He didn't answer that. He watched the toaster. I watched him watching the toaster and I thought that the back of his neck looked thin to me, the knobs of his spine showing at the top of the hoodie, and that he had dark half-moons under both eyes like somebody had pressed them in with their thumbs. Lately he looked, to me, like a picture of a boy who'd been left out in the weather.
"Mrs. Quillen emailed again," I said.
"I know."
"You know?"
"She said she was going to." The toast came up. He took it out with his fingers and didn't butter it. "I turned in two of the labs."
"Out of four."
"I'm doing the other two."
"When? At three in the morning?"
He looked at me then. It was a quick look and then it was gone, and it wasn't the look I expected, which was the flat sullen look I'd been getting since about the middle of eighth grade. It was something closer to alarm. Then he looked down at his toast and the alarm went away and the flatness came back over it like a lid.
"I'm doing them," he said, and took the toast and went upstairs.
I let him go. I want that on the record too: I let him go. I'd had eight hours of sleep in the daytime, which is not the same as eight hours of sleep, and in seven hours I'd be standing in a refrigerated aisle with a scanner gun on my wrist pulling insulin pens and vaccines and boxes of IV bags for hospitals in three states, and I did not have it in me that afternoon to have the fight. I told myself it was strategy. I told myself I was choosing my battles. Later, much later, my sister Steph said to me on the phone that sometimes choosing your battles is just a nice name for being too tired to look, and I hung up on her, and then I called her back and said she was right.
Juniper came in at ten after three like a small storm system.