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  “Race you to the corner,” he says. Jake has a lot of excess energy to burn off. At least, that’s what my mother says.

  He always wins, but I don’t mind letting him win. I mean, not letting him but racing anyway. At the next corner, I turn around and see my dad talking to Mrs. Schultz. He walks with his hands behind his back, and he’s leaning over, too, as if he’s listening carefully. He’s just being polite—that’s what he’s always like with the other mothers.

  But I don’t think he likes Jake much. Or maybe he doesn’t like . . . me when I’m hanging out with Jake. When we finally get to the school gates, he sort of holds me back a minute.

  “Why aren’t you trying?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you race against Jake, you let him win.”

  “Jake’s the fastest kid in our class,” I say, in, like, a hushed way, so Jake can’t hear us; but he’s talking to Addie and Zach, his other friends, so he’s probably not even listening. And Mrs. Schultz is talking to their moms.

  “I don’t care about that,” Dad says, in his normal voice. “You’re still not even trying.”

  “I am, Dad. Jake’s just faster than me.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it,” Dad says. “I don’t mind watching you lose if I think it’s the best you can do.”

  “It’s just a dumb race,” I say. “I mean, who cares?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  The kids are starting to file into class. I have to leave. “When are you coming home?” I ask my dad.

  “I’m not sure yet. It depends how things go.”

  “Where are you flying this time?”

  “London,” he says, and puts his arm around me but doesn’t really hug me, and after a few seconds I break away. There’s a river of kids going through the big double doors and I kind of join the flow. When I turn around at the top of the entrance steps to look for him, he’s already gone.

  Mom picks me up after school—Jake and a couple of his friends are allowed to walk home by themselves. They have their phones out and are going to get something to eat. I watch them walk off together.

  “When are you going to let me go to the coffee shop with Jake?” I ask her. “I’m twelve years old. It’s just around the corner. Everybody does it.”

  “I don’t like not knowing where you are,” she says.

  “Well, then, buy me a phone. I’ll text you when I get there. I’ll text you the whole time—I can leave it on.”

  “I’m not going to buy you a phone. What do you need a phone for? You’re twelve years old.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “You’re going around in circles.”

  “I’m just not ready to let you . . . I mean, New York is a big scary city. I don’t want you to grow up too fast.”

  “You don’t want me to grow up at all,” I say.

  The next day, Mom walks me to school. She likes doing it—she says it gets her out of the house, but I think it also makes her feel a little bad. Before she met my dad, she was a teacher, but I’ve never seen her go to work.

  Jake is already in the playground when we get there. Mom starts talking to some of the other mothers, and Jake is talking to Zach and Addie. It’s Friday, and they’re going to the movies after school. That’s all they want to talk about—what they’re going to see. They can’t agree on a movie; the truth is, I haven’t heard of any of them. I just kind of hang around and go, “That sounds great, that sounds really cool.” Feeling like a . . . I don’t know—feeling like I’m pretending and it’s totally obvious but somehow I can’t stop, and saying stupid stuff like that is also me, it’s who I am. The kid who doesn’t know what anybody is talking about but tries to join in anyway.

  After school, when Mom picks me up, she sees me standing in the playground by myself. She says, “What are you doing, why don’t you join the others? There’s Jake.”

  “I don’t want to talk to Jake.”

  “Did you have a fight with Jake?”

  I shrug. “No. I just don’t want to talk to him.”

  “What’s going on, Ben?” she says, and eventually I tell her.

  “They’re all going to the movies, and since I’m not allowed to go, there’s no point hanging out with them.”

  “Please,” Mom says. “We’ve been through all that before. I’m not in the mood right now to have another fight about it.”

  “I’m not having a fight, but you asked me. So I told you.”

  Since we’re trying not to argue we don’t really say anything on the way home. It’s another nice Friday afternoon—there’s only one week of school left. Sometimes I think the problem is Mom misses having a job. She has a hard time accepting that I don’t really need that much looking after anymore.

