Chapter Text
Midtown School of Science and Technology, New York, May 2008 · Peter, 7
The TV in the common room belonged to the big kids. Nobody had written that rule down. Peter had learned it his first week, when he sat on the couch right in front of the screen and Devin Marsh lifted him off it by the armpits and set him on the floor, like moving a lamp.
Everybody in the dorm was big compared to Peter, a second grader in a building where the next youngest boarder was in fifth. The fifth graders mostly treated him like a pet somebody had been allowed to keep.
On Saturday afternoons the big kids watched baseball, or cartoons that were too loud, or a channel where men in suits argued about money. Peter sat on the floor by the radiator with a library book about octopuses and didn't watch anything. Octopuses had three hearts. Two of the hearts stopped beating when the octopus swam, which seemed like a bad design, and he wanted to ask somebody about it.
He was going to ask his father tomorrow. Tomorrow was Sunday, and Sunday was the phone call. He'd been saving the question all week, turning it over in his head and imagining his father's voice when something caught his interest; faster and warmer.
“Yo,” said Devin, who was eleven and had a voice like a car alarm. “Yo, turn it up.”
Somebody turned it up. Peter kept reading. An octopus could squeeze its whole body through a hole the size of its beak.
“...confirmed that the convoy came under attack in Kunar Province earlier today. Among those missing is Tony Stark, chief executive of...”
Peter looked up.
His father was on the television. It was the picture from the magazine, the one where he was leaning on a car and not smiling, with the words STARK MISSING underneath. Then the picture gave way to a desert with smoke rising from it and a truck turned over on its side like a dead beetle, before the magazine picture came back.
The always noisy common room had gone unnaturally quiet. Devin had turned around on the couch. So had Priya, the two Kowalski brothers and a boy whose name Peter didn't know, all of them staring at him.
“Isn't that your dad?” said the boy whose name Peter didn't know.
Not know what else to do with his hands, Peter closed the octopus book, putting his finger in it first to keep the page. Something cold had started in his stomach and was spreading outward, and he clutched the book as tightly as he could.
“Okay, okay, that's enough of that.” Mrs. Albescu, the dorm mother, hurried in from the hall with a dish towel in her hand and took the remote from Devin without asking. The screen switched to a man selling knives. The man cut a tomato into very thin slices and held one up to the light. Mrs. Albescu looked at Peter, then glared at the TV as if it had done something to her personally, and then looked back at Peter.
“Peter, honey. Come help me in the kitchen for a minute.”
“I'm reading,” Peter said.
“Bring the book.”
He brought the book.
In the kitchen she gave him a glass of milk he hadn't asked for and a cookie from the jar that was supposed to be for Fridays. Crouching so her face was level with his, she said a lot of things. The people on the news didn't always have the whole story. Mr. Stark was a very important man, and very important men had a lot of people looking for them. Somebody from his father's company would call the school soon, she was sure of it, and the second they did she would come and get him.
Peter nodded at all of it and drank the milk. He left the cookie on the counter, because it was Saturday.
Afterward he didn't go back to the common room. Instead, he went down the hall to the phone.
The phone hung on the wall outside the laundry room, a beige one with a curly cord that years of kids had stretched long and flat by dragging it around the corner to cry where nobody could see. On Sundays from 6:00 in the morning until 6:00 at night, the hall phone was for parents, and kids lined up for it. Peter usually waited on the bench across the hall with his notebook, because his father called when he called. Sometimes that was 4:15 and sometimes it was 5:50, and one time it was 7:30 and Mrs. Albescu had let him stay up.
It was Saturday, and nobody was going to call. Peter sat on the bench anyway and opened the notebook to the last page, where the list was. He read it over but didn't add anything, because it wasn't Sunday yet.
In the laundry room, somebody's sneakers thumped around and around in the dryer. Peter sat and listened to them go.
* * *
Queens, June 2007, 11 months earlier
His mother was packing too much.
Peter knew about packing. You got one suitcase, and in the suitcase you put your clothes and your toothbrush and one toy, and if the toy didn't fit you picked a smaller toy. That was the rule when they went to Grandma Fitzpatrick's in Boston, and Boston was five days.
Germany was four days. His mom had said so at breakfast. “Four sleeps, Pip, and then I'm back, and then it's the Fourth of July.” Now three suitcases lay open on her bed, and the biggest one held no clothes at all.
