“Okay, good night.”

“Good night, Ben.”

I try to read again, and after a few minutes Mom’s breathing slows down and I can tell she’s asleep. After another few minutes I turn off my light, too.

But even with the lights off I don’t feel sleepy. All the sounds are strange. The fan is still on, creaking, and the window is open, and I can hear crickets outside, and even in the night it’s still hot. Granma has the TV on low, but in the dark, it’s like you can hear everything. She’s watching the news. . . . It’s not a big house, and the walls are thin, and for some reason I get this feeling like I’m just this computer or receiver or something, receiving all this information, like sounds and smells (the quilt on my bed is a little musty—it smells like towels that have been left in the cupboard too long); and it’s very hard for me to turn that feeling off. I don’t know if I’m happy or not but it’s like everything is very close, closer than normal, and sort of bigger than normal, too, like if someone put their hand or something right up against your face and held it there. It takes me a long time to fall asleep.

We spend the next day just doing stuff. Mom has a lot of stuff she has to do, like buy a car. So I help her do that, sitting next to her on the couch, and looking at carmax.com. There’s this whole world of people out there trying to sell you their car; it’s a little overwhelming. At least, that’s what Mom says. But it’s also kind of fun, imagining, like, maybe that will be our car. Maybe we’ll be like the people who drive around in a yellow convertible Chevy Camaro. (Mom says, “We are not those people.”) Granma brings us iced tea from the kitchen; the fan is spinning above, making noise; and Mom is clicking and saying, “What do you think?” and in my head it’s like I’m talking to Jake and asking him, What do you think? He has strong opinions about stuff like this. In New York we never had a car.

While Granma sets the table for lunch, Mom starts making phone calls about schools. “Don’t even think about it,” she says to me. “This is, like, a whole summer away. This is, like, pretend.” But it’s not pretend: it’s going to happen. In five or six weeks, I’m going to go to a brand-new school where I don’t know anybody.

Granma says, “Let’s eat,” but my mom is still on the phone, waiting on hold and sometimes talking to somebody. I try not to listen in, and eventually Granma gets annoyed. “You can do that later,” she says. “We’re all getting hungry here.”

Then when we sit down they have a kind of quiet argument. “There are just a lot of things I have to get done,” Mom says, and Granma tells her, “You don’t have to do them with Ben hanging around. He’s the priority right now.”