Brandon wasn’t particularly surprised when, waking in a tangle of sheets and yesterday’s clothes, he immediately felt slightly ill.

It was that smell. He’d never figured out exactly what it was — some mixture of the nearby Jamaica Bay mud flats, garbage not yet taken out, or the omnipresent, slightly sweet odor that had permeated the house since they had first toured it three months earlier. Smells almost like that roach spray from…before, he had thought.

He hated that smell. Mostly, he’d come to accept it, which from observation was What Adults Did: they accepted that life would contain things that, in his parlance, sucked. Such as cars that rattled alarmingly, and whose driveshafts occasionally broke free on Cross Bay Boulevard, making a scraping “WHUNKAWHUNKAWHUNKA” sound from beneath the seat from which Brandon sat, counting the minutes that he’d be late for French (again), watching his stepfather click his teeth as he sat behind the inert steering wheel.