I stayed up as long as I could that night, waiting to hear the front door open and Mom walk in, but I fell asleep before I heard it. In the morning, I woke up feeling no better than I had the night before. Mom wasn’t in the bedroom, and Dad had already left for work. I went downstairs slowly, afraid she might not be there. What would I do if she wasn’t? What would that mean?

I don’t know, Antsy.

Parents were supposed to know the answers, and even if they didn’t, they could usually fake it really well. I wanted to hate my dad for not knowing, but I couldn’t hate him. That made me want to hate him even more.

I came downstairs, and Mom was in the kitchen. I had to hold on to the wall, as if the Big One was having an aftershock. I took a deep breath and went in. She was drinking coffee by herself, like they do on those commercials for fancy flavored coffee.

“Are you having breakfast before you go to school?”

“What is there?”

“Cornflakes, Raisin Bran. There may be some Froot Loops left, if Christina didn’t make a pig of herself.”

Most of the time Mom would get the bowl, or the box or the milk. She would always do something to be a part of the meal. Today I did the whole thing myself. It just didn’t feel right.

When I got the milk from the refrigerator, I noticed that the plate of food Dad had left was gone. The plate had been washed by hand, and now sat in the drying rack. I knew it shouldn’t matter. I knew it was just a little thing—but the image of that plate on the rack stayed with me all day. Like Dad said, sometimes the little things are the biggest things of all. And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out whether Mom had eaten the food on that plate or had put it down the disposal.

I sat by myself at lunch on Monday. I hadn’t been sitting with Howie and Ira for a couple of weeks now. Used to be we were inseparable, but cliques are like molecules: They bind together in Mr. Werthog’s little test tube until you add something new. Then they all break up and recombine into something else. Sometimes you get these things they call “free radicals,” which are atoms that aren’t bound to anything else, floating free. That was me now. I didn’t mind it at first, because it left open a whole lot of possibilities, but after this past weekend, radical freedom didn’t feel so good.