I met Mrs. Wexler when I was in fifth grade. It was my first year at Vision and Voice. It was a few weeks into school, and it was raining. I’ve never really grasped the concept of recess. It’s loud, and there’s never enough equipment (not that I wanted it, but the missing balls and bases always seemed to contribute to the noise), and it was just like the playgrounds I avoided as a kid but worse because you couldn’t leave and there weren’t benches. I am not a double-dutch person. I am not a H-O-R-S-E person. I don’t even like kickball. I like to watch, I guess, but there wasn’t even a good place to do that. It was just a lot of noisy kids trapped in a cage for twenty minutes to play a game they didn’t have time to play or enough of whatever they needed to play it. If you stood at the fence and put your fingers through like an escapee, you looked crazy. I knew better than to do that. But then it rained. It rained! They were going to send us all to the gym, but we wouldn’t fit, and so some of us had to go to the library. I volunteered. The kids all rushed in, mostly girls and a smattering of Magic: The Gathering boys. The girls threw themselves around the library like they owned it, finding tables and claiming them, making sure they saved a seat for Tiffany or Kelli or whoever. They squealed and played with their iPhones, and I snuck off into the stacks. I could still hear them, it would have been impossible not to.

“Marc is the cutest. I think he really likes me.”

“There is no way that is true. Justin told me that Marc likes Melissa and Melissa likes him back, so … ”

“You are so mean sometimes.”

“I’m sorry you think the truth is mean.”

“I’m sorry about your face.”

And on. And on. And on.

Mrs. Wexler was terrifying to everyone. She was tall and pale, with short blond hair and earrings up and down both of her ears. She was a little old for that look, which is probably what made her seem kind of scary. Like she’d had a wild youth, but also like maybe she was still a little wild. She tamed it all with the cardigan she always wore, the only hint that she was (a) an adult and (b) a librarian. A lot of teachers take the warning approach; they’ll give you a chance before they really let loose. Not Mrs. Wexler. After two minutes, she roared at the giggling girls, “You want to talk, go talk in the rain. This is the library. We read in here.” They blushed so hard I could hear it. They took to writing notes. I took to looking for books, trying not to grin so as not to get yelled at for smiling too loudly.

I was wandering around, looking for something new to read, and feeling that rush of watching someone who isn’t you get in trouble. She tapped me on the shoulder.

“Something I can help you with?”

“No.” I’m pretty sure I sounded terrified.

“I’m Mrs. Wexler. What’s your name?”

“Sparrow.”

“You’re in the fifth grade, right, Sparrow? You seem new.”

“I am.”

“So, let me show you around. You’ve found fiction, I see. We’ve got classics over here and graphic novels there. The nonfiction is on the other side, split into sections alphabetically from autobiography to zoology. Is there anything you’re particularly interested in?”

“Um. No.” I don’t lead with the truth right away. Besides, it was still entirely possible that this woman would eat me for a midafternoon snack if my answer displeased her.

“Have you read Harriet the Spy?”

“Seven times.”

“One day you’re going to have to talk a little louder so I can hear you, but for now”—she got down on one knee—“we’ll just do like this.”

“Seven times.”

“It’s the greatest. What other books do you like?”

“Matilda; The Phantom Tollbooth; The Westing Game; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”

“Ah, the classics. Okay, let’s try something this century.”

“Okay.”

She handed me Out of My Mind and Flora and Ulysses and Liar and Spy. She didn’t even have to look for them. It was like she had them set aside for me. Memory plays tricks. I know that’s not possible, but it’s how I remember it. Whoosh, from out of nowhere, she drops three books into my hands.

“You know,” she said as she was checking them out for me, “you don’t have to wait to come back until you finish them. There are a few kids who come here every day during lunch to read. You can’t eat in here, but you can be excused to the library as soon as you’re done with your lunch. I’ll just put your name on the list, okay?”

