“Go on, he’s gonna run. Do it,” Frick said. But I stalled too long and it hopped away. I was relieved until Frick said, “I might as well drop you off at Save ’n Shop, let you go hunt like white people.” I never told Mom, but she knew I was upset about something. After that she let me stay home each weekend with Paige while she and Frick went up to camp.

After a few weekends staying home, Paige didn’t want to watch me anymore. She said she needed a break. Not from me—maybe I was partly the reason—but from the world. Paige was like that: time and time again she slowly sank into some darkness, and then when it got no brighter she’d pack up and leave as if to chase the sun so it could never set. She always returned, though, and I liked to imagine that she’d gone around the world, never letting the sun dip below the horizon and out of her sight, until she finally made it around the globe and home again and was full of the light she’d chased. Each time she left I worried a little, and I always had this feeling that a time would come when she wouldn’t return, that she’d disappear for good. But there was no way she’d leave now: she was pregnant, and so I felt she knew better than to run.

Since Paige didn’t want to watch me, and since I didn’t want to go to camp, Mom arranged for me to stay with a kid named Jay Pitch (but his parents and teachers and classmates called him JP) at his house. JP was a bit chubby, and when he kept his long black hair tied back he looked chubbier. I was happy about staying with him—we were always shooting hoops at the community center after school, and he had some cool plastic men too.

So most weekends I spent my days at JP’s, playing men outside until it got too cold, eating dinner with his mom and dad and brother who was in high school, and at night JP and I would get yelled at by his mom when she heard us up way past twelve o’clock laughing hard at pigadees, or when we told or made up stories about our plastic action figures. JP told me about leaving one out during the summer once, and the sun beat down so hot that it melted his face, and we couldn’t stop laughing at that deformed guy, couldn’t get his funny-looking face out of our heads late at night while we lay in the dark. I always went to JP’s house pretty tired, but come Sunday, when Mom and Frick picked me up, I left awake in a way I didn’t when Paige would watch me.

I never told JP the story about the jar or the bite marks—not because I couldn’t tell him (no one had told me not to talk about it), but because with him all that mattered was good weather and our action figures. And so I had forgotten all about the jar and the bite marks until one blue, cold Saturday when Mom and Frick picked me up a day early. “Go get your stuff, gwus,” Mom said.