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knowing I really couldn’t throw them away but wishing that I could at least make them disappear.
    I went to the kitchen as Mom came inside.
    “Did you look in the packet Carl gave you?”
    “I’m tired, Mom. Can we talk about it in the morning?”
    I scavenged through the fridge, finding doggie bags left over from her and Carl’s big engagement date. Wan Fu’s Szechuan Emporium: the most expensive Chinese restaurant in town. At least the guy had good taste in food.
    Mom leaned against the wall. “Why does Quinn have to be like this? It’s like I’m not allowed to have any happiness around here.”
    I didn’t feel like getting into it. “Not everything’s about you, Mom.”
    “Yeah, well, not everything’s about him, either.”
    I snatched up the doggie bags, and instead of escaping to my clean room, I went in Quinn’s pigsty. At least there, the chaos was all out in the open, instead of hiding in unseen places.
    I pushed open his door. A dart zipped through the air headed straight for my face. I deflected it with the doggiebags, and it punctured the flaming Hindenburg on Quinn’s classic Led Zeppelin poster instead, which had once been Mom’s until retro became cool and Quinn nabbed it.
    “That would have been a bull’s-eye,” Quinn complained. I looked at the dartboard on the back of the door.
    “Fat chance. It wouldn’t even have hit the target.”
    Quinn shrugged and turned his attention to a flight simulation game on his computer. It was typical Quinn: playing darts while playing computer games while blasting music loud enough to shake the house from its foundation. I turned down the music a few hundred decibels so I could hear myself think, as Quinn ditched his plane in a cornfield.
    “Isn’t the object to actually land the plane?”
    “Where’s the fun in that?” Quinn quit the game and flopped bonelessly onto his bed. I sat on his desk chair, handing him one of the bags of food. “Here, stuff your face. Mom and Carl had Chinese.”
    “Great! They’re engaged five minutes, and we’re already eating his table scraps.” He riffled around his desk until he found a fork with dried ketchup on it and started eating.
    I studied the diamond stud in Quinn’s earlobe. “I like it better than sputnik,” I told him.
    Quinn looked at me as if I’d insulted him. “You gave me sputnik.”
    “Yeah, but when I gave it to you, it was a key chain.”
    He returned to his food. Lo mein noodles dangled from his chin like worms as he sucked them in. “Youwatch,” Quinn said. “This guy’s going to bail, and we’ll never hear from him again. Just like the other ones . . .”
    I looked away. He didn’t have to say it—I knew what he was thinking: Just like Dad.
    I wanted to reach out to Quinn somehow, but I couldn’t. It made me think of this thing I once read. Scientists now think there are actually nine dimensions instead of three, but the other ones are so folded in upon themselves, we can’t experience them. Maybe that explains why I could never reach out to Quinn, because although he was only a few feet away, he somehow felt much farther than the space between us. When Dad left us all those years ago, it tore open a wound that led to a whole lot of unexpected dimensions.
    “Hey, maybe this guy’ll hang around,” I said. “And maybe it won’t be so bad.”
    “Easy for you to say. You’ll be off at Columbia.”
    I felt the skin on the back of my neck tighten. “I never said I was going.”
    Quinn laughed, his mouth full of noodles. “Yeah, right. You’re gonna turn down an Ivy League scholarship.”
    When I didn’t answer him, his expression changed.
    “Wait a second. You’re not kidding!”
    I began to pace, kicking the debris on the floor out of the way. “That scholarship doesn’t cover everything. And do you know how expensive New York is?”
    “One month to go, and you’re gonna talk yourself out of it?”
    “I’m being practical. I know that particular word never made it