“You can try,” Mom says.

This time Jake’s mother picks up the phone. “Hi, Mrs. Schultz,” I say. “It’s Ben . . . Michaels calling. Is Jake around?”

“Hey, Ben.” Her voice is super friendly—it’s the voice grown-ups use to talk to little kids. “He sure is. I’ll go get him.”

But when Jake answers, I don’t know what to say. I panic. “Hey, Jake” is the best I can come up with.

“Hey, Ben.” His voice sounds different from what I remembered. I mean, he sounds like Jake, but it’s also like . . . he’s this other person, while in my head, when I’ve been talking to him in my head, it’s like, I know exactly what he’s going to say.

“What did you get for Christmas?” The phone line isn’t great; there’s a little delay, so we end up answering at the same time. “I got an old watch and a fountain pen.”

“I got a dog,” Jake says. “My sister is really pissed off. She bugged my parents for a dog for years, and now she’s in college. . . . Mom said, it’s because I miss her. Which is just . . . I mean, I said, Hey, Jennifer, look what we got to replace you. It’s a bearded collie; it’s like one of those dogs with so much hair, it can hardly see. . . . I mean, I just kept laughing. Jennifer was so pissed off.”

“That’s funny,” I say. “That’s so funny.” But it doesn’t sound like I mean it, I don’t know why. And he kind of runs out of steam; he doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t ask me any questions. Finally, I say, “What did you do today?”

“It snowed last night, so we went to Central Park. We had to take the dog for a walk anyway. Dad made me clean up her poop. Then we had a snowball fight and I hit Dad in the nose. I couldn’t tell if he was mad or just pretending to be mad.”

“There’s no snow here. It’s like eighty degrees outside. I’ve been playing a lot of basketball.”

“Who do you play with?” Jake asks. It’s the first thing he’s asked me, but I don’t want to answer because the answer is nobody.

“There’s this kid called Pete,” I say. It’s not really a lie, it’s just like I’m answering a different question. “He’s like the star of the basketball team. Anyway, we went to this Number Sense competition, and he got annoyed because . . .” But it all gets a little complicated. For some reason I don’t want to talk about Mabley, even though she’s really the point of the story. Or not the point exactly, but the part I want to talk about, even though I also don’t want to talk about her. It doesn’t make sense. “For a while, it was like, they might suspend him from the team,” I say. “But he’s too good. Anyway . . . nothing happened in the end. They didn’t do anything.” It feels like a lame way to finish the story and I don’t think Jake is paying attention. He hasn’t said anything for a while.