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from pharmacy to pharmacy since they kept getting sick, never even stopped for a minute. I was worked into the ground just because someone felt like going to another country! I even had to give back the copy of Robinson Crusoe I’d borrowed from Ender because I hadn’t had time to read it.
    As a matter of fact, I’d only been curious about the book because he’d summed it up as, “There’s this slave merchant, he gets washed up on a deserted island …” The second I heard that, I’d wished I could get washed up on a deserted island too. After all, I could be considered a slave merchant, and I was sick of both: of slaves and of mercantile! All I wanted was for my father to scold me over my report card like a normal kid, and not because I forgot to activate the air conditioner we’d just had installed in the back of the truck!
    This wasn’t like forgetting to turn off the lights when you left the house. I’d caused the death of an Afghani by not turning on the conditioner. He was twenty-six, and he’d made me a paper frog. A frog that leaped when I pressed down on it with my finger. His name was Cuma, which meant “Friday.” The Afghani’s, not the frog’s. I found out years later that Robinson had a Cuma of his own. But since Friday was a book protagonist, how could he possibly be anything like Cuma! For he would never be found asphyxiated in the back of a truck nor give a paper frog as a gift to the child who’d turn on him like a snake. Of course, had Robinson and Friday existed, our lives would have seemed like a novel to them . That was the problem. Everyone’s life seemed like a novel to someone else. But they were all just lives. They didn’t turn into novels through mere divulgence. An autopsy report perhaps, at most … a feature one. Libraries were full of them: feature autopsy reports. Bound or unbound, they all told the story of paling skins. A man was made of skin and bones, after all. He would either eventually wrinkle or break on the way. Or be an Afghani named Cuma to die like that pondering rock of Rodin’s. Cuma who died on a Sunday …
    And I felt so bad I finally caved and went to Ender’s for meatballs. But it didn’t help shit. In fact, sitting at that table and watching that family made me feel even worse. The meatballs were delicious, though. If I had had a mother, I’m sure she would have made them that way too. “Would you like more?” she too would have asked. “Some more?” Maybe then I wouldn’t have hated the word “more” as much. When I got up to turn the meatballs in the pans, due to habit I suppose, my mother would say, “That’s not for kids, leave it,” just like Salime. Like a kid I would sit and the sizzling oil wouldn’t burn my hands and blister the spaces between my fingers. The way it did every time …
    They said there was ice cream, but I didn’t stay. I got out of there. Yadigar didn’t ask me anything. Not my father’s health or how his business was holding up. All he said was, “Eat. You need it,” like he knew everything. Really he was right. We were all growing. No matter what their age, everybody. The entire world. We were spinning our way into growth. Our heads spinning … That was why we ate and should eat. Each other and everything. We needed it. So we could grow as quickly as possible. Grow as quickly as possible and croak and leave space for others. So a new epoch could begin. One that was preferably not like this one … because we could tell we wouldn’t amount to shit. We weren’t that dumb … not all that dumb …

 
     
I was home. Father had gone to the industrial area in the city to get the brake linings of the truck replaced and wouldn’t be home till the evening. Just as I was contemplating how terrific it was to be alone and that I should definitely be alone when I grew up, the phone rang. I could tell it was Aruz by the digits on the small blue screen. I’d memorized his number. I didn’t want to take it. He would