“Phones suck out your brains anyway,” I tell her.

She usually carries one of my book bags if she walks me to the bus. At least until we get near, so the kids don’t think, Look at that kid. His mom still carries his bags. She stops now and gives it to me; I sling the satchel over my shoulder. “I’ll make a deal with you, Ben,” she says. “If you talk to somebody new today, I’ll give you a dollar.”

“What am I supposed to buy with a dollar?”

“Well,” she says, “if you talk to somebody new every day for a week, you’ll have five dollars.”

“How will you know if I talk to somebody new?” I ask her.

“Because you’ll tell me.”

“What if I lie?”

She gives me a don’t-be-silly look, a teachery kind of look. “You don’t lie, Ben. I know that.”

“No,” I say. “That’s true. I don’t lie, and I don’t talk to people.”

And I walk off to the bus stop by myself.

But at lunch that day, I don’t want to sit at one of the picnic tables in case Mom comes out and sees me. So I wander around the grounds, looking for a place to eat where nobody can bother me.

The school building is brand-new, but there used to be an old school in the same place. When they tore it down, they had to rebuild everything, including the football field and the picnic area and the chain-link fence that keeps us from going into the street. But if you look closely, you can see leftover parts of the old school, like a water fountain or an old brick wall.

Pennsylvania Avenue is the name of the street, which is funny, because that’s the address of the White House. I mean, where the president lives. Maybe that’s why they built the school out of white brick. There’s a parking lot by the side of it, and then a field, and you can see neighborhood houses over the road. It must be weird living right opposite the school. Some of the houses are small and look like they could use some paint. The roof sags or there are broken steps up to the porch. But others are in pretty good shape.

We’re not allowed to leave the school grounds, but I can wander down to the football field—which is on a slope away from the school, so it always gets muddy in the rain. There’s no fence on that side, just a big road at the bottom, with some benches and a bus stop and a few trees. It’s far enough away that I can feel like I’m not even at school; nobody knows I’m here.

That’s where I go today. There’s a wooden hut in a corner of the campus, which I have never been to. I walk across the football field to get there, but it’s still cold out; the field is empty. I reach the hut and notice that there’s a padlock over the door, but the hinges are loose. If you pull on the door a little, you can look inside. I see an armchair, an electric heater, and a television set sitting on a wooden crate. But nobody’s there.