This is his idea of a joke, because it’s the kind of thing my dad always says.

They’ve got a big wooden table in the middle of the kitchen that takes up most of the room. Mrs. Schultz is sitting there, drinking coffee and trying to read a magazine. But she says, “You guys are too noisy,” and leaves. “I’ll be in my room. Jake, your father and I are going out tonight.”

This kind of thing happens only in Jake’s house. In my house if we’re too noisy we have to shut up. But anyway, Jake’s mom leaves her coffee mug on the table and when Jake blocks my shot he kind of pushes me, too. I don’t know, I guess he must have knocked me into the table because the mug falls on the floor with a crash and breaks. There is still some coffee in it.

Their kitchen has black-and-white tiles, and now there’s a puddle of cold coffee all over them. I know the coffee is cold because I try to pick up some of the pieces of the mug, and it’s just . . . it’s just a mess. The mug has a photograph on it, a picture of a pine tree with a mountain behind it, and the words Yosemite National Park written around the side. That’s where Jake went on vacation last summer. There are some big bits of broken mug, like the handle, and some kind of chalky powder in between them, which has turned to mush.

“Do you think she’s gonna be mad?” I ask Jake.

“Nah, she won’t be mad,” Jake says. “She won’t even know.”

“What do you mean?”

Jake is the kind of red-haired kid with a lot of freckles. All the moms think he’s cute so he always gets away with stuff—I mean, ever since we were little. He has one of those faces where it looks like he’s smiling, even if he doesn’t mean to. But he’s smiling now.

“Well, we’re not going to tell her,” Jake says. He looks at me and shrugs. “I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

Jake grabs a dustpan and brush from the broom cupboard in the kitchen. He gives them to me and I get down on my knees and try to sweep up the pieces. They keep getting stuck on the rubber lip of the dustpan.

“Sometimes my mom glues broken plates or bowls back together,” I say. “Maybe your mom can still fix it up. If we wash off all the pieces.”

“Nah. Just dump it in the garbage,” he says. “She’ll never know.” So that’s what I do.

Jake takes a mop from the cupboard and tries to mop up the coffee, but that only spreads it around. Eventually he finds a roll of Bounty paper towels on the kitchen counter, and we both get down on the floor and start wiping up the mess by hand. We must use almost a whole roll. Our hands are full of soggy bits of paper towel. But we stuff them in the garbage, too. I even dry off the dustpan and brush, because otherwise it seems pretty obvious that somebody has made a mess. We put everything back in the cupboard. Nobody has seen us; nobody came in. The kitchen looks like it did before.