The heat was relentless, radiating up off the pavement in a reek of tar and petrochemicals. Corey, slouched in the passenger’s seat, hadn’t said more than ten words since he’d climbed into the car, and he didn’t say anything now. He just looked at her as if she were some previously unknown life-form he found only minimally interesting, Corey, who’d been the center of her life, whom she’d raised to be articulate and outgoing and who’d shared a special vocabulary with her—their own private language—until he’d stopped using it and she’d stopped too and it vanished without a trace, another of the lost languages of the world.

“What?” she demanded. “What are you looking at me like that for?” The car was in drive still and she had to fight down the impulse to take her foot off the brake and smash everything in front of her. “Shit!” she repeated. “Shit!”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he gathered up his books, clutched them under one arm and swung open the car door.

“What are you doing?”

His face, in the hard hot light, was no longer the face of a child. He was fifteen. He was as tall as she was. He gave her a grimace, as if all this—the parking lot, the two hours waiting in front of the school, his mother—was too much for him. “Going in?” he said, making a question of it.

“You mean you’re not going to help me?”

“Help you what?”

“Find a spot, for God’s sake—I mean, is that too much to ask? And the groceries—what about the groceries?”

He slipped out of the car with the agility of an escape artist, slammed the door so hard the chassis rocked, then crossed the lot to their room, inserted the key in the lock and disappeared inside.