Page 158 of Roadrunner

He wasn’t angry.

He was finished.

At the door he stopped.

“He’s eleven,” he said. “He just got a life that makes sense. I’m not going to tell him to make himself smaller so a kid with brothers can feel tall.”

Mrs. Keene didn’t have an answer for that.

I didn’t either.

I didn’t need one.

Arthur was at the kitchen table when we got home.

Pencil. Packet. The ripped shirt already in the laundry, which was how he filed things he didn’t want discussed.

Riley sat across from him.

I stayed at the counter.

This wasn’t a speech I needed to give.

“Teacher called,” Riley said.

Arthur’s mouth tightened. “I didn’t start it.”

“Didn’t say you did.”

“He said my dad wasn’t my dad.” Arthur looked at the pencil, not at us. “Then he pushed me.”

The kitchen went very still.

Not the old kind of still.

The new kind. The kind that had a floor under it.

Riley nodded once.

“You push back?”

“A little.”

“You stop when he stopped?”

“Yes.”

“Math packet?”

Arthur’s ears went red. “I forgot.”

“You didn’t forget,” Riley said. “You were chewing on it.”

Arthur didn’t argue.

Riley reached over and turned the packet around so it faced him.

“We do the math,” he said. “Then we talk about the boy.”