  I mean, I’m twelve years old, but she still treats me like her brown-eyed baby boy (that’s what she calls me sometimes). I’m the last kid in my class not to have a phone. Mom has this kind of hippie thing against them, that’s what she calls it. “I’m old-school,” she says. She thinks technology is, like, the end of civilization. That’s another thing she fights with Dad about—he’s always staring at his iPhone.

  On the elevator up to our apartment, she catches my eye in the mirror. She can look at me without really looking. We don’t have to face each other. “I get lonely when you’re in school all day,” she says. “Dad’s in London again. You see your friends all day. I like to see you.”

  “I like to see you, too,” I say.

  “So what do you want to do tonight? It’s Friday night, your choice.”

  “I want to go to a movie.”

  And she gives me a hug. “Me, too. It’s a date.”

  There’s an AMC cinema on 84th Street, just a few blocks from our apartment. “Let’s put the week behind us,” she says. She lets me choose the movie, so I pick Ant-Man, which is what Jake and Zach and Addie are going to see. Even though it’s PG-13, and I won’t turn thirteen until next year. I look around for them at the theater, but I can’t see them, and Mom says they wouldn’t be allowed in anyway without an adult.

  “I bet they could get in,” I say. “Jake looks like a teenager.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with what you look like. They need to check ID. It’s the law. Kids say they’re going to do a lot of things; it doesn’t mean they always do them.” But then she says, “I don’t want to fight with you about it. You’ll all be teenagers soon enough.”

  I don’t think she likes the movie much. “It’s more your kind of thing,” she says to me afterward. It was sunny when we went inside, but it’s dark when we come out—the whole world seems a little different.

  Even though it’s almost ten o’clock, there are still people walking around and sitting outside at some of the restaurants that put tables on the sidewalk. It’s pretty warm, even at night. Since I don’t have to go to school in the morning, Mom lets me stay out late.

  Mom tries to take my hand as we walk home. She hasn’t done that in a while. I’m really too old to hold her hand, and I don’t want anyone to see us—I mean, anyone from school—so I let go. The traffic on Broadway keeps starting and stopping. I always like to count the yellow cabs. In math we’re studying ratios and percentages, and I try to work out the ratio of cabs to total cars at every stoplight. Three cabs, five ordinary cars makes three over eight.

  “You know that your father is away on business,” she says.

  “Yeah, I know. He’s in London.”

  We wait at a cross street for the light to change. Mom keeps talking.

  “Right. So, his company has an office there. And they . . . they want him to move out there permanently—he called me last night, which is probably why I’ve been a little crabby. They want him to take it over.”

  “Does that mean we’re moving to London?” I ask.

  She pauses before saying, “Do you want to move to London?” Sometimes she does a thing with her voice, where it sounds like she’s excited but she really isn’
t. So I’m trying to think what I’m supposed to say. What does Mom want to hear, and what would Dad want me to say if he were here, too?

  “I don’t know,” I say, looking away. “I mean, I liked it when I visited, but we don’t really know anybody there.”

  We went to London one summer when I was six or seven years old, and I still kind of remember it. There were big red buses and Mom made a big deal about riding on the top deck. Everything tasted funny. They put vinegar on their fries. People always say that it rains in London all the time, but it didn’t rain once while I was there. It’s just that the sun didn’t shine much either—it was mostly gray. It was the middle of summer and I had to wear a sweater. The best thing I saw was a shop that sold umbrellas and canes and stuff like that—some of them had swords inside. That seemed really cool when I was six.

  “Well, if you don’t want to move to London, you should tell him.”

  “He never listens to me.”

  “He doesn’t listen to me either.” Mom puts her hand on my arm. “But maybe if we both . . . We need to put up a united front,” she says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We need to stick together. If he talks to you about it, if he asks you what you think, just tell him the truth. Tell him what you told me.”

