It was a small party, because Jordan's parties had always been small, and this year it was smaller. When Mom had asked who he wanted to invite, he'd said, "Just us. And Grandpa," and Mom had said, "Not anybody from school? What about Eli?" and Jordan had said, "Eli moved," which Caleb was pretty sure was not true, because he'd seen Eli Watts at the Casey's on Saturday buying a slushie with some other kids. But he didn't say anything. It wasn't his party.
Grandpa Walt came at two in his truck with the bad muffler, which announced him from three blocks away. He was a tall man who had been taller, with a white crew cut and hands like baseball mitts that had been left out in the rain, and he came in carrying a grocery-store sheet cake under one arm the way some men carry footballs.
"Where's the birthday convict," he said, and Jordan, who was not a hugger, hugged him around the middle, hard, and Grandpa put one big hand on the back of Jordan's head and held it there a second. Then he looked over Jordan at Caleb. "Stranger," he said.
"Hey, Grandpa."
"Thought maybe you'd died. Thought maybe I'd have to come identify the body."
"I've had homework."
"Uh-huh," said Grandpa Walt, who had never in his life believed that homework was a real thing.
They ate pizza from the place on Grand that did the square cuts, and Mom had made the green punch with the sherbet in it that she made for every birthday, even though everybody was old enough now to think it was a little embarrassing and nobody would ever say so. Caleb ate four squares. He was trying. He'd decided on the walk home from Dev's the night before that he was going to try, because Jordan was eleven, and eleven was a real age, and it wasn't Jordan's fault about the orthodontist and the cereal and the Saturdays and the murmur through the wall. Probably. He'd gotten Jordan a gift: a book of optical illusions from the clearance bin at the Barnes & Noble in the mall, nine dollars of his ninety-one, because Jordan liked things that tricked your eyes. He'd wrapped it himself, badly, in the comics section.
Jordan opened Caleb's first. He actually laughed — a real laugh, short and surprised — at the cover, which was a staircase that went up forever and also down. "This is so cool," he said, and turned it sideways and back, and Caleb felt something loosen in his chest.
Grandpa's was a pocketknife, which Mom gave a look about, and which Grandpa answered with a look of his own, and which ended with the pocketknife going "up high until you're older" on top of the fridge, which everybody understood meant Grandpa had won.
Then Mom went into the hall closet and came back with a box.
It was wrapped in blue paper with silver stars, and it was big, and it was a shape. Caleb knew the shape before he knew he knew it. He had looked at that shape on a screen at least a hundred times, late at night, in his room, with the price under it. His body knew it the way your foot knows the last step on a staircase in the dark.
Jordan looked at Mom. Mom looked at Grandpa. Grandpa looked at the ceiling.
Jordan tore the paper.