It held binders instead: blue ones, the fat kind with clear plastic on the front, along with the gray file boxes from her office closet and the little black rectangles that plugged into her computer. She was putting the rectangles in a sock.
“Why are you putting those in a sock?”
“So they don't get scratched.” His mom didn't look up. She had her hair pinned up with a pencil, which meant she was working, and she was tapping two fingers against her collarbone, which meant she was thinking about something hard. “Can you hand me the tape?”
He handed her the tape, and she taped the sock shut. Peter had never seen anyone tape a sock before. He filed it away with the other things grownups did that didn't make sense, like coffee, and the news.
“Do you need all the binders?”
“I need some of them.”
“Which ones?”
“I don't know yet.” She said it to the suitcase. Then she looked up and smiled at him with mostly her real smile. “That's the problem with science. You never know which part is the important part until later. So you bring all of it.”
Peter thought about this. “That's why May brings so much stuff to the park.”
“That is exactly why May brings so much stuff to the park.”
“I heard that,” May called from the kitchen.
May was their babysitter, except that word was too small. Peter's mom said “nanny” to other grownups, and that word sounded old, like somebody in a movie with an umbrella. May was just May. She arrived every morning at 7:00 with her big hoop earrings and her bag full of things that might be needed, and she stayed until his mom got home, which was sometimes 6:00 and sometimes 9:00 and sometimes, when there was a Problem at the Lab, the next day. May kept her own toothbrush, a purple one, in their bathroom. She sang along to the radio with the wrong words on purpose so Peter would correct her. When she read, she pushed her glasses up on top of her head, then searched the whole apartment for them.
Peter liked it better when she was there than when she wasn't. He didn't say this to anyone. Somewhere around turning five, he had figured out that it made his mom's face crumple a little before she smoothed it out, and he loved her too much to make that happen.
His mom's lab was in Manhattan. It was small, she said, which was the point of it; she didn't want to work somewhere huge where nobody knew your name. It belonged to a bigger company, which belonged to an even bigger company, and all of them had letters instead of names. She studied genes. Genes were the instructions for how to build a living thing, written in a code of only four letters that his mom could read. When Peter was little she used to read him the beginnings of her papers at bedtime, the short part at the top, because he liked how the words sounded. He could still say some of them. Drosophila melanogaster. That was a fruit fly. Heritable. That meant something you got from your parents, like brown eyes, or being bad at whistling.
For weeks a drawing of a spider had sat on her desk, next to the computer. It was a good drawing, with every leg bent a different way and tiny numbers written next to each part, and a patch of color on its back like somebody had spilled blue paint.
“That's gross,” Peter had told her, the first time he saw it.
“That's beautiful,” she'd said. “Look how many legs it has to keep track of. You can barely keep track of two.”
Tonight the drawing was in a folder, and the folder was in the big suitcase.
“Okay.” His mom zipped the suitcase and sat on it to make it close. It didn't close. She stood up and sat down again, harder, and the zipper went. “Okay. Come here, you.”
He came over and she pulled him onto her lap, holding on for a long time, long enough that he started counting. He got to forty. She smelled like the lab, a clean smell like the inside of a new box of Band-Aids.
“Mommy! You're squishing me!” he squealed, unable to hold in his giggles.
“I know. I'm allowed. It's in the rules.”
“Which rules?”
“Mom rules. Page one.” She let go. Her eyes were wet, and she rubbed them with the heel of her hand. “Allergies. This apartment is a dust factory.”
Later, when he was supposed to be brushing his teeth, Peter heard her talking to May in the kitchen. Their voices were low. He turned off the water to hear better, then turned it back on in case they noticed it had stopped.
“...if anybody from work calls, I'm at the conference. That's all you know.”
“Mary, you are at the conference. That's all I do know.”
“Right.” A pause. “Good. That's good.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Everything's fine. It's a data thing. I want someone outside to look at something before I bring it to anybody here. It's probably nothing. I'm probably just being paranoid.”
May said something too quiet to hear. His mom laughed, and it wasn't her real laugh.
“And if it's not nothing,” she said, “I'll be really glad I brought the binders.”
Peter spat out his toothpaste. He decided paranoid was probably a kind of tired, because that was how she sounded. He snuggled deep under his covers and made himself think about something better: when she came back from Germany, he'd draw her a spider, a good one, with all the legs.
