“I don’t want anything to happen. I don’t want anything to change.”

“Well, that’s not really up to me. There are some things I can’t do.” And she gets up from the bed. I roll over and look at her, and she bends down to give me a good night kiss. “You’ll have to talk to your father about that,” she says.

A few days later the movers arrive. I’m busy playing Minecraft on Mom’s iPad. She’s usually pretty strict about screen time, but right now she doesn’t seem to be paying total attention to everything I do. . . . There’s a buzz on the entry phone, and then about a minute later the doorbell rings and three big men in brown uniforms are standing outside.

“Is your mom around?” one of them says, and then she comes up behind me and lets them in. They lug a lot of stuff into the apartment—plastic bags and rolls of tape and flat cardboard boxes. There’s always somebody holding the freight elevator. And I can smell them in the house, because it’s another hot day outside and they’ve been sweating.

Their uniforms have their names written over the front pockets or kind of sewed on. A short, fat guy named Tomas says, “Hey, give me a hand here.” He has a foreign accent—at first I didn’t know he was talking to me. “Yeah, you. You know how to fold a cardboard box?”

“No.”

So he shows me, and then he carries a few flat boxes into my bedroom and gives me a roll of tape. “Why don’t you get started in here?” he says.

Mom brings out a pitcher of ice water and lots of glasses. She sets them down on the table in the hall. I hear her say to Tomas, “He was supposed to go to his friend’s house. I didn’t want him to have to watch.”

“It’s better if he helps,” Tomas says. I like Tomas, but I don’t like the way Mom talks to him. That’s something my dad used to complain about. She talks to everybody like she knows them. But if I close my bedroom door, I don’t have to listen. So that’s what I do.

It’s easy to make the boxes, and kind of cool. They start out flat, like a picture on a page, and then turn into something real, something three-dimensional, that you can put stuff into. But I don’t know what to put in. Everything I have ever been given is on the shelves or in the chest at the foot of my bed. Mom is bad at throwing things away. Even baby things, like the stuffed elephant I used to sleep with every night but haven’t slept with in ages. For some reason, I call him the Bursar. He just stands there on a shelf, holding up a few books. His legs have gone floppy; he has to balance on his trunk.

After a while, somebody knocks on the door, and Mom comes in. I’m back to sitting on my bed, playing Minecraft. The boxes are still empty.