up to their chests, their backpacks pressed like carapaces behind them. Bruce’s mother was out front, reading her newspaper in the sun, waiting in case Toby needed to come home with them for the rest of the afternoon. Now, Bruce flipped the sack onto the back of his hand, where it rested.
“Sure you don’t want to play?”
Toby looked at him. Bruce noticed red points on his cheeks that made it look like he had a fever. “Yeah,” Toby said. “Okay.”
They turned to face each other. Bruce dropped the sack onto his right ankle, angling his foot just so for a light, easy catch. He popped it to Toby, who caught it, sailed it into the air, turned a 180, and caught it again on the bottom of his shoe before lofting it back to Bruce. They had been hacking like this for a few minutes when Toby stopped a toss from Bruce with a listless motion and began to dribble the sack on his toe, watching it as it bounced up and down, collapsing flat when it landed and thrusting itself slightly taller, looser, in the moments in between. They could hear the soft thunk of it against Toby’s sneaker in the emptied-out lobby. Toby said, “I think my mom’s with her boyfriend.”
Bruce kept his face still. He knew to do that much. He wished he had the sack himself so he could concentrate on it instead of on Toby’s foot. His heart was beating with sudden excitement and sorrow. Divorced mothers had boyfriends. Toby’s mom was married.
“Dude,” he said finally. “She has a boyfriend?”
“He’s a dick,” Toby said. “My dad’s met him.”
Because breathing seemed like it might hold the power to hurt, to offend, Bruce held his breath. He folded his hands in on each other, making fists, and scratched at layers of palmy sweat with his fingernails. He was glad when Toby kicked the sack over, though he hesitated to do anything but hold it still in the hollow of his ankle and stare at it, as Toby had.
“Have you?” he said finally.
“Met him? No. But I know he’s a dick. He builds houses in my town,” Toby said. “I guess he built one on our street.”
It looked like Toby was going to cry, which caused Bruce’s excitement to constrict and go colder inside his chest. Just then the headmistress came out of her office and told them that Mr. Van Wyck had agreed to pick Toby up at Bruce’s apartment at six o’clock. They were free to leave.
“Yes!” Bruce said, exhaling held air with the word, listening as it went more whispery than he’d meant it to. He pocketed the sack and followed Toby out into the too-bright sunshine.
He and Toby didn’t speak about the boyfriend for the rest of the afternoon. They did what they sometimes did on weekends: hung out behind the doorman’s podium in Bruce’s building, watching the live footage of people going up and down in the elevators and passing by outside. They hooted when someone picked his nose or, better, grabbed or scratched anywhere near the vicinity of his balls. They made a few crank calls from the extension in Bruce’s room. They hacked in the living room, the largest space in the apartment, and yelled monosyllabic answers to the questions Bruce’s mother called from the kitchen, where she was making dinner. The questions went like this: Tob, would you like to spend the weekend with us? And: Bruce, wouldn’t that be great? Bruce could tell that his mother was trying to make the best of the situation, so that Toby wouldn’t feel worse. He was grateful for his mother’s good manners. He was grateful and, under the circumstances, vaguely ashamed that she loved his father. Toby’s mother never called. At six o’clock sharp, Mr. Van Wyck buzzed from downstairs. No, he crackled over the intercom, thanks, but he couldn’t come up for a drink. He and Toby had better get on home.
Toby said goodbye. Bruce held the door out for him, handling the knob carefully, as if it could break up, an eggshell in his hand.
At dinner Bruce brought it up. He took a breath and said, “Toby thinks his mom …”
“What?” said his mother, peering at him.
Bruce felt the same mix of excitement and dread that he’d felt in the school lobby when Toby had told him. He almost laughed, for some reason. “Has a boyfriend,” he said.
From the way his mother looked quickly at his father, Bruce knew that