Caleb looked at it for a long time.
Then he peeled the sticky note off the box and stuck it on Jordan's shirt, right in the middle of his chest, and pressed it flat with his thumb.
Jordan looked down at it. "What are you doing?"
"You sorted all the bins," Caleb said. His voice wasn't working very well. "You're Player One. I'll be Two."
Jordan stared at him. Then at the note on his chest. Then at him again. Something was happening in his face, something slow, like the sun coming up behind a hill, where you can see the light before you can see the sun.
"You're terrible at boat games," Jordan said.
"I've never played a boat game."
"I can tell already. You're gonna be terrible."
"Probably."
Jordan's mouth twitched. Then it went further than a twitch. Then he was laughing — not his rehearsed whoa laugh from the party, but a real one, the one that came out of him all at once like a sneeze, surprised at itself — and Caleb was laughing too, and he didn't even know why, and the leaf blower down the street kept going, blowing nothing, and the stars on the ceiling kept not quite glowing, and neither of them could stop.
* * *
The whine of the old TV came down the hall at 4:15 that afternoon, high and thin, like a mosquito in another room.
Dana heard it from the laundry room, where she was sitting on an upside-down bucket in front of the dryer with its back panel off and a YouTube video paused on her phone, holding a new belt in one hand and a flashlight in her teeth. She took the flashlight out of her teeth. She listened. Under the whine, faintly, she heard music — a slow, rolling, oceany kind of music — and over it, two voices.