“I’m not going to buy you a phone. What do you need a phone for? You’re twelve years old.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “You’re going around in circles.”

“I’m just not ready to let you . . . I mean, New York is a big scary city. I don’t want you to grow up too fast.”

“You don’t want me to grow up at all,” I say.

The next day, Mom walks me to school. She likes doing it—she says it gets her out of the house, but I think it also makes her feel a little bad. Before she met my dad, she was a teacher, but I’ve never seen her go to work.

Jake is already in the playground when we get there. Mom starts talking to some of the other mothers, and Jake is talking to Zach and Addie. It’s Friday, and they’re going to the movies after school. That’s all they want to talk about—what they’re going to see. They can’t agree on a movie; the truth is, I haven’t heard of any of them. I just kind of hang around and go, “That sounds great, that sounds really cool.” Feeling like a . . . I don’t know—feeling like I’m pretending and it’s totally obvious but somehow I can’t stop, and saying stupid stuff like that is also me, it’s who I am. The kid who doesn’t know what anybody is talking about but tries to join in anyway.

After school, when Mom picks me up, she sees me standing in the playground by myself. She says, “What are you doing, why don’t you join the others? There’s Jake.”

“I don’t want to talk to Jake.”

“Did you have a fight with Jake?”

I shrug. “No. I just don’t want to talk to him.”

“What’s going on, Ben?” she says, and eventually I tell her.

“They’re all going to the movies, and since I’m not allowed to go, there’s no point hanging out with them.”

“Please,” Mom says. “We’ve been through all that before. I’m not in the mood right now to have another fight about it.”

“I’m not having a fight, but you asked me. So I told you.”

Since we’re trying not to argue we don’t really say anything on the way home. It’s another nice Friday afternoon—there’s only one week of school left. Sometimes I think the problem is Mom misses having a job. She has a hard time accepting that I don’t really need that much looking after anymore.

I mean, I’m twelve years old, but she still treats me like her brown-eyed baby boy (that’s what she calls me sometimes). I’m the last kid in my class not to have a phone. Mom has this kind of hippie thing against them, that’s what she calls it. “I’m old-school,” she says. She thinks technology is, like, the end of civilization. That’s another thing she fights with Dad about—he’s always staring at his iPhone.

On the elevator up to our apartment, she catches my eye in the mirror. She can look at me without really looking. We don’t have to face each other. “I get lonely when you’re in school all day,” she says. “Dad’s in London again. You see your friends all day. I like to see you.”