“So Bones, what was so important that you texted at the crack of dawn? Remember, you had to ‘tell me something’?”

“Lump, isn’t that a great word, ‘crack’?”

Bones was the master of changing the subject, especially when it came to stuff that wasn’t all rainbow skies. I mean, if it wasn’t good, Bones didn’t like to think about it, much less talk about it.

Last year, he tried out for the Ridgewood lacrosse travel team. There were going to be two teams with six- teen kids on each team. Only problem was thirty-four kids tried out for the thirty-two spots. That meant two kids weren’t going to make it.

After the tryouts, the coaches called each kid to tell him which team he was on. I must have asked Bones about twenty times whether he’d made the B Team. (I knew there was no way he was making the A Team.) But whenever I tried asking him, he’d start talking about why Queen was the greatest classic rock ’n’ roll band of all-time. It took me about a week to find out he got cut.

I could tell just from his dumb question about the word “crack” that we were headed for another week of interference, so I decided to play hardball. I powered down the laptop and focused all of my attention on him.

He got flustered and started stammering. “Hey, we got some more edits and ...”

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