« You feel picked. »
« Yeah, Mom. »
« And you know where your first class is? It’s on the opposite side of… »
« Mom. I’m fine. »
He was fine. He was always fine, at least in the vocabulary we used together.
« Is this stupid? »
****
For the first few weeks, though, he came home talkative in a way I hadn’t seen since middle school. There was a girl. Her name was Ava.
« She has this laugh, » he told me one night, standing in the pantry doorway with a granola bar he wasn’t eating. « Like, she doesn’t even try to be funny, she just laughs at other people’s stuff, and you feel picked. »
« Picked? »
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