He thought through his chores list, which was topped by taking out the garbage and emptying the dishwasher, in addition to basics like keeping his room clean and doing his laundry. He picked “Taking out the garbage” even though he didn’t mind it that much. “That’s a dumb question.”

“What about you, Mom?” Selma asked.

“I already gave up the one I disliked most. Marwan empties the dishwasher now.” She smiled.

He said, “I’m glad we had this chat. I feel much closer to you now.”

She looked at the paper Selma was holding and said, “What is your favorite childhood memory?” then looked at him and waited.

“For real?” he asked.

“I know mine,” Tosnim said.

“What?” Selma asked.

Tosnim started to talk about a snowstorm from a bunch of years back and how the neighbors across the street made this mountain of snow and dug a tunnel through it and how all the kids on the block took turns sliding through it.

It was a nice memory, but the whole idea of conversation starters was still dumb. He’d seen an ad for a new conversation-starter game from Europe in his feed not that long ago; it showed all these good-looking people hugging each other in soft focus. How was that a real thing?

Anyway, his father could talk to a wall. They did not need help on this front as a family.

“What about you, Marwan?” his mother said.

“Gonna have to get back to you,” he said, and then he said, “I’ll be in my room.”

He had clean laundry to put away, so he put his earbuds in and queued up the beauty queen. It was a particularly infuriating episode about lost evidence and mishandling of the scene. There was so much human error involved in the botched investigation that Marwan wondered about the future of AI in crime solving. Like, if it were fed all the data, could the device or something like it solve a crime better than a human could? If he was going to ask the device for help, did he need the approval of the others first?

He’d only had a few minutes left of that episode, and when it was done he wasn’t in the mood to start another. He lay down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling’s water stain in the shape of an old man’s profile and said softly, “It all started with a message that came to four of us—all students at a high school in Queens—one Wednesday afternoon.”

Pushing away the feeling of feeling dumb, he said it again, and added on to it. “The message told us to report to the music room and said that the matter was urgent. I should have known something was up, but I couldn’t have ever imagined what was going to happen next.”