I turned back to Eliza. “Really, dodgeball? As I recall you spent most of gym on the bench . . .”

“Kidding, Maguire. Had a rough volleyball practice. Olivia is very concerned about me.”

“Don’t know why it had to be volleyball,” said Ms. O’Connor. “Couldn’t have been cross-country or swimming. Just one of the most concussion-heavy sports.”

“The danger makes it more fun,” said Eliza, “like riding a motorcycle.”

The color drained from Ms. O’Connor’s already pale face. “Where are you riding motorcycles?”

“Nowhere, Mother.” Eliza relaxed into the bar stool. “It’s too easy with you.”

I kept my head down and flaked some of the sugar crystals onto the frosting as instructed. There must have been a hundred cupcakes on the counter. Half of them were brown, the other half white. I was about to ask Ms. O’Connor what the occasion was when we were interrupted.

“Dude.”

Carter stood in the doorway wearing flannel pajama pants and a Clarkebridge College sweatshirt.

“Sometimes I feel like you only come over here to hang out with my mom,” he said.

“Someone has to.” Ms. O’Connor approached Carter and nudged him with her frosting-covered spatula. “Here, sweetie, try this.”

“Ew. Stop.”

“Can’t blame me for trying.” She shook the frosting in his face, but Carter wrinkled his nose.

Carter was the one person in their family, and perhaps the world, who didn’t like Ms. O’Connor’s cupcakes. He claimed it’s because when she was starting out, Ms. O’Connor fed him four cupcakes a day trying to perfect her recipes.

“If you’d gone through that,” he often said, “you wouldn’t eat another one either.”

“Have fun with your video games.” His mom smiled at us, relieving me from my decorating duties. “If you need anything, let me know before nine. Have to be up early tomorrow to drop these off. They’re for Stephanie Kaplan’s gender-reveal party.”

She picked up one of the brown cupcakes and broke it in half, exposing a deep blue center.

“It’s weird that I know the gender of the baby before she does . . . She came over with a slip of paper from the doctor. Said she hadn’t even read it yet.”

“You should’ve made these bad boys green,” said Eliza. “Tell her she’s having alien babies.”

Carter chuckled. “I’d go to that party.”

“And,” Eliza continued, “why does gender have to be binary? What if it doesn’t know what it wants to be yet? Like, we are literally color-coding babies to let strangers know what type of private parts they have. Pretty freaking weird, if you ask me.”

“Too bad no one did.”

“Carter,” his mom warned, shutting down a showdown between the O’Connor siblings real quick.

“Whatever. I gotta change.” Eliza put her ice pack in the freezer, between the gallons of frozen dough, and gave her mom a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Where are you—” I started, but Carter shook his head. Don’t ask.

Carter led the way up to his room, though I could’ve gotten there from his kitchen blindfolded, spun around a hundred times, and in forty steps or fewer.