For weeks, we’d pretended to ignore the conversations we obviously weren’t having. As wonderful and comfortable as we were with each other, there were gaps, holes, empty places in our friendship. Jasper didn’t come around when my parents were home. And I never asked about her family. We both saw the gaps and knew they were there. Only now we’d stumbled into one of them.

But I didn’t want things to be tense, and there was really no reason not to talk about Dad’s job. So I shrugged and said, “Honestly, his job is kind of dumb. I’m not even really sure what he does. Something boring at a desk that means he needs to wear a button-down shirt. He works for a company that makes toilet paper.”

“Oh,” said Jasper. “Toilet paper?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not very interesting.”

She laughed. “He seriously switched from art to toilet paper?”

“Yeah, I guess he did,” I said. “But I never thought about it like that. He never seemed to mind his job. It was just his job. Most of what he was didn’t have anything to do with that. Mostly, he was a dad. “Anyway,” I added, “the exact same thing happened to Mom. She was a poet a long time ago, and now she writes for the newspaper. She started doing that after I was born. Like, it made sense to try to do whatever they wanted when they were young, but then I was there, and they both thought they needed a house, and groceries, and health insurance, and that sort of stuff. So Mom packed all of her poet-hippie dresses in the back of her closet, and Dad turned into Mr. Toilet Paper.”

Jasper laughed. “Mr. Toilet Paper.”

I laughed too. “See, it’s not all boring. That was a joke we had, when we were little. We thought he actually made the toilet paper himself. He’d bring home a roll for each of us on Friday after work each week, and be, like, ‘I made these ones special for you.’ And then Sam and I were allowed to throw the toilet paper at each other through the air, so we’d end up with a big tangled mess of it in the yard.”

“Your dad sounds weird.” But she was grinning, so I could tell she understood.

I nodded. “He used to be weird. . . .”

“But not anymore?”

I shook my head slowly, thinking it over. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it like this until just now, but the truth is that’s the thing that’s changed the most. That they aren’t weird anymore. They were weird until Sam died. Weird and funny. Maybe they’re just too sad to be weird and funny now. Too numb.”