Tomas is still there and the other two men. I can see them carrying boxes into the hallway. Their truck is parked in the courtyard, but the freight elevator is slow and it takes them five or ten minutes to go down and come up again and get another load. Every time they come back they’re sweating even more than before, and Mom says, “I think there’s some beers in the fridge. You’ve earned them,” but Tomas shakes his head.

“Water is fine,” he says, and one of the other guys says something to him in a language I don’t understand. They both laugh.

“We’ll come back tomorrow to finish up,” he says.

Meanwhile, I get this stupid idea that Jake is going to ask for the Bursar. Just as a joke, just because . . . he thinks I don’t care. Or maybe to make fun of me. For some reason, that’s all I can think about, and I can’t finish my spaghetti. It’s going to be too embarrassing for me to say that I don’t want him to take my stuffed animal. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that, if he asks. I’m going to have to say okay. Either way he’ll laugh at me.

Afterward, Mom lets us finish up a tub of chocolate chip ice cream. “No use letting it sit in the freezer.” Then we go back to my room and Jake starts looking through my things again. He’s gone kind of quiet.

“I guess I don’t need anything,” he says. There are toys all over the floor and on my bed, piles of books and a whole tangle of jump ropes and yo-yos and stuff like fishing nets for the beach. “Mom says my room is already too messy.”

“Well, if you want something, you can have it.”

“That’s okay, I guess,” Jake says. I keep thinking he’s going to make fun of me for something, but he doesn’t; he can’t even look me in the eye. It’s like . . . when he gets a bad grade in school, that’s what he does: he sort of turns his face away from the teacher. A few seconds later, in break time, he might be just the same, laughing or whatever, but it’s like I can see the muscles in his face, making him laugh when he doesn’t want to.

Mom walks into the room and says, “Okay, Jake, I’m gonna have to kick you out. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

Suddenly I say, “You can have the drone if you want, I guess. I don’t really play with it anymore, except when you come over.”

He looks at me for a second. Then he says, “That’s all right. That’s like your best thing. You should take it to Texas.”

“Take it,” I say. “You’re better at it than I am anyway.”

He stands there, next to my mom. For some reason he looks very small. He’s still in his soccer gear, in his cleats and shiny shorts, like a kid who never wants to take off his uniform. I’ve known him since he was four years old, when his parents moved to our apartment building, and my mom met them in the elevator. She came home and told me, all excited, about a boy who just moved in a few floors down. He’s exactly your age, she said. And after that we started going to the park together—Mom and Mrs. Schultz started hanging out, too. I don’t really remember what it was like beforehand—it’s like he’s always been around. Finally he says, like he’s talking to a grown-up, “That’s all right. I mean, no, thank you.” But he’s looking at me.