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didn’t say ‘sucks.’”
    I held my hand up like I was pledging an oath. “That’s what you said,” I told her. “I heard you.”
    â€œAh.” She straightened out some business cards on the counter. “So, are you looking forward to it? It might be a good chance to make new friends.”
    Mom had been on my case about making new friends for a while now. She must’ve asked me about Noah Gorman a million times since February. “I haven’t seen him in ages,” she would say. “Why don’t you invite him over for dinner tonight? It would be nice to catch up, don’t you think?”
    I didn’t.
    What I should’ve told Mom, so that she’d stop harassing me about what a friendless loser I was, was that it wasn’t like I’d ever had buckets of friends to begin with. I had Noah, and sometimes I’d hang out with some of his friends, but only if Noah was there, too. And there were the guys I played pickup with—Mike Jessup, Steve Bickford, Tommy Lipowitz.
    Jared Richards.
    But I was never really
friend-friends
with those guys. That’s what I should’ve told my mom. They were just sports-playing friends. Noah would play sometimes, too, when I could drag him along.
    After Jared, though, some of the sports guys didn’t want me to join them anymore. Not all of them, just some. It’s not like I could blame them, really. That’s what I should’ve told her.
    I should’ve told her, too, that Noah did keep calling me, for a while. He even offered to go out on the lake with me once (even thoughhe was a worse skater than I was), because of me not being able to play hockey with those other guys. But back then, right after it happened, just looking at my skates made the skin on my arms clammy, like I was sweating something terrible, no matter how cold it was outside. Made it hard to swallow. Hard to breathe.
    And I guess I should’ve told my mom that I was the one who’d stopped calling Noah. That I’d said I’d let him know when I wanted to hang out again, and he’d said okay. And I thought I might want to soon, really, but for a while there, thinking much of anything got pretty tough. For a couple of months the drawings in my Book of Thoughts freaked me out so bad, I had to hide them at the back of my closet while I was sleeping. That’s how stupid I could be back then—afraid of my own thoughts. The stuff I drew for a while, it made my shark-eating drawings seem like happy little unicorns munching on cupcakes. What-ifs about it not being Jared that day on the lake, that’s what I drew for a while. What-ifs about it being someone else instead. So I guess I just never did feel like hanging out with Noah Gorman again.
    Eventually Noah had stopped calling. That part I did tell my mom. I just left out the stuff beforehand.
    It was too much to tell, anyway.
    â€œIntramural baseball starts in a couple weeks, right?” Mom asked me, poking me in the side with her elbow. I guess she could tell I wasn’t going to talk about friends, so she’d moved on to other ways to try to get me pumped about middle school.
    I shrugged. “Three, I think.”
    â€œJust think,” Mom said. “Soon I’ll have
two
baseball stars. Whenyou join the Dodgers, just make sure you sign a big enough contract that I can afford the mansion
and
the butlers.” I bit the insides of my cheeks to stop from smiling, but it was no use. Sometimes Mom got a little loopy around her sixth coffee or so. “People always forget about the butlers.”
    â€œI’ll see what I can do,” I promised.
    When things started to get really slow in the store, about four thirty or so, Ray went to the back to answer emails, and Mom took to dusting, and I didn’t do much of anything because I only got paid four dollars an hour. Mom said I could “man the fort” and holler if any customers showed