"I know you do, and I'm proud of you for that." She meant it. That was the annoying part. She always meant it. "But I can't make up the other four-sixty right now. Not this month. Probably not this spring."
"Not this spring," Caleb repeated, as if she had said not this century.
"There's a lot going on, Cal."
There was always a lot going on. A lot going on was the weather in their house. A lot going on was the reason the dryer made a sound like a dying goose and nobody fixed it, and the reason Mom took Saturday shifts at Lakeview Family Dental, and the reason that, when Dad's check came late from Tulsa, she said "Well," in a voice that was not about wells.
"Like what?" he said.
She opened her mouth and then didn't say anything, and in the gap Jordan came in from the living room in his socks, holding an empty cereal bowl he'd been told twice to bring in. He was ten and small for ten, with a cowlick that stood straight up at the back of his head like it was trying to get somebody's attention. He put the bowl in the sink, saw both their faces, and backed out again without a word, the way a cat leaves a room where something is about to fall.
"Like stuff," Mom said finally. "Grown-up money stuff. It's not a punishment. It's just a no."
"Fine."
"Caleb."
"I said fine." He picked his backpack up off the chair, which ruined the whole responsible-person demonstration, and went upstairs. He did not slam his door, because slamming the door got you a talk, and a talk was worse than anything. He closed it in a way that he hoped sounded like slamming to someone who was really listening.
Nobody came up. He lay on his bed and looked at the group chat. Dev had posted a clip of Marcus's character falling off a radio tower in Forward Base, and underneath it were forty-one laughing faces and a voice memo of Marcus screaming. Caleb watched the clip four times. On the fourth time he laughed, alone in his room, and then he felt stupid for laughing alone in his room, and then he typed lmao and deleted it and typed nothing.
* * *
After that, the evenings developed a shape.
At seven-thirty the chat lit up with who's on, and then went quiet, and the quiet was the sound of everybody being on. Caleb would sit at his desk with his math homework open and his phone face up beside it like a pet he was watching for signs of illness. Sometimes Dev remembered him and texted bro come over, and sometimes Caleb went, and sat on the end of Dev's bed while Dev and the others shouted at each other through headsets, and sometimes Dev passed him the controller for a round and he died in nine seconds because everyone else had been playing for three weeks and knew where the snipers liked to hide. Then he'd give it back and say he had to go, and walk home past the four houses in the cold, and the porch light would be on, and Mom's car would or would not be in the driveway.