  The next day, I go to Jake’s apartment and we spend all afternoon playing NBA 2K. Jake beats me pretty much every time. I tell him about London, and my dad’s job, and what my mom wants me to say. Jake likes my dad, or at least he wants to be like him. When he’s older he wants to make a lot of money, he wants to be tall and rich, so he thinks my dad has it all figured out.

  One of the things I like about Jake is that nothing surprises him. I think that’s because he has an older sister. Jennifer is already in college, she’s a sophomore at Brown, and whenever she comes home “she tells it to me like it really is,” Jake says. “A lot of parents are going through this kind of thing. This is when it happens.”

  “What do you mean? When what happens?”

  “Jennifer says, it’s when the kids grow up. That’s when the parents start wondering if they even like each other anymore.”

  “My parents like each other.” But even as I say it, I don’t know if it’s true. “I mean, I don’t feel like we’re very grown-up. All we do is play video games.”

  “My dad plays this all the time,” Jake says. “He kicks my butt.”

  But it feels good talking to Jake. It’s like, with him, everything that happens, whatever you’re going through, has a pretty normal explanation.

  “You know why your mom won’t let you have a phone?” he says. “Jennifer thinks it’s because she doesn’t have a job—she’s overinvolved. That’s why she doesn’t want you to grow up, because then she wouldn’t have anything to do.”

  “She has a lot to do,” I say, trying to stick up for her. “She’s always busy.”

  “What does she do?”

  Jake’s mom is an accountant; she works for a company that publishes different magazines—there are a lot of weird magazines, like Antiques Monthly and Bird & Bait, lying around at his house. The truth is, I don’t really know what my mom does. I don’t think about it much. When I’m at school, I’m at school, and when I’m home, she hangs out with me.

  “I think she goes to classes sometimes,” I say. “She picks me up from school, she makes dinner.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Jake says. “She’s overinvolved. That’s why she won’t let you get a phone. It’s like, when we’re at your house, she notices everything we do.”

  “Phones are really the end of civilization,” I tell him. “Nobody ever talks anymore, they just play with their phones.”

  “Talking is boring,” he says, so we play some more NBA 2K, and he beats me again.

  About a week later, my dad comes home. Usually on his first night back, we eat at Carmine’s, this loud, old-fashioned Italian restaurant a few blocks from our apartment. All the dishes are so big that everybody shares. The walls are full of black-and-white photographs of old famous people, like movie stars and boxers and politicians. I always ask my dad to tell me who they are: Joe Louis, Frank Sinatra, Mayor Koch. My dad isn’t easy to talk to, but he likes to tell me stories—he knows a lot of information. Anyway, Carmine’s is my favorite restaurant. Sometimes we go there on my birthday, too: the waiters bring out a big cake and everybody sings.

  But this time, when my dad comes home and before we go to Carmine’s, Mom says, “I’m going to leave you two alone for a minute. He can explain this one,” and she grabs her handbag, puts on her summer coat, and walks out.

  “Jenny,” my dad says, following her. The trouble with our apartment is that if you want to walk out of the house, you still have to wait by the elevator—you can’t just slam the door and disappear. So my dad and mom end up having this argument in the hallway while she waits for the elevator. I can hear their voices, even from our apartment—my mom does most of the talking. Sometimes my dad says something and then she starts again. I just stand in the living room, trying not to listen, and eventually my dad comes back in.

  “What are you supposed to explain?” I ask.

  It’s about five o’clock in the afternoon; his suitcase is still in the hallway. It feels like everything is happening pretty fast; nobody is doing the stuff they normally do, where you’re just in a groove and everything is kind of expected and fine. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

  “I’ve got to go away again next week,” he says. “I’ve really just come home to pack up a few things.”

  “You’re moving to London.” I try to say it so it’s just like the answer to a question, like a fact. I don’t want to sound like Mom, nagging him, he calls it. Mom hates that word.

