In the hallway, Marcus felt the new phone buzz. A text from Yvette: Ms. Okello emailed. We will talk tonight. Then, a second bubble: I am proud you finished.
He read the second one twice. Pride arriving after a crisis was a complicated weather. He typed okay and put the phone away. Between third and fourth he stood at his locker longer than necessary, arranging binders he did not need to rearrange, letting the sentence I am proud you finished sit somewhere it could cool.
That afternoon Zora's school let out twenty minutes earlier than his. She was already at the apartment when he got home, sitting at the island with her old phone and a worksheet about fractions. The old phone had a pink case with a cartoon fox on it. She had wiped the fox clean. The new white box was gone from the counter; Yvette had folded it flat and put it in the recycling before work, as if leaving the packaging out would make the night keep happening.
"Mom's still at work," Zora said. "She said there's yogurt. And she said don't touch the broken phone on the sill. She's keeping it."
Marcus poured two glasses of water. "Why?"
"I don't know. Maybe so she remembers." Zora pushed a fraction problem toward him. "Can you check number four? I keep getting two different answers."
He checked. She had inverted a step. He showed her on scrap paper, drawing the fraction like a little building with a roof. She fixed it and nodded, satisfied in the quiet way she got when a number behaved. Then she said, "At lunch Bria asked why I didn't bring my new phone to show everybody. I said I gave it to my brother because his was broken. She said that was weird. I said it wasn't."
Marcus felt something loosen behind his ribs. "You didn't have to tell people."
"I wanted to. It's true." She looked at him over her glasses. "Are you mad at Mom?"
He thought about the grocery bags, the no eye contact, the sentence Your sister earned this spoken into the open fridge. He thought about three months of saving every two minutes and the nights the phone died mid-sentence and he had to rewrite from memory while his eyes burned. He thought about Yvette's face when she understood, the way shock had looked almost like grief.