My hands are dying.

I keep trying to explain it to Milo, but he just looks at me like I’m crazy.

“They don’t feel warm—they haven’t.” I squeeze the tips of my fingers as hard as I can, which hurts. “They’re not numb, though…”

“Maybe you have that … Raynaud’s disease,” he says. He takes my right hand and studies my fingers. They seem healthy, pink. He shakes his head. “They’re not blue.”

“But they’re cold.”

“They feel warm to me.”

“They feel cold,” I insist.

“Okay, Eddie,” he says. “They’re cold.”

I jerk my hands from his and then I rub them together. Friction. Heat. Milo can say what he wants; they’re freezing. It’s the hottest summer Branford has seen in something like ten years, but I haven’t been able to get my hands to warm up since it happened.

I hold them up again. They don’t even look like my hands anymore. They don’t even look like anything that could belong to me, even though they’re clearly attached.

“They’re different,” I tell him.

“Would you please put your hands down?” he asks. “Jesus.”

My hands have changed. I catch Milo looking at them sometimes, and I see it on his face that they’re different, no matter what he’s saying now.

We’re at the park, sitting on the picnic tables, watching a summer world go by. Kids play in the fountain with their parents. Pant legs are rolled up and big hands are holding on to tiny hands, keeping them steady against the rush of water. The smell of burgers and fries is in the air; food. It reminds me the fridge at home is empty and I have to go grocery shopping today or my mom and I will starve. I don’t even know how long the fridge has been that empty, but I noticed it today.

“What’s in your fridge?” I ask Milo.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “My mom isn’t home.”

We’re stuck between my house and his lately. He hasn’t been allowed to have girls at his place unsupervised since he hit puberty and I don’t like hanging out at my place now.

It’s too depressing.

“That’s not why I asked. I have to go grocery shopping and I don’t know what to get…” I rest my chin in my hands. “And I really don’t want to do it.”

He hops off the picnic table. “Let’s just get it over with, okay?”

We make our way out of the park and go to the grocery store. I’ve barely stepped through the automatic doors when I decide it is The Saddest Place on Earth.

Everyone just looks sad.

We end up in produce. I give myself a headache over the kind of math you have to use to buy food, which you need to live. I don’t even know what I want or what we need or how much I should be spending or what’s reasonable to spend. EVERYTHING HERE IS A STEAL, if I believe the signs, but there are two grocery stores in Branford, so I don’t know.

“It’s not hard,” Milo says, but even he sounds kind of unsure.

It is hard. I’ve never done this before.

I never had to.

We head to the frozen foods and I start shoving TV dinners into my cart and then I go to the dairy aisle and get cheese and bread because it seems less hopeless than TV dinners. And then I stand there, lost. What’s next? This is what grown-ups do.

It’s such a waste of time.

“Hey,” Milo says. “You here?”

“I’m here,” I say. I think.

I head back to the freezers and grab some frozen vegetables. I read somewhere they’re better for you than fresh because they were picked at a perfect moment in time and frozen in it. Fresh vegetables aren’t really fresh because as soon as they’re out of the ground and on their way to the grocery store, the best parts of them have already started to fade away.

“I should get…”

I trail off and turn in the aisle, trying to ignore the sad faces shuffling past, and then I grab some ginger ale. Ginger ale is usually only for when we’re sick and I know we’re not technically sick, but every time I’m at home, I feel like I could puke so that must be close enough.