  I can tell he’s looking at me, but I don’t want to look at him. “Let me just get a glass of water,” he says. “I’m dehydrated from the flight.” He goes into the kitchen, and I hear a faucet running, and after a minute he comes out again and sits on the couch.

  “Come here, Shorty,” he says and pats the cushion next to him.

  My dad always calls me Shorty. I used to like the nickname when I was little but not anymore. Maybe that’s why I don’t move—I just stand there.

  “I’ve got to go,” he says at last. “The company I work for has an office in London, and they’ve asked me . . .”

  “What do you mean, got to?”

  For some reason I know this is one of those times when I can get away with being rude. My dad makes the face he makes when he . . . when he approves of something you say.

  “You’re right,” he says. “I’ve decided to go. I’d like us all to go, but your mother . . . has other ideas. Anyway. That’s not your problem. This is a conversation we can have when everybody calms down. We don’t have to decide anything right now. Everybody’s tired, everybody’s hungry. Let me just get cleaned up and we’ll go out to eat.”

  My dad disappears into his bedroom and I call out, “I’m just going to see if Jake’s around,” but I don’t think he can hear me. I don’t really want him to hear me. If he can come and go whenever he likes, then so can I.

  I take the elevator down and ring the bell. Jake answers the door in his pajamas. Basically, after spending the day in bed—he’s got a cold. School finished a couple of days ago, and the first thing that happens to him is he gets sick. He says, “Jennifer’s here,” when he sees me, and rolls his eyes. “With four friends.” I can hear noises in the kitchen. Anyway, Jake looks pretty miserable, too. He just wants to watch TV.

  So that’s what we do, but the girls keep coming in and bugging us. They pretend to think we’re really cute. Jake’s pajama top has a picture of Darth Vader on it. “I love him when he’s dopey,” Jennifer says—she’s got freckles, too, and red hair, and those kinds of braces that aren’t really braces but you can just see a few lines of clear plastic or rubber or whatever they’re made of. Jake is really pissed off with everybody. He isn’t just pretending. Sometimes he gets like that
. Most of the time, he’s in a good mood, everything’s great, he’s kind of running the show, but once in a while it’s like . . . he’s run out of gas.

  “Go bother somebody else,” he tells his sister.

  “But we like bothering you.”

  The Karate Kid is on TV.

  “This is such a bad movie,” one of the friends says.

  “The original is much better.”

  “The original was pretty stupid, too.”

  Jake finally says, “I’m trying to watch,” and eventually they clear out. “Close the door,” he tells me, so I get up and close the door. The den is really his dad’s office, but it’s got a sofa and a TV.

  “I think it’s really gonna happen,” I say, sitting back down. “My dad’s moving to London.” This is when it hits me for the first time.

  “Are you gonna cry?” Jake says.

  “No.”

  “Are they getting divorced?” he asks.

  I look at him, but he’s looking at the TV. “I don’t know . . . My dad just came back from London, and then my mom walked out. They had a big fight by the elevator. I think he wants us all to move there, but she doesn’t want to.”

  We watch the movie for a bit. Two boys are fighting on a mat in front of thousands of people. One of them kicks the other one down; he’s hurt and the crowd starts chanting, but slowly he gets back up, standing on one leg. “I love this part,” Jake says. The hurt kid does a kind of flip and kicks the other one down. People go crazy. “Do you think he has a girlfriend?” Jake asks.

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Your dad.”

  For a second, I can’t figure out what he means. “You know, like, in London,” Jake says. I don’t answer but he’s not trying to be unfriendly. He says, “Your dad is still the kind of guy . . . women like guys like that.” He’s always been embarrassed by his own dad, who works at a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. Mr. Schultz is not fat exactly, but his shirt is always hanging out of his pants, and he wears the kind of shoes you can walk a lot in. He has a long commute, but whenever I see him come home, he seems in a good mood. Jake wants to be a lawyer. Whenever my dad’s around, Jake’s always very polite. I thought he was just scared, but maybe it’s something else—like he wants to impress him.