In the morning a car came for his mom, her three suitcases, her laptop bag and a backpack, and the driver made a face when he lifted the big one. She hugged Peter on the sidewalk, not as long this time, and hugged May before getting in and rolling the window down.
“Four sleeps,” she said.
“Four sleeps,” Peter said.
She looked up and down the street before she rolled the window back up. Peter looked too, but saw only Mr. Castellano walking his dog and the garbage truck at the corner making its big slow noise.
* * *
It was only the first sleep when the phone rang.
It rang very late, when the apartment was dark and the air conditioner in the window was making its rattly hum. May was sleeping over because his mom was away. Peter heard her feet hurry down the hall and heard her say “Hello?” in her awake voice, even though she'd been asleep.
Then he didn't hear anything for a long time.
He got up and tiptoed to the kitchen doorway in his socks. May was sitting on the floor with her back against the refrigerator, the phone at her ear. She had her other hand pressed over her mouth and kept nodding at whoever it was, even though they couldn't see her.
She saw Peter and took her hand off her mouth.
“Hey, bud,” she said. Her voice was the wrong shape. “Go back to bed, okay? I'll come in a minute.”
He went back to bed. She didn't come in a minute. She came a lot of minutes later and left the light off. After sitting on the edge of his bed for a while, she lay down on top of the covers beside him, shoes still on, and told him.
Peter understood the plane part. Planes could crash. There had been one on the news once, in the ocean, and his mom had turned it off. He understood that his mom had been on a plane, a small one, going from the big airport in Germany to the city where the conference was, and that something had gone wrong over the mountains.
He didn't understand the other part, the part where she wasn't coming back. He knew what the words meant, but he couldn't make sense of them. It was like a sentence in a language where he knew all the letters and none of the words. Maybe if he went to sleep and woke up again, it would be the right night, and his mom would come home. But he knew that wasn't how it worked.
“She said four sleeps,” he said.
“I know.”
“This is only one.”
May made a noise. She put her arm over him, over the blanket, heavy and warm, and didn't say anything else. Peter lay there counting the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. There were thirty-one. There had always been thirty-one. He counted them again to make sure.
* * *
The next days didn't go in order. Later, Peter could remember pieces of them but not which came first.
On the first day, the apartment filled up with people. Grandma Fitzpatrick came from Boston and cried in the bathroom with the fan on. Neighbors arrived with food in foil pans, so much food that May started putting it in the bathtub with ice because the refrigerator was full. A policeman came, and then a man in a suit who wasn't a policeman but talked like one. He said mechanical failure and weather conditions and no indication otherwise, and May wrote the words down on the back of an envelope as if she were going to be tested on them.
On the second morning he put his mom's slippers by the front door, as he always did when she was coming home late, so they'd be waiting for her after a long day in work shoes. Nobody moved them. Grandma Fitzpatrick stepped around them twice on her way to the bathroom without saying anything. Part of Peter knew what it meant that nobody moved them. Another part, one that didn't talk to the first part, was sure she'd want them when she got in.
His questions came out at the wrong times. In the middle of May drying a pan, he asked whether the people looking in the mountains had checked all of them, because Germany had a lot of mountains; he'd seen them in a book. He asked whether his mom had taken her binders on the plane, and whether binders could float. He asked who was going to sign his summer reading log. May answered the ones she could. For the reading log she said, “I will, bud,” and he told her she wasn't allowed, it had to be a parent. Then neither of them said anything. Peter's face went hot. He hadn't meant it to come out mean. He'd only meant that there were rules, and you were supposed to follow them. That was just how it worked.
The apartment was too full. There were always two or three grownups in the living room talking in low voices, and whenever Peter walked in they stopped and turned the same face on him, and somebody would reach out and touch his hair. He spent the afternoon hiding in his mom's closet, sitting on her shoes with the door pulled almost shut, because it was dark in there and smelled like her and nobody talked to him. Sometimes he held one of her sweaters to his face and breathed in until the smell ran out, then waited a while before doing it again, careful not to use it all up.
On the third day, a woman from his mom's lab came. She had short gray hair and a lanyard with the letters on it, and she gave Peter a pack of gum as if they were already friends. Then, in the kitchen, she asked May whether Dr. Fitzpatrick had left any of her notebooks at home. Work notebooks. Files, drives, anything. For continuity, she said. So the research could go on.
