A kid with grease in his knuckles. A kid with a cowlick like an antenna. A kid who ate lunch in the library and shelved returns so it would count as a job. A kid who'd spent thirteen Saturdays sorting cotter pins into WEIRD and MEDIUM so that his brother would come downstairs.
"I'm sorry," Caleb said.
Jordan didn't say anything.
"I'm really sorry, Jord. I didn't — I thought—" There was no end to that sentence that didn't make it worse. He thought he'd been the one getting left out. He'd been so busy keeping score that he'd never once looked up to see what game they were all actually playing. "I'm sorry I said move."
Jordan wiped his face again. His shoulders were shaking a little, but he wasn't crying, not really. He was doing the breathing.
"It's not your fault about the lunch thing," he said finally. "Or the wave. That's just a thing my brain does. Dr. Ines says it's nobody's fault."
"I know. But I could've—" Caleb stopped. "I could've noticed."
"Yeah," Jordan said. "You could've."
He didn't say it meanly. He just said it, like it was true, because it was.
Then he got up off the bed and went to his closet. He reached up to the top shelf, behind a winter hat and a shoebox, and he took down something small and flat wrapped in blue paper with silver stars, a little crushed at one corner now, and he stood there holding it for a second, looking at it, like he was deciding.
Then he held it out.
Caleb took it. He didn't open it right away. He held it in both hands and felt the shape of it through the paper, the two handles, the curve. Then he peeled the tape off carefully, the way Mom did with presents she wanted to save the paper from, and folded the paper back, and there it was. Cosmic Red. The exact one. And stuck to the front of the box, a yellow sticky note, a little curled at the edges from a week in the closet, and on it, in careful crowded marker that Caleb now knew from a hundred plastic bins, two words.
PLAYER 1