That’s when I saw them, a handful of kids scattered around the library on rugs, lying in pairs or off in a corner by themselves on a mat, piles of books beside them. It was the first time I ever wanted to join anything.

“Okay.”

I came back the next day. I didn’t go to lunch. I went to the bathroom, scarfed down my sandwich, and headed right for the library.

“Hi again,” she said.

“Hi.” I think I managed a smile. I hope I did.

“This is where we keep the lunch-bunch mats,” she explained, pointing to a stack of rugs next to the checkout desk. “Find a spot and happy reading!”

“Thanks! Um, I finished these.” I handed her the books she’d given me the day before.

“Wow! Big reader, huh?”

“I guess.”

She dropped another one right in my hands. The Year of the Book. It’s about a girl who prefers books to people. I knew what Mrs. Wexler was trying to hint at. The thing is, this girl already had a friend and she just needed to learn how to be better friends. If anything, I needed a book that came with a friend included, or at least a friend manual. Cute of her to try, though. Instead, I read all the books that the main character read: My Side of the Mountain, I reread A Wrinkle in Time, and then Hush. After Hush, I read every single book Jacqueline Woodson had ever written.

“What are you in the mood for today?” Mrs. Wexler asked over her dark glasses, tilting her head a little, so all her earrings jangled. She had noticed that I was now through with everything from From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun to After Tupac and D Foster. I was stumped.

“Maybe something about birds?” I figured I could test her out now.

“Ornithology! Why didn’t you say so?” She practically skipped over to the section. “Here you go, as many books as you could want on the topic of avian wonder.”

“Thanks!” I’d never seen that many bird books together. I started at Audubon and kept going. It took the rest of the year. These were reference books, she explained, you were only allowed to take one home at a time. I came every day after that. I would always beat all the other “Frequent Flyers,” as Mrs. Wexler called us. The mat kids. The readers. The losers. Frequent Flyers certainly sounded nicer.

After a few weeks, she called me out.

“Sparrow.” Her voice wasn’t as harsh as I knew it could be, but it wasn’t her grab-a-mat voice either.

“Yes?”

She knelt next to me.

“You’re not eating lunch.”

“I am!”

“Stuffing a sandwich into your face in the bathroom isn’t lunch, Sparrow.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just stared at my shoes.

“That’s what you’ve been doing, right?”

I nodded as little as I possibly could. I was worried that if I moved my head too hard, I might knock some tears loose.

“Listen, you and I both know that the cafeteria is a terrible place, but, Sparrow, so is the bathroom. I have a little office behind the checkout desk. You can eat in there before you come read, okay?”

The world’s tiniest nod again.

“Good. Grab a mat.”

We never talked about it again. I just started eating in her office after that. Sometimes she’d eat with me; most of the time I’d sit there and read. Sometimes she would ask me about what I was reading and didn’t I get tired of all those carrots and celery sticks and didn’t I want some cookies. I did. My mom’s the health nut, not me. Sometimes we’d both just sit and read and eat in silence. On my birthday, she brought me a cupcake with a little bird candle on top.

In the middle of sixth grade, Mrs. Wexler pulled all the Frequent Flyers together in her little office. There were six of us. We stood wide-eyed, nervous to be around each other. We’d seen each other every day for the last year or so, of course, but part of the joy of going to the library instead of the cafeteria was not having to talk to anyone except for Mrs. Wexler, and most of the time she didn’t want to talk to us anyway. It was the first time we’d ever really seen each other. Emilio with the hearing aids; Francis, who always sat with Eric to read Magic books when they took a break from playing the actual game; Buzz, whose real name was Molly and who spent all of her time in the astronomy section; and Leticia, who seemed like the most normal person on earth. I never understood what Leticia was doing being a Frequent Flyer. She had friends—a quality that the rest of us noticeably did not possess, except for Francis and Eric, who were more like the same person than they were like actual friends. Apparently, Leticia just liked to read.

“We’re going to have a book club,” Mrs. Wexler announced.