He didn't answer. After a minute her footsteps went away. They stopped outside Caleb's door. Jordan held his breath and listened. He heard her stand there for a long time. He heard her not knock.
Then she went downstairs.
Jordan got up and took the blue package off his desk and opened his closet and put it on the top shelf behind his winter hat and the box of Pokémon cards he didn't play with anymore, where nobody would find it unless they were looking.
Then he got back in bed and looked at Caleb's Belt, glowing very faintly, almost all the way faded out, until he fell asleep.
* * *
In the morning the box was gone from the dining room table, and the silver stars were gone, and the PS5 was in the living room under the TV, hooked up, its white wings standing up on either side of it like something that had landed there in the night. One controller, white, lay on the coffee table, squared up neatly with the edge.
Nobody said anything about it.
It stayed that way for nine days. Caleb counted. He didn't mean to count, any more than he'd meant to keep the ledger, but on the fourth day he realized he knew it was the fourth day, and after that he couldn't stop knowing. He walked past the living room on his way to the kitchen and on his way to the front door and on his way upstairs, and every time, the PS5 was there, and the white controller was there, squared up with the edge of the table, and it was never moved. Jordan never touched it. Caleb would have known. He'd have heard it from his room; the TV in the living room was the old kind that made a high electric whine when it was on, a sound like a mosquito in another room.
The whine never came. The PS5 sat there with its little light off, like a dog nobody had named.
At first Caleb thought it was for his benefit — that Jordan was waiting until Caleb was out of the house to play, so he wouldn't have to see it. That would have been fair. That's what Caleb would have done. But he went to Dev's on the Tuesday and came back two hours early, on purpose, quietly, through the back door, and the living room was dark and the controller was exactly where it had been, and Jordan was up in his room with the door shut. Through the door Caleb could hear the shhh of pages. The optical illusions book, maybe. Or something else.
He stood in the hall for a minute. He almost knocked. He didn't know what he'd say if he knocked.
He went to his own room instead and closed the door in the way that sounded like nothing at all.
At school, he told Dev and Marcus that his brother got a PS5 for his birthday, and they said yo, you can get on now, and he said, "It's not mine," and Marcus said, "So? Just use it when he's asleep," and Caleb said, "It's not mine," again, in a voice that made Marcus go, "Okay, dang," and change the subject to whether Mr. Feeney wore a toupee.