"I'm not a foreman," Walter said. "I never got to be a foreman. You know that."
Something passed over her face, fast, and was gone.
"Goodnight," she said, to all of them, and went down the hall. Her bedroom door didn't slam. She shut it carefully, which in that house meant the same thing.
---
Dez slid the form back into the clear plastic sleeve Ms. Sato gave everyone for important papers and put it in his backpack. He didn't cry. He'd decided sometime in fourth grade that he would cry at movies and at the end of books, and over hurt animals if it came to that, and not over things people decided about him. It was a rule, and rules were how you made a robot do what you wanted when you weren't touching it.
"Hey," Jalen said.
Dez zipped the backpack.
"Dez. Hey. I didn't know about your thing."
"It's not a thing. It's a qualifier."
"I didn't know about it."
"You knew," Dez said. "I told everybody at Thanksgiving we were trying. You said cool and kept watching the game." He stood up. "It's okay. You didn't do anything."
That was worse, and both of them knew it. Dez went to the room they'd shared until last year, when Renita turned the little office into a bedroom for Jalen so he could sleep through early practices without Dez's alarm going off at 6:15 for robotics club. The door closed.
Jalen looked down at the shoe in his hand. One hundred and ninety dollars before tax. He put it back in the tissue, put the lid on the box, and held the box on his knees.
Walter was standing at the window.
"Grandpa," Jalen said. "I didn't ask for them."
"I know you didn't."
"I mean I wanted them. I'm not going to lie. But I didn't ask."