“She took everything,” May said. “I watched her pack. Three suitcases.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. She said that's how science works.”
The woman looked around the kitchen, at the foil pans and at the spider Peter had started drawing, stuck to the fridge with a magnet and only five legs finished. Then she thanked May and left. Peter wasn't allowed to chew gum, so he gave the pack to May, who tucked it into her bag with all the other things that might be needed.
And on the fourth day, which should have been the day his mom came back, his father came instead.
Peter had met his father three times. The first time he was too little to remember, but there was a picture: a man in sunglasses holding a baby like a bag of groceries that might leak. The second time was when Peter was four. On his way somewhere, his father had stopped by the apartment for twenty minutes, just long enough to give Peter a remote-control helicopter too complicated for him. After the door closed, Peter's mom said, “Well. That was a lot.” The third time was last Christmas, at a restaurant with white tablecloths, where his father talked on the phone for most of dinner. When he hung up, he looked at Peter like he'd forgotten he was there. It wasn't mean. He just didn't seem to know what to say to Peter, like the people in lab coats his mom worked with. His mom said they didn't know what to do with kids and just had to get to know him better.
Peter also knew his father was on TV. Everybody knew that. There were pictures of him on magazines at the grocery store, next to the gum. Once a kid at Peter's old school had said Tony Stark was his dad, and everybody laughed. When the kid insisted it was true, they laughed harder, and Peter hadn't said anything at all.
His father filled up the doorway. He wasn't that tall, but the doorway was small, and the apartment was small, and he looked like he'd been built for somewhere with more room. He wore a dark suit and glasses tinted a little bit orange. Behind him in the hall, a big man with no neck held two coffees.
“Hey,” his father said. He looked at Peter, then at May, then back at Peter. “Hey. Peter. Hi.”
“Hi,” Peter said.
“Hi.” His father took off his glasses, wiped them on his jacket and put them back on. “This is Happy. He's, uh. He drives. Happy, say hi.”
“Hi,” said the big man. He did not look happy. He looked like somebody's dad at a birthday party who wanted to go home.
“Can I get you anything, Mr. Stark?” May had her arms folded. “We have a lot of lasagna.”
“I'm fine. Thank you. We've got a car, we're...” His father stopped and looked around the living room: the couch with May's blanket on it, the bookshelf with his mom's books, the five-legged spider on the fridge. He stood in the middle of it all with his hands in his pockets, like a man in a museum where you weren't allowed to touch anything.
“I'm really sorry,” his father said to Peter. “About your mom. She was really smart. Way smarter than me, honestly, and I don't say that. There's maybe two people I say that about.” He stopped again. “Sorry. That's not the point. Sorry.”
Peter didn't know what to say to that, so he said “Thank you,” which was what you said when people brought lasagna.
Everything in the apartment was still where it belonged, the couch and the books and the spider, but Peter didn't feel like he was in the right place anymore. Somehow his home had turned into a place where people came to be sorry at him, and now one of them was his father. He wanted, very badly, for this man to be somebody who knew what to do. He could tell from his father's face that he wasn't.
* * *
Tony stayed for the funeral. He slept at a hotel instead of the apartment, arriving each morning with Happy and the coffees to talk on his phone out in the hallway, where the reception was better.
Peter learned a lot of words that week by listening in hallways.
Custody, which for a while he thought was a kind of pudding, until May explained. Guardianship. Estate. Arrangements, which Peter knew from the flower shop by the subway, where arrangements came in baskets. When the grownups said it, though, it meant the flowers and also other things. Malibu, which was a place in California where his father's house sat on a cliff over the ocean.
“He's got a room,” Tony was saying into the phone, out in the hall. “Well, he's got several rooms, it's a big house, Pep, pick one. Not the one with the... okay, fine, yes, the one by the stairs. Make it blue. Kids like blue. Is that true? It feels true.” A pause. “I don't know what six-year-olds eat. Look it up. No, don't look it up, ask somebody.” Another pause, longer. “No. No, I think it's cleaner this way.”
The funeral was at a church his mom had never gone to. Peter knew his mom was supposed to be inside the closed box at the front, the one with flowers on it, but he didn't think she was. He didn't know what was in it and he didn't want to ask. Lots of people from her work came. There were flowers from the company with a card that said With deepest sympathy from your colleagues. The gray-haired woman with the lanyard waved at Peter with just her fingers.
