Booked

This section begins with “Usually at dinner” and ends with “Last Night You Couldn’t Watch TV.” After an unusually silent dinner, Nick’s parents tell him they are breaking up. Nick’s mom will move to Kentucky to train a racehorse for the Kentucky Derby, as she explains in “Broken.” Nick struggles in sleep and in school, “trapped / in a cage of misery / with freedom / nowhere in sight” (61). The only thing that distracts him from his family problems is an indoor soccer match, but he is shocked when a team of girls beats his and Coby’s team. April sends Nick a sympathetic note in the poem “Dear Nick.” 

Nick’s mom tells him goodbye and leaves him to live alone with his dad until her next visit. Nick tells Mr. MacDonald he dislikes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the librarian gives him a book about the soccer star Pelé. Nick and his dad share an awkward dinner of “Mustard mac-n-cheese” (81). Nick and Coby practice soccer and talk in the poem “Hanging Out at Coby’s” and the poems that follow. Nick has not been communicating with his mom, who has called and texted him often since she left.