When we got to my house, we went inside and I shut the garage door behind us. We went up the steps and into the family room. We were going to watch something on the feed. We sat there. We weren’t really interested in the feed. It was daytime shit, anyway. Soap operas with all these people with the big hair going on crying jags. And lots of puppets. Puppets telling you about every goddamn thing.

“I wish there was someplace we could go,” Violet said. “I want to . . . I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just, there’s a whole universe out there.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never been underwater for a really long time.”

“I been down on a couple of vacations into the really deep part. It’s pretty good. There’s a lot of stuff to do.”

“I’m just using that as an example,” she said, stroking my face.

“You have to have reservations. Otherwise, if you go by yourself, you get the bends.”

She was stroking my face and was like, “I probably don’t have much time. There’s just so much I want to do,” which was a difficult thing for her to say, because when she was stroking my face, it looked like it might mean one thing, but on the other hand, it probably meant something else, and it would be embarrassing if it didn’t mean what I thought it meant, and if I said something, and then if it turned out that by “so much she wanted to do,” she really meant riding trikes across the Sahara.

That would suck.

I said, “Do you mean . . .” I stopped, and tried, “That could be taken to mean that . . . you know . . . we . . .”

My feed was like, Tongue-tied? Wowed and gaga? For a fistful of pickups tailored extra-specially for this nightmarish scenario, try Cyranofeed, available at rates as low as —

She was like, “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you at Marty’s.”

“Would you stop?”

After a minute, I said, “You kept quiet about this for a long time.”

She nodded. “A few weeks. I’ve known.”

“You could’ve told me.”

“I could’ve,” she said.

“You didn’t need to be thinking about it all alone.”

She had her hands in her lap now. She said, “I want to go out and see the world. There’s so much. There’s . . . just so much.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. This sucks. It meg sucks.” I didn’t know what to say. We sat there, side by side. We were sitting there, and it seemed like nothing was right. We were done talking.

I held on to her, and she held on to me. We held like that. We were staring at the wall.

She blew out all her breath.

It was a strange moment, like when you get sad after sex, and it feels like it’s too late in the afternoon, even if it’s morning, or night, and you turn away from the other person, and they turn away from you, and you lie there, and when you turn back toward them, you can both see each other’s moles. Usually there seem to be shadows from venetian blinds all across your legs.

She said, “You toss something up in the air, and you expect it to come back down again.”

Which made absolutely no sense to me.

We sat and we looked at the fireplace. There were the fake logs and the fake iron parts. All the bricks were perfect. The walls were all a weird color of white.

Then there was the sound of the front door banging open. Mom was home with Smell Factor. We both were like, Whoa.

We pulled apart, and were sitting there. Smell Factor ran into the family room and took off his sneakers one at a time and threw them at the wall. Then he fell down on the rug and phased out and started watching Top Quark. Mom was like yelling for him to go pick up his room. He just lay there. She was clapping and calling his name. He just kept up with Top Quark. He didn’t have it shielded, so we were picking up the whole thing.

Aw, Top Quark, I’ll never get the prize at the fair.

Listen up, Down Quark — don’t get so down! Remember all your friends are right behind you.

Yeah, Down Quark!

Yeah, we’ll sing a song for you! It’s a happy, zappy song, full of chuckles and chortles.

Violet ate dinner with us. My father wasn’t there, so it went better than the last time. She said some stuff that made my mother laugh. Mom was chatting me about how she was a great girl.

We flew back late at night.

I finally asked her, Do they know how long?

No. Earlier, they were saying it could take years. Now they’re not sure. They’re saying it will be much faster.

It still could be years.

It’s not going to be years. It could happen anytime.

I dropped her off at her house. We didn’t make any plans. There weren’t any plans.

I spent the rest of the night doing homework. It seemed like that was the only thing left to do.