Marcus took the new phone, still charging, into his room. He left the shattered one on the sill. Zora hesitated, then followed him as far as his door.
"I meant it," she said. "About mine working fine."
"I know."
"I'm not mad you have it."
"I know that too." He looked at her. "You didn't have to slide it."
Zora shrugged, a small lift of tie-dye shoulders. "You needed it more. That's not the same as me earning it less. Mom likes words like earned. I like words like works."
She went to her room. Marcus sat on his bed with the new phone warm in his hands and felt, for the first time in months, the absence of the dread that came with every save button. He did not feel triumphant. He felt like someone who had been swimming with a cramp and had finally been allowed to float.
In the morning the apartment smelled like coffee and toast. Yvette had already packed lunches: turkey sandwiches, apple slices, a note in Zora's bag that said Have a good day in the handwriting Yvette used for work forms, neat and slightly pressed. There was no note in Marcus's bag. He checked twice and then told himself he was being childish for checking. He put an orange in his own lunch from the bowl on the counter and tried not to invent meanings. In the bathroom mirror he checked his cornrows—still neat from Sunday evening when Yvette had sat him down with the comb and the oil and the patience she saved for tasks with clear beginnings and endings. She had not talked about the phone while she parted his hair. She had asked about algebra and whether he wanted his hoodie's drawstring replaced. The silence around the hard subject had been almost kind. Almost was becoming their household weather.
On the bus, he kept the new phone in his hoodie pocket and did not take it out. The cracked one was still on the kitchen sill. He had almost put it in his backpack out of habit, the way a person almost reaches for a limp that has healed. Outside the bus windows, the city looked ordinary and cold. A kid two seats up filmed something and laughed. Marcus watched the back of that kid's head and wondered what it felt like to treat a phone as entertainment first and tool second.
He touched the new phone through his hoodie once, then made himself stop. Superstition was a kind of hunger; it would eat the whole day if he fed it. He opened his algebra notebook instead and copied the warm-up problems from memory, the ones Mr. Hensley always put on the board in the same order. Numbers were a relief. Numbers did not ask him how he felt about his mother.