Sometimes I wake up around four thirty, when the sun is just starting to come up and my neighborhood is this weird pink that doesn’t seem to fit the city streets and building-block houses or the traffic, and I look out the window and want with everything I’ve got to be up in the air just one more time. I’m not trying to fly away from anything, I’m really not, but when you spend your whole life wrapped in blue, wind at your back, sun-soaked and soaring, it’s hard to settle for just walking around. It’s hard to settle for the subway and school and watching TV.

I go to school and work on those endless packets while everyone is talking to each other, and then I go to the office and eat candy with James and do work and wait for Mom and then go home with her on what always seems like an eerily quiet subway car and then avoid her and listen to music in my room until I fall asleep. It’s fine; it’s better than a hospital, but it’s not like my life was. It’s not like I can’t tell that something is missing. I don’t know how everyone does it, walking around in bodies that are nothing other than what they are. Being themselves and never anyone, or anything, else. I guess it’s okay to wander around without the swoop swoop of your heart rising and falling in your chest and your wings stretching over water if you’ve never had it.

I sit at the island and eat my cereal, and it’s like I can’t even get myself to bring the spoon to my mouth because what’s the point? The cereal looks like twigs in my milk; it reminds me a little of a nest. Great.

“Bye, Mom!” I call as I leave. She’s running late today, or maybe she’s started going to work later so that she can avoid me in the mornings. It’s fine. I walk to school and let the crowd push me along to my first-period class. I don’t have to think about it; I just follow the swarm. When I get to my classroom, I stand on line and read The Perks of Being a Wallflower and wait—wait to get into class, wait for the day to end.

In English, we’re starting to read The Great Gatsby, which I only like because Charlie’s also reading it in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The popular girls ask if we can see the movie. Ms. Smith says absolutely not, and that’s why I like Ms. Smith. I never like movies that books get turned into. She asks me to help pass out books, which I don’t like because I feel the other kids watch me as I walk around the room, but I think she’s just testing me to make sure I’m ready to be her assistant, so I do it. Also, it’s not like she’s actually giving me a choice. When I get back to my seat, there’s a note on top of Perks. It says Charlie is the best. Do you like the Bots? I look around my table, and everyone seems completely fascinated as Ms. Smith introduces the book, telling us about Fitzgerald’s life and asking us for a definition of materialism. Nobody seems like they’ve just finished writing a secret note to someone they’ve never spoken to. But then again, what would that look like?

Everyone is trying to start to pack up without Ms. Smith noticing—she doesn’t like it when you pack up before the bell. I try to think of who might have left me a note. I’ve never gotten one before. I look around my table at the five other kids I’ve been sitting with since September. Are any of them secret indie rock fans? Not Christina, who’s best friends with Monique. Not Zahara, who wears pink shirts with rhinestones and loves, loves, loves Katy Perry. Noah sometimes rides a skateboard, so maybe, but why would he write me a note? The truth about Tanasia is that I don’t know anything about her. She sits with the second-tier popular kids at lunch, she seems nice, but does she blast indie rock in her spare time? I just don’t know. It’s nice to feel something in my stomach besides dread—what is it? Curiosity? There’s the tiniest spring in my step as I slip the note into my pocket and head to the door.

On my way out of the classroom, Ms. Smith stops me to say that rehearsals will begin next week, just us at first so I can “learn the ropes.” I’ll need to be in the theater from three to five on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I say okay, what else can I say? My heart sinks to my feet as I realize this means talking to Mom about not coming to the office, which means she’ll have to trust me to not fail out of school, and that doesn’t seem likely.

When I get home from the office that night, I rush through the door and upstairs to my room. I start to download the Bots. I click related artists over and over; I add Thunderbitch, Courtney Barnett, Benjamin Booker, and Tune-Yards. My feet kick against the floor in time. I watch video after video. I can’t take my eyes off the hands of the bass players. My packet of worksheets, my impending academic doom, the hospital, Dr. Katz, even Mom, it’s not that they feel far away; it’s that they feel like a foreign language, an alien planet. Nothing to do with me and this good noise. I didn’t know you could feel this free with both feet on the ground.

“Sparrow? Come on in.”

“Hi.” I have a seat and see what we’ve got going on today. I guess Dr. K is feeling funky, rocking her yellow-and-green Roos and a yellow-and-red shirt that I think is what batik means and a leather vest. With fringe.

“Hi.” She says the word like it has a few extra iii’s at the end, like she’s waiting for me. “So, how’s it been on the ground?”

“Kind of boring, honestly. Everything is okay, except for feeling like something is missing all the time. Like part of me is … not dead, maybe, but dying? It’s like when you have a scab and you can’t stop picking at it and it turns into a scar and then you pick at that, even though it’s just skin, but it feels like a different kind of skin, like a stump? Does any of this make any sense?”

“Yep.” She smiles. “I want to talk about something from last time. Why the roof?” I think about my most recent visit up there and shudder a little inside. I know I should tell her. I will. I will.

“It’s such a boring answer. I wasn’t up there for any special reason, okay? I was up there because that’s where I go. After that terrible week with Monique and Leticia, I realized that most people don’t actually notice if I’m missing, so instead of going to lunch I’d go to the roof, because the cafeteria sucked and the roof is quiet and empty and a lot of birds come by.”

“Why do you think it’s been so hard for you to answer that question?”

“It’s the only thing anyone wants to know, why I was on that roof, and the answer is so simple, but I couldn’t tell them because how do you explain to everyone that you have no friends and lunch is hell and so you go up to the roof to hang out with the birds because they like you and are nice to you, and oh, by the way, you also happen to turn into one from time to time?”

