The blue light caught the whites of her eyes and made them look wet. Her thumb moved the way her hand used to move through the bin of Legos - not looking, just feeling for the next piece. Outside, a car backed out of the Hendersons' driveway and the headlights swung across her ceiling and she didn't look up. The cracker sleeve crinkled when she shifted, and she pressed it flat against her knee to stop the sound.
The glass left a wet ring on the dresser that spread into the shape of a state, maybe Ohio. Jada's wrist was still crooked around the cord - and her mother unlooped it the way you'd unloop a garden hose from a post - slow, so nothing woke. The curtain let in one bright stripe across the comforter, and it landed on Jada's closed eyes, and her eyes moved under the lids but her body didn't.
The word was *mitosis*. She could see the shape of it, the tall *t* - the way it ended soft, but when she opened her mouth what came out was *the one where it splits*. Her lab partner, Brianna, wrote it in the margin anyway, small and neat - and circled it, and slid the notebook back without looking up. Jada uncapped her pen again and wrote the date at the top of the blank page and stared at it like it was evidence of something.
The counselor's thumb left a smear on the laminate edge of the chart when she slid it across, and the number 43 sat in its bold black box like a price tag someone had forgotten to peel. Jada picked up the corner of the paper and set it down. The red bars were the color of the inside of a watermelon, and there were seven of them, and she counted them twice because counting was easier than reading. Outside the counselor's window a groundskeeper was dragging a leaf blower across the same strip of wet grass - back and forth, and Jada watched him instead of the chart, and the counselor waited, and the leaf blower went back, and then forth again.
Her mother's right hand drifted off the wheel and hovered near the radio knob and then settled back on her thigh. The dry cleaner's sign had a letter missing - *rop-off* in red neon, and Jada read it three times. The kid on the bike was standing on the pedals and his jacket was the color of a school bus and he got smaller in the side mirror until he was gone. Jada turned her left palm up on her leg and looked at the lines in it like she was trying to remember what they'd always been there for.
The phone sat beside the bananas with its face down, and her mother touched the corner of it once with two fingers, the way you'd check if something was still warm.
From the other room came the sound of a page turning, and then a small involuntary sound - almost a laugh, almost nothing.
Her mother picked a grape off the bunch and ate it standing up, and looked at the dark screen again, and looked at the doorway, and didn't say anything.
The library sticker on the spine said it was due the ninth - and the ninth had come and gone while the book sat under a hoodie on the floor of Jada's room. She'd folded the corner of page 211 into a triangle the way her grandmother folded napkins, both corners in, then down, precise. The word underneath the fold had four syllables; you could feel them even with your thumb covering it. She hadn't opened the book in eleven days, but she kept it on the nightstand because moving it would mean something.
