The bike that was never a bike.

That was all” “I made a deal,” Caleb said.

“With the collections office.”

He said it the way a boy reports a thing he is proud of and terrified of at once.

“I went there in person.

On a Saturday, after my first shift.

I brought my first paycheck, all of it, in cash.

And I told the man at the desk that I was thirteen, and that my mom didn’t know I was there, and that I would bring them eighty dollars every single week, every Saturday, if they would just hold off.