I turn and look at him, right in the eyes. I don’t even blink.

He’s wearing his dark gray suit, which he always wears to work. It has thin white stripes and makes him look even taller than he actually is. I’m not very tall. In school pictures, the photographer always lines me up at the front, with the big kids behind me. Sometimes I think my dad . . . sometimes I think he’s disappointed that I’m not going to be as tall as him.

He sighs. “I’m not explaining myself very well.”

The elevator opens again, and we walk silently into our apartment.

As I lie in bed (I always leave the door open a little, to let the hall light in), I can hear my parents arguing about me.

Two

MY PARENTS ARGUE all the time. Not argue exactly, but bicker—that’s my mom’s word for it. “Let’s not bicker in front of Ben,” she always says. The problem is, my dad has to travel a lot for work, and my mom misses him. “What do you expect me to do?” he says. “It’s my job. What do you think pays for all this?”

He means not only my school but our big apartment on the tenth floor, which has a view of Central Park from the living room window. He means the restaurants and movies we go to and our summer vacations on the beach. Maria, the cleaning lady who comes twice a week, and my mom’s pretty clothes and handbags and stuff like that.

“It must be nice to be such an important person,” she tells him.

Sometimes I think, if I say the right thing, everybody will get along. Like once, when I was seven and they were arguing about money, I said, “You can sell me. How much am I worth?”

And they stopped arguing and looked at each other. There were tears in Mom’s eyes—sometimes she’ll cry at anything, but she’s hard to predict. Sometimes she doesn’t react at all. Dad said, “Ten bucks. I’ll give you ten bucks for him.” And Mom said, “Fifteen. Look at those cheeks. Fifteen dollars.” And Dad said, “Twenty.” And they went on like that for a while, saying stuff like “Look at those nice brown eyes, look at his hair.”

“He needs a haircut. That’ll cost something.”

But when I say stuff like that now, it doesn’t work anymore.

Dad decides to walk me to school in the morning—maybe he wants to make up for last night. It’s only a few blocks. I can see Central Park when I come out of the lobby, which is the big famous park in the middle of New York, with trees everywhere, and funny artificial hills and curvy paths, and even a zoo and a castle. Then we go left to 91st Street, and left again. Everybody seems angry in the morning or in a hurry: drivers honk their horns; you can see school buses stuck in traffic; and I’m happy we don’t have to get in a car, especially when the weather is like this—breezy and sunny.