He sat on the flat roof of their apartment building cross-legged. He came up here to ponder the moon. He couldn’t see the stars—too many city lights. Who would have thought that the street lamps and fluorescent office buildings and 75-watt bulbs lighting bedtime reading or late night activities could obscure the stars. Their light traveled how many millions of miles to reach this spot only to be blocked by the desire to see what was right around them all the time. But even without the stars, the night sky and the moon gave Jonas a sense of his smallness. And he found this smallness comforting.

Even if his mother barely looked up from her computer when he came home from soccer practice, responded in grunts as he recounted the goal he scored in their scrimmage game, Ned’s slide tackle, which the coach had totally not seen and could have taken his knee out, or how Eddie had dumped the gallon of water on Ned’s head to the applause of the rest of the team but the yelling disapproval of the coach.

Now, sitting up here, he wondered why he told her these stories every evening as he took out two microwaveable dinners from the freezer, stuck them in the oven, set the table for two and waited for it to ding. He kept up this steady monologue even when she gestured for him to bring her dinner to her desk, that she’d work while she ate. Did he talk to pretend that he had a mom who listened? Who cared about the nuances of the day? Or to give her a chance to be that mom? Maybe one day, one of these details would cause her to pause, to look at him with interest. Just like setting the table might one day encourage her to join him. They might ask one another questions about their days. They might listen to each other. They might laugh.

But here up on the roof, his efforts seemed small and meaningless. Instead of depressing him, however, he felt like he was part of a bigger pattern, something vaster than the fast clacking of his mother’s fingers on the computer keys and slower clacking of his teeth as they chewed through penne noodles with marinara sauce. Nothing mattered up here but they were all part of an expanding universe. They were all made up of the same stardust, right?

He didn’t come up here every night, usually on the nights when one of his mom’s gestures felt more dismissive than usual or if he handed her a morsel from his life that he really cared about. Or sometimes when he sensed that she was more lost in her work than usual, when she had a deadline, he knew she wouldn’t notice if he smelled like smoke. So he would come up here with cigarettes or, if he was lucky, a joint, and contemplated the stars.

Tonight he’d made the mistake of telling her he’d been voted MVP—Most Valuable Player, he explained when she hadn’t responded. And then instead of dropping it, he’d escalated it—he’d talked about the award dinner, that he’d need to wear a suit, maybe she’d want to come? He’d thought MVP was something she’d recognize as noteworthy, as worth paying attention to, like when he came home with a rare “A,” but apparently sports didn’t count. And he’d stood there staring at the back of her head in her Herman Miller chair and wanted to shake her, to scream. And instead he’d skipped dinner and come up here.