I think I gave up before I ever began, and then I tried anyway. What else can you do when there’s nothing to give because everything’s been taken away? But he gave up too, before he had to, on all of us, so we’re both quitters. The problem was that there was never anything in his fridge, except his stupid protein shakes and chicken sausages that I hated. And he never bothered to buy the wheat bread I said I hated but really loved. Once I tried to bake cookies, but he didn’t have a cookie sheet, or any flour, or chocolate. At first, every time I came over we had frozen pizza. He’d buy pepperoni, and I’d have to peel it off, and he never got the hint. And then I’d have to watch some movie he loved, and pretend to love it too. Only I hated doing this more than I hated the movie, and I felt like something impossible. It was between self-pity and self-disgust that I had to force myself to laugh for him. But I don’t think he noticed. I laughed for me because somebody had to. And when I tried to go to sleep, the sheets were always cold. It didn’t matter how long I stayed under them. My body could never make those sheets warm. And the sheets smelled different too. He didn’t use my mom’s detergent, which smelled like spring and soap and something else that made me want to close my eyes. Sometimes I called my mom on the phone, on his phone that used to be our phone, and she sounded too far away. Farther away than she should be, like she was in a different country instead of a different house. I pressed the phone to my ear until it hurt. A couple more hours couldn’t come sooner. They did, finally they did, and he drove me home, but his car smelled wrong, like a new car with no people in it.