“No, but I’ll take a few corn fritters with me.” I wasn’t hungry.

“Come home for lunch, I’ll fix you something. What do you want?”

“Grilled cheese?” I said.

“We don’t have any bread.” Mom laughed. “I’ll ask next door.”

I dressed, grabbed a corn fritter, and went outside. Out back, frost sparkled on the tips of grass around the fire pit. An open tin coffee can filled with sand and cigarette butts held down an empty pork-rind bag in the wet grass. I took some long-butted Winstons, and then I found the lid to the can and snapped it on. I cut through the woods to Tyson’s.

When I showed up to his house, he was eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, and when he finished and brought his bowl to the sink and came back to the couch he turned on his Xbox and handed me a controller and we played three matches of Halo until his dad left, and we tried to play a fourth match but we grew sick of it, and so we went on his mother’s computer and tried to watch porn, but the videos wouldn’t buffer.

“You have Lucky Charms cereal, yet you have shitty internet?”

Tyson laughed as he cleared the browser history.

“Let’s go smoke,” I said, and he was saying his dad might be back soon.

“Boiler room,” he said.

We smoked in the boiler room, yet it was so hot we didn’t even finish our cigarettes and went back inside. Tyson put on jeans and a fresh black shirt. He asked if I wanted to go to the social, the powwow at the football field. I told him my mom was making lunch, and right then I remembered the bread, remembered his jacket. I persuaded him to wear a different one.

At noon, before I left Tyson’s, I stole four pieces of white bread and put them into a sandwich baggie. It had gotten much warmer outside. I carried my jacket over my arm and rolled up my sleeves. I rounded the corner of our road. Smoke rolled out of our chimney and into the sky. The door creaked shut behind me, and Mom’s hair dryer was whistling from the bathroom. I rolled my sleeves down.

“Ma?” I yelled.

“Be right there.” She turned off the hair dryer.

I sat at the table and the money that had covered the small dent was gone. Mom came out. “Oh, shoot,” she said. “I forgot to go ask for bread.”

I held up the baggie with four slices and smiled.

“David,” she said. “What happened to your face?”

Shit.

She took the bread from my hands but didn’t take her eyes from the cut.

“A stick,” I said.

She put the bread down next to the sink. “I told you. You fucking kids don’t listen.” She meant Paige and me.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Relax.”