“Who’s everyone?”

“Everyone who’s asked me about going to the roof.”

“Who’s that?”

“Well, you a million times, to start with.”

“Yep, but even after you told me about flying, you couldn’t tell me about the roof. Why not?”

“It just became this thing, like, ooooh, why was she on the roof, and with everyone else I can’t answer the question because I can’t tell them that I was flying, and with you I couldn’t answer it because I’d been refusing to answer it for so long.”

“How does it feel now that you’ve told me?”

“Anticlimactic.”

“Ha. Who else has asked you?”

“The doctors.”

“Who else?”

“No one, really.” Except Mom, I think. Her name brings tiny stabbing pinpricks at the back of my eyes. I’m not in the mood.

“Sparrow.”

“What?”

She’s going to insist, I can tell. I can tell, this is what the next eighteen minutes are going to be about. I can wait it out.

“Sparrow.”

“What?” I snap this time. “I’m done.”

“You’re not, really.”

“I have seventeen minutes and thirty seconds left and I’m done.”

“You’ll be done in seventeen minutes and thirty seconds.”

“Twenty-nine.”

“In the meantime, I asked you a question.”

“Yeah, and I answered it. Sorry you don’t like my answer.” These days I seem to be setting a record for being rude to adults. I mean, I know I’ve gotten angry at Dr. Katz before, but this feels different. I used to get angry and help myself out the window. Now I’m angry and I’m here, and my hands are fists and my face is hot.

“You can be angry at me, Sparrow, that’s fine.… ” I hear her say in the background. I don’t hear the rest. I do not feel my body doing it, but I know it’s happening. Suddenly I am standing. Suddenly I’m at the door. Suddenly I’m gone.

I run down the beige-white-green hallway to the door at the end and take the stairs two at a time until I’m at the street and people are walking by me like it’s just a regular day. They’re coming home from work or picking up their kids or getting out of a taxi or going grocery shopping. I run across the street and head up, up, up the hill. My legs know where I’m going even when I don’t, like at school when I tell myself I won’t eat lunch in the bathroom today and end up there anyway. I’m running up the hill, and though I’ve done it many times, I’m still surprised to find myself at the park and out of breath.

I keep going deeper into the park, past the soccer fields and the dog beach and the baseball diamonds and the people riding horses in the middle of the afternoon, to the lake my mom used to take me to when I was little. I guess it’s technically a pond, but it’s got swans and geese and it reflects the blue sky and the big puffs of white clouds. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and pick up some rocks. I see Dr. Katz’s face in the water and throw the rocks at it over and over again. I like watching her disappear. I watch the swans until they start spreading their wings and my heart goes heavy inside my chest. I walk back through the soccer fields and hide out in the shade of the trees, watching the boys playing soccer with their dads and wishing they’d kick hard and fast at my head instead.

I stay a long time, longer than I should. I watch the sun go down over the soccer fields; the dads toss their kids on their shoulders and carry them home. Finally, one of those pretend cops comes by in his little golf cart and tells me to head home. For a while, I think about just sleeping here, like the kids in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Look it up. It’s a book. Mrs. Wexler gave it to me and I love it. It’s about these two kids who sneak into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stay there. I remember thinking they were so brave. And that it sounded like such a good backup plan. Every time a teacher would drag our class to the Met for a field trip, I’d look around for good hiding spots, but I knew I would never be able to do anything that brave. I was right—I’m not that brave. I consider the park bench for a minute, but mostly I think about the different kinds of animals and humans that go through the park at night, and I decide to head home.

It starts to rain suddenly, the way it does sometimes in the spring—kind of warm until it’s dark and cold and not warm at all anymore. I walk another twenty blocks home down the hill and across the neighborhood, soaked through my sneakers, my hoodie, my hair. Alone and a mess.

Some kids have curfews, or at least they do in TV shows. I don’t have a curfew. I’ve never come home late in my life. I’ve never had anywhere to come home from. So, I wasn’t breaking a rule, technically. Well, I guess I did break one. I’m supposed to pick up the phone whenever my mom calls, no matter what. She called three times while I was at the park. I look at my phone and consider calling her back, but I just keep walking. When I get home, I am expecting her to be pacing the floor arms crossed, steam coming out of her ears. I am expecting to hear it all night long from her, to hear about how I scared her half to death, what in the world was I thinking, don’t I know better, didn’t she raise me not to do foolish things like this, go to your room, I can’t even talk to you right now, and on and on.

But my mother isn’t at the door. She’s at the island, eyes red. Even though I’ve never seen her do it before, I know she’s been crying. She’s wearing her bathrobe, hand around a cup of tea that went cold a long time ago. When I walk in, I hear her say, “Oh, thank God.” That’s all she says. She doesn’t ask where I’ve been. She doesn’t call me a fool. She doesn’t send me to my room or threaten to ground me until I go to college. She doesn’t even look at me as I cross the kitchen to go to the bathroom and hang up my wet things. I’m hanging my jeans on the hook on the back of the door when she says, “I know you want me to say something, Sparrow, but I swear to God I have no idea what to say to you anymore.” Her voice cracks while she says it, like more tears would come if only she had them. Then I hear her put her cup in the sink, go up the stairs to her room, and close the door. I sleep on the mat on the floor of the bathroom. I can’t bear the idea of running into her. I’m also pretty sure that a person who makes her mother cry like that doesn’t deserve a bed.