The bus came at ten to three. I heard the brakes sigh at the corner and then, a minute later, the front door, and his backpack hitting the floor of the hall in the way that always made me think he'd thrown it, though I'd watched him once and he hadn't, he'd just let go of it like it weighed nothing to him anymore. He came into the kitchen in his black hoodie with the hood up. He was taller than me that year by three inches. He had his father's long jaw and my dark eyebrows, which on him looked permanently drawn together, as if he were trying to read something in small print.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey yourself. How was school?"
"Fine."
He went straight to the counter. He didn't pick up the phone, I noticed. He bent over it with his hands in his hoodie pocket and looked at the screen without touching it, and then he straightened up and his shoulders went down a quarter of an inch.
"Thirty-one percent," I said. "After all day plugged in."
"It doesn't charge when nobody's here. It goes in and out." He took the bread out of the bag and put two slices in the toaster, carefully, without bumping the sock. "If you bump it, it stops."
"Kel, that phone is done."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine, honey. It's got a stripe."
"The stripe doesn't matter. You can see around the stripe."
I said, "Can you see around the giant crack?"