June. I wondered what she was doing. If she was still in bed. What her family did on Christmas – her not-close dad, her not-understanding mom. Had she even thought of me since the beginning of break? I would have done just about anything to see an itemized list of everything she thought about on any given day. Oh God. I would have given anything.

Mom knocked on my door at ten that morning. I pretended it had woken me up; I wasn’t sure why. ‘Santa came,’ she said.

I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘No, he didn’t.’ I think I was trying to make a joke, but it just came out like some defiant proclamation from an eight-year-old.

She smiled, the rest of her face straining in protest, then leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed. ‘We’re just gonna have a little day in. OK? There’s no pressure. No pressure to feel … feel anything at all. Deal?’

I wiped the non-sleep from my eyes, and smacked my cheeks. ‘Deal,’ I said, not convinced.

Mom had gotten me an excessive number of presents. I worried that I’d been placed on some ‘give-a-sad-kid-the-best-Christmas-ever’ list, but the meticulousness and uniformity with which everything was wrapped suggested it had all come from Mom. New sweatshirts, and gift cards to restaurants, and a drone. With each new thing I unwrapped she’d watch, then take a sip of her coffee before saying that we could take it back if I didn’t want it – it was so damn quiet in the house, just crinkling and tearing and plastic scraping plastic and Mom slurping and saying we can take that movie back or that gift card back and it was honestly driving me insane. God, of course I appreciated it, of course I did, but it was also driving me insane. And I thought of Mom at the kitchen table with her stacks of folded papers, kneading her forehead and sighing – how could she have done this? How could we afford this?

And when the pile had been exhausted she looked at me for a long time, then finally said, ‘You’re not happy,’ in the weirdest way I’d ever heard. She didn’t say it as though she expected the presents to make me happy, like she was disappointed that they didn’t, but as though it was a statement of fact, almost robotic, like she’d assessed me just now and come to a conclusion. ‘You’re not happy.’ No. No, I’m not.

But it wasn’t because I was unsatisfied; it was because I was sad for her, and I was sad for us, and I was sad that the world had ended and there was nothing we’d ever be able to do to get it back, but I couldn’t say any of that so I just went: ‘You said I didn’t have to feel anything.’