The air conditioning in the church was turned up too high, and the pew was too high for his feet to reach the floor. Peter sat between May and Grandma Fitzpatrick in new shoes that pinched, while his father sat at the end of the row with his sunglasses folded in his lap. A man at the front talked about his mom for a long time. He called her Dr. Mary Fitzpatrick and said she was dedicated and brilliant, and Peter kept waiting for him to say something true about her, like how she read Peter her research papers, or how she sang in the shower in the wrong key on purpose. He never did. It was like listening to somebody describe a photo of his mother they had seen once.
When everyone stood up to sing, Peter stood too, not knowing the words. He watched the box. If she was in there, he thought, she'd be very cold. Then he thought she wasn't in there at all, and he couldn't tell which thought was the right one, and his throat closed up so that it hurt to swallow. Without looking down, May found his hand. He held on to two of her fingers until the song was over.
Afterward, Peter waited with his father while a long line of people went up to Grandma Fitzpatrick and said how sorry they were. He had heard the words so many times they had stopped meaning anything.
A very big man with a bald, shiny head and a beard found Peter and his father on the church steps.
“Tony.” The big man shook his father's hand with both of his, as if he were trying to keep it warm. “I'm so sorry. I came as soon as I heard.” He looked down at Peter. He had crinkly eyes, and he smiled with all of them. “And this is the young man. Look at you. Look at that face, Tony, that's your face exactly, God help him.”
“Obie,” Tony said. “Peter, this is Obadiah. Obadiah runs the company. I just make stuff.”
“Your father's being modest,” Obadiah said. “That's how you know he's upset. It's the only time he's ever modest.” He crouched, which took a while and made his knees crack. He smelled like cigars and cologne. “Anything you need, son. Anything. You ask your Uncle Obie.” He reached into his coat pocket and came out with a butterscotch candy in yellow plastic, which he pressed into Peter's hand before folding Peter's fingers over it.
Peter said thank you. He thought Obadiah sounded like a name out of the Bible, which it probably was. He put the candy in the pocket of his church jacket and didn't eat it.
* * *
The worst of the conversations happened in the kitchen, and Peter could hear all of it through the vent that connected to his room. Neither his mom nor May had ever known about the vent.
“I'm not saying you're not his father,” May was saying. “I'm saying you don't know him. Do you know he won't eat anything that's touching anything else on the plate? Do you know he gets nightmares when it thunders? Do you know he reads at a fifth-grade level and doesn't have one friend his own age because they all bore him to tears, and it breaks his heart, and he'll never, ever tell you about it? I know that. I've been here every day since he was eight months old.”
“And I'm grateful.” Tony's voice was fast and smooth, like it was going downhill. “I am. Genuinely. Which is why I want to make sure you're taken care of. My people put together a...”
“I don't want a package, Mr. Stark.”
“...a severance, which, I should say, is very generous. Embarrassingly. Pepper told me to lower it and I said no.”
“I'm not asking to be paid. I'm asking to stay. You're taking him across the country to a house where he doesn't know a single soul. Let me come for a few months. Let me help him settle in. Pay me what she paid me, pay me nothing, I don't care.”
Tony didn't answer right away. Fingers drummed on the table. “Look. I've thought about it. I think a clean break is better for him. He needs to adjust to his new situation, and if you're there, he's not adjusting. He's just in the old situation with a better view.”
“He's six.”
“Right. So he'll adjust fast. That's the thing about kids, isn't it? They're, uh. Resilient. Everybody says resilient.”
It was quiet for a long time after that. Peter lay on his bed and stared at the vent. He decided severance was probably like severe, which meant very bad, and he couldn't work out why his father would want to give May something very bad, or why that was generous. What he did understand was “clean break.” He pictured the plate that had slid off the counter last spring and split into two neat pieces, and how May had said a clean break was the good kind because you could glue it. Nobody in the kitchen was talking about glue. Peter pulled the blanket over his head and breathed the hot air under there, trying to hear what May would say next and trying not to.
“You can visit,” his father said finally, in a smaller voice. “Obviously. We'll figure something out.”
“Will we,” said May. It didn't sound like a question.
