“WAIT A MINUTE!” DOMINIC said when Loop and Z immediately grabbed a bunch of stuff from their new box of magic. They hadn’t even bothered to look at the instructions. “You’re going to mess up the tricks.”

Loop held up a contraption called the Mafia Manicure. “This is definitely mine,” he said.

Meanwhile, Z took out items and asked a dozen questions about each one.

“If you just took a minute to read…,” Dominic tried to explain, but his friends ignored him. Soon all the contents of the box were on the counter, as jumbled as a heap of pick-up sticks. “We’re going to lose the pieces,” he complained.

After twenty minutes of squabbling, the boys divvied up the items. Dominic picked tricks that used mentalism, the art of reading someone’s mind. He’d always been fascinated by telepathy and telekinesis. In fact, his favorite superhero was Professor X from X-Men because he could control minds. If Dominic had that power, he’d make his friends do silly things like pat their heads while quacking. He giggled just thinking about it.

Loop and Z handed Dominic the instructions for all the magic tricks. “Why don’t you take the booklet, so you can tell us what to do,” Loop said.

Dominic sighed. Every time they got a set of instructions, Loop and Z goofed off while Dominic figured things out. It didn’t matter if they were learning how to play a new video game or conducting an experiment in their science class.

Finally, it was time to head home. The boys walked most of the way together, but since Dominic’s apartment was closest to the shopping center, he was the first to say good-bye.

He climbed the steps to his second-story apartment and let himself in. “Mom?” he called. No answer. Then he saw a note on the coffee table: “At Lulu’s.” This meant his mom was next door.

Dominic and his mom had a two-bedroom apartment with a giant bathroom and walk-in closets. His apartment was just like the others in the building, except for the books all over the furniture. His mom was always getting self-help books at Hastings or the library, and since she dragged Dominic along, he’d learned to love reading, too.

His dad, on the other hand, did not read, except for Sports Illustrated or the newspaper.

Dominic shook his head thinking about how different his mom and dad were, and he wondered how they ever got married.

Then again, his parents weren’t married anymore. They had gotten divorced when he was five. Then his dad moved to Corpus Christi and got remarried, while Dominic and his mom stayed in Victoria. Now his mom was a single parent who worked forty hours a week as a receptionist at Crossroads Clinic. Once a month, his parents met at the halfway point between the cities—the Burger King in Refugio—where they traded him off. They might say hello to each other, but most of the time, they simply nodded from a distance. So Dominic just grabbed his duffel bag and transferred it from one trunk to another. He’d try to bridge the gap by saying “Mom told me to say hi” or “Dad told me to say hi,” but his parents would just mumble something like “Tell him [or her] I said hi, too.”

Sometimes he envied Loop and Z, because they got to live with both their parents. Loop was an only child, but he had cousins and a grandma who always visited. And Z had tons of brothers and sisters. So those guys were never bored or lonely. If Dominic had more family around, he’d have extra people to talk to. But he didn’t have any cousins or siblings, at least not the full-blooded kind. He had a half sister on his dad’s side. She was only four years old, so even if she lived next door, he probably wouldn’t hang out with her. She was sweet, but she couldn’t play basketball. She couldn’t play anything more complicated than Candy Land and video games with ponies and fairies, which were the only things his stepmom kept in the house, saying they were age appropriate. Meanwhile, Dominic was twelve years old! They weren’t age appropriate for him. He liked to crash race cars and shoot monsters, but his stepmom said that was too violent for Maria Elena. That was his sister’s name. Not Maria or Elena, but Maria Elena, pronounced as one word.

He barely remembered when his parents were together. There was one portrait from Sears—his mother, his father, and his three-year-old self—but that’s it. It was on his dresser next to another family portrait, one where he was posed with his dad, stepmom, and Maria Elena.

He loved his mom, and he loved his dad’s side of the family, too. But every birthday and Christmas and awards assembly at school, he wanted to hang out with his entire family, and instead, they made him take turns. He didn’t understand. Why couldn’t his parents be friends?

Maybe that’s why he wanted to learn mentalism—so he could read their minds.