The words echo in my head. The stone is over on the island in the middle of our room, watching me like a cat, and I can feel tears sizzling off my cheeks with the updraft of hot air from my pancake griddle. I wipe my face off, still sniffling. This is ridiculous. Adam stumbles down the stairs, and by that I mean he walks down, but it sounds like he fell from the first floor to the landing. He's already on his phone when he turns the corner to meet me. I lean to my mix bowl and give him a smug grin. "Hey. Didn't see you there. I was too busy making pancakes and texting my friends. Like an adult."
                          
Adam's eyes flick in my general direction. "What?" 
                          
"You'll pass again today?" I ask.
                          
"No, I'll take two," he says. He sits down and keeps texting. At some point he looks up, expectedly, and I harshly click the plate against the table. I scoot into a chair across from him, occasionally pausing to look up, but he's dead silent. I've never seen him this engrossed in talking to the guys before. In fact, I'm at least eighty percent sure his friends aren't awake yet. They always came in late to middle school, so I assumed their parents just lugged them out of their beds and threw them in the car at 8 AM.
                          
	I put the fork down. Adam looks up. "I was... going to go to this activities fair today," I offer.
                          
"Dude. No one goes to activities fairs," he tells me. 
                          
"Well, I do," I say, "And Amanda's club is going to be there, so I guess I'm going to give them some free traffic." Adam looks unimpressed. As a follow up, I offer, "Bet they'll have candy."
                          
Adam sighs. "I should probably find out what the tech clubs are out there, so I can join them. If I happen to pick up some candy along the way..." 
                          
"You're into STEM?" I ask. 
                          
"Colleges are into STEM," he shrugs. 
                          
"Right," I say.
                          
"You should try to join something practical, too," Adam offers. "You know, something you can win. That way, our parents won't bug us about joining sports again." He gets to his feet, utensils folded neatly across the plate. "Cinnamon in this one?" 
                          
I joined wrestling in sixth grade. It ended about as well as it sounds like it would end.  "Yeah," I say. "Little bit of nutmeg, too."
                          
"It's really good," Adam says. "You ever think about going into culinary arts? It's slightly less impractical than art arts."
                          
I pretend to debate this. It's not like committing to being a world-class chef would be any easier than committing to being an artist, but just like with art, I already know that I'm behind. Everyone with a future has been practicing longer and harder. I'm not going to sneak up on anyone from behind, so my pipe dreams are staying in the pipe. Adam knows this. My dad knows this. I know this. "Yeah, maybe. Maybe I'll do mocha art for a living. You know, where people do the fancy looking aesthetic coffee?"
                          
Adam laughs. "I'll put that up there with 'professional YouTuber' in the 'things people aren't going to pay Will to do' category."
                          
"Don't forget Twitch streaming," I say. "Hey, if nothing works out for the pair of us, I still say we do the world's first twenty-four hour stream. We both sleep and work in shifts, so that we never have to stop the stream. It goes on like that, forever, and as long as we don't talk, no one will be able to tell the difference."
                          
"Because of what we sound like, or what we'd say?" asks Adam.
                          
Breakfast is long past over now, but I'm glad to have him on the line, and so I can't bring myself to push him back away, even though we're just standing by the empty table, wasting time. "You're right, it wouldn't work."