In the morning there was a check on the kitchen table, folded in half. May didn't pick it up. After making Peter cinnamon toast, cut into strips on a plate where they weren't touching anything, she ate her own toast standing at the counter, looking out the window at the fire escape. When she finished, she slid the check aside with one finger so she could wipe the crumbs off the table, and then she slid it back.
Nobody told Peter exactly how far Malibu was. He asked May whether he'd be back for the Fourth of July, because they always watched the fireworks from the roof. May said she didn't think so. He asked about Halloween, since his mom had promised they'd make him a bat costume this year, with real wings. May pressed her lips together and said that was a question for his dad. So Peter packed for a trip, because that was the only kind of packing he knew how to do. He left the bat wings he'd drawn for his mom on the desk, and the stars on the ceiling, and his library book on the nightstand with a bookmark at page forty. It wasn't due for two weeks, and he could finish it when he got back.
* * *
The car came on Thursday.
Peter had one suitcase. It held his clothes and his toothbrush and one toy, a stuffed octopus May had won for him at Coney Island by throwing baseballs at milk bottles until the man running the booth begged her to stop. The rest of his things were going to come later, in boxes, with a moving company. His father had said so. His father said a lot of things were going to come later.
May walked him down to the sidewalk. Happy put the suitcase in the trunk of a black car that was much too long for the street. His father was already in the back seat, on the phone. He held up one finger through the window. One minute.
May knelt on the sidewalk, which was wet, but she didn't care. Pulling out a marker, she took Peter's backpack off his shoulders and opened the flap. On the inside, where the name tag was supposed to go, she wrote her phone number in big square numbers. Then she wrote it again underneath, smaller, in case the first one rubbed off.
“That's me,” she said. “You call me whenever you want. Middle of the night, I don't care. You call me and tell me about the ocean.”
“Okay.”
“You want me to say it out loud so you remember?”
“I already remember it.”
May laughed. It was wet, not her real laugh, but it was closer than his mom's had been in the kitchen that night. “Of course you do.” She put the backpack back on him and clipped the chest strap, which he never clipped. She held his face in both hands for a second, studying it as if she were trying to memorize it, even though she'd seen it every day.
“You're gonna be okay,” she said. “You hear me? You're a good kid. You're the best kid I know.”
“You don't know that many kids.”
“I know tons of kids. I'm a professional.” She kissed his forehead. “Go on. Your dad's waiting.”
Peter wanted to grab her coat and not let go. He wanted it so much that his hands hurt from not doing it. But he climbed into the car instead.
His father had put the phone down. He opened the door from the inside and slid over so Peter could climb in. The seats were leather and cold. There was a little television in the back of the seat in front of him, turned off. The door shut with a heavy sound, like a refrigerator.
Somebody had put a booster seat in the back for him, a black one that matched the leather so well it must have been bought for this car. Peter climbed onto it and pulled the seatbelt across his chest. The buckle was on the far side, sunk down in the crack of the seat, and he had to dig for it.
“Need a hand?” Tony asked, already half reaching over.
“No.”
“Okay.” His father snatched his hand back as if he'd touched something hot. “Cool. Independent. Love that.”
The belt was stiff and the angle was wrong. Peter jabbed the metal tongue at the slot and it skidded off, clicking against the plastic, then skidded off again. Tony watched him miss a third time, opened his mouth, and looked down at his phone instead. On the fourth try it caught.
His father looked out the window at May, still standing on the wet sidewalk with the marker in her hand. For a second it seemed like he might roll the window down and say something. Then his phone buzzed.
“Stark,” he said into it. The car pulled away.
Peter twisted around in his seat to look out the back. May got smaller until a delivery truck blocked the view, and when it moved she was gone. He kept staring at the place she'd been until the car turned the corner, with the feeling that if he looked away first, it would be his fault somehow.
He turned to face front. Finding the butterscotch from the funeral in his pocket, he held it without unwrapping it and didn't let go until they got to the airport.
On the plane his father sat across a little table from him, typing on a laptop. Peter watched New York shrink under the window, the bridges and the gray water and the buildings he couldn't tell apart from up here, and tried to find Queens. He couldn't. He tried to work out which way Germany was. Somewhere in the second hour he realized he didn't know what his father's house looked like, or where he would sleep, or who would pick him up from school, or whether there was a school. Every question he thought of made two more, until the inside of his head felt like the dryers in the basement of their building, everything tumbling around at once. His hand kept going to his pocket.