Jordan closed his eyes.
"There's no orthodontist."
"Her name's Dr. Ines," Jordan said to the inside of his eyelids. "She has an owl. It's a noise machine." He opened his eyes. "I made Mom say it. It's not her fault. I made her promise. Dr. Ines said I get to decide who knows, and I decided — I didn't want you to know."
"Why?"
Jordan looked at him like it was the dumbest question anyone had ever asked. Then something in his face folded up, and he looked about six years old, and he said, "Because you'd think I was a baby," and turned around and kept walking, fast, his backpack bouncing, both straps, and Caleb stood there in front of the flamingo for a second and then had to jog to catch up.
He didn't say anything else the rest of the way home. He didn't know what to say. He kept thinking about the ledger — the column for Jordan, the Thursdays, the Saturdays, the murmur through the wall at night that Caleb had lain there listening to and resenting, every single night, like it was something being taken from him. He thought about what Mom must have been saying in there. He thought about what Jordan must have been saying back.
When they got to the house, Jordan went straight upstairs. Caleb stood in the front hall with his VISITOR sticker still on his shirt. Through the living room doorway he could see the PS5 under the TV, and the white controller on the coffee table, squared up with the edge.
Nine days. Not touched once.
He peeled off the sticker and stuck it to the inside of his wrist and looked at it for a while.
* * *
Mom got home at a quarter to six with her hair coming out of its clip and her badge still on. She went upstairs to Jordan first — Caleb heard her take the stairs two at a time — and she was up there for forty minutes, and the murmur came through the wall, and for the first time Caleb lay on his bed and listened to it and didn't put anything in the ledger at all.
When she came out, she stopped at his door. She knocked. She actually knocked, which she never did.
"Thank you," she said, when he said come in. She was standing there with her hand still up, like she'd forgotten to put it down. "For today. He said you were—" She pressed her lips together. "He said you were good."