I wake up in a sweat. I close my eyes, out of breath. I just need to get back. Just let me get back. I lie down, try to convince myself that I’m still sleeping, try to get the dream to come back. I try to see the light behind my eyelids, feel the wind in my face. I try to remember what my body feels like when it’s that light, what my arms feel like when their span is twice as long, when they’re covered in smooth brown and white feathers, when I swoosh and dive and soar and rise and glide. When I am just one among many, keeping my spot in our V. What it feels like to be up above, beyond Park Slope, beyond Brooklyn, beyond New York, beyond, beyond, beyond. When Central Park looks like nothing but a landing pad and there’s so much blue between my body and the ground. It’s not working.

I get up and head over to my window. If I can’t dream about flying, maybe I’ll see if I can get some actual birds to stop by. See if I can’t get the real deal. Even a pigeon. It’s not true what they say—they’re not winged rats. Their name comes from the word for peeping chick in Latin, and they’re just the same as doves. But even they’re not coming by tonight. I hear an owl. I open the window and wait for it. Owls rarely come for me. They’re just not that interested in a fourteen-year-old girl with insomnia. But I can hope. At the very least, I can wait.

My mother finds me slumped in a heap by the open window in the morning, my head resting on the sill. She screams when she see me, running to me and shaking me.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say unconvincingly. “I was just looking out the window.” This is not going to help me with that whole see-Mom-I’m-totally-fine thing.

The lights and the noise are the first things I notice. In that way, it’s not so different from being in the hospital. I walk in and feel blinded by the fluorescent lights, deafened by the slamming of lockers in unison, the shouts and high fives and Slow down! and Oh shit! and Watch your mouth! and the opening and closing of doors and the I said get in a line! Everything here moves like Times Square on a Saturday night. If I don’t pay attention, I’ll be trampled. I pull over into the doorway of an empty classroom just to catch my breath. First period. I just have to get to first period. Where is first period?

It’s funny how when you’ve been out of school for a little while—just two and a half weeks—what was second nature a few weeks ago feels like a different country with strange customs and rituals. Did I really go to math on the third floor every day for this whole year? It feels like I’ve never been there before. But I have to go. I have to be on time. I cannot, cannot be the person who walks in late and everyone takes a minute to look at you and then maybe they stop to think, “Huh, where’s she been?” and then the teacher is like, all solemn, “Glad to have you back, Sparrow,” and then you have to go and think about really killing yourself this time. My legs start walking me there without my realizing it. I guess this is what they mean by muscle memory.

Mr. Garfield is fine, but he’s new—and young. He has jet-black hair that falls into his very blue eyes. Most of the girls think he’s hot; the jock boys want to talk sports with him. Sometimes he can’t tell whether we’re just wasting time or we really do want to know his opinion about, for example, SpongeBob. I never mind those times, those fifteen-minute inquiries into what he was like in high school or the Yankees. I can read. I can stare out the window. He is grateful for a quiet kid who doesn’t need much from him. He leaves me alone.

We’re supposed to line up outside the classroom before we come in. It’s supposed to be two single-file lines, but Mr. Garfield is never very good at insisting, and we take full advantage. Today, that works in my favor. I don’t have to worry about what part of the line I should be in, the front begging him to announce to everyone that I’ve returned, the end giving him the chance to take me aside to welcome me back personally, the middle leaving me open to comments from my classmates—if they’ve become people who talk to me, which they probably haven’t. Happily, it’s a big chaotic mess, and I can just shuffle in with everyone else.

He starts class with a Do Now—or he tries to. He’s got the question on the board, 8 = 5 + 2d, but Charmaine starts with “So nice to see you, Mr. Garfield. How was your break?” He’s so happy that we’re being nice to him that he tells us all about his visit to Colorado to see his family, how he went skiing. He asks if anyone else went skiing. Three boys tell him all about snowboarding; a few girls draw curlicue hearts in their notebooks. Jayce throws a spitball at one of the snowboarding boys. He hates snowboarders, he says, but I think he really means that he hates people who have families who take them snowboarding. For the whole month before break, all Jayce could talk about was how his dad was going to come and take him to the mountains. I guess his dad didn’t make it. Jayce probably sat at home playing video games.

Mr. Garfield says at the top of his lungs, “You GUYS! This is not cool. This is not how we behave in a society. A classroom is a society, you see, a community. Who can tell me what a community is?” A spitball heads toward Mr. Garfield, not at him, not a suspension-worthy offense, just a warning shot. And I roll my eyes right out the window. It’s nice to see that some things don’t change.

The next period is English, and I know that I won’t be able to get by quite so easily. Ms. Smith notices everything. The lines outside her classroom are always straight, single-file, and silent. They’re also alphabetical. There’s no way that she won’t notice I’m here, no way she hasn’t noticed that I haven’t been here. Ms. Smith isn’t mean; she’s just serious about school. She’s young—a lot of the teachers at my school are—and she’s West Indian, which the rest of them aren’t—and she has dreads down to the middle of her back, and ironic horn-rimmed glasses. She waits for us at the doorway, a smile soft like it’ll go away if we mess up. We know for a fact it will.

“Good morning, everyone,” she says.

“Good morning,” we mumble.

“Come on in; get started. Sparrow, it’s good to have you back.”

She doesn’t leave time for anyone to look at me or say anything, she says it right as we’re all coming in, and in Ms. Smith’s class, you come in and start the Do Now. It says: Journal Day! Write two paragraphs, one about the best part of your vacation, one about the worst. I like Journal Days because there’s five minutes after for anyone to read what they’ve written but the journals are private. Even Ms. Smith doesn’t read them. She walks around the room while we’re writing to make sure that we’re not sleeping or using our phones, but the actual writing is totally private.

I mostly doodle today. I can’t really answer this question. It seems like a long list of worsts. Worst: Being in the hospital. Worst: Being in therapy. Worse worst: Not talking to Mom. Just thinking the word Mom makes me want to cry; I can’t imagine actually writing about her. Ms. Smith circles our six pushed-together desks. She puts one hand on my shoulder as the other places a Post-it on my page. In her perfect cursive it says, Take your time. We missed you. I put the note in my pocket, curling and uncurling my fingers around it for the rest of the period.

Naomi sits next to me in science. “Where’ve you been?” she asks. Naomi’s sentences go up extra high at the end, like a squeaky toy.

“On vacation, like everyone else.” I try to sound like I think she’s crazy, like I can’t tell what she’s getting at.

“No, I mean before that.” Squeak. She looks me straight in the face, like, You know what I mean. Like, You can talk to me, Sparrow. Naomi’s the resident Nice Girl. She’s nice to everyone. She has big brown eyes that she bats in your direction, two pigtails that go down to her waist, and pink glasses that I think are just for show. When Naomi sits down next to you, you feel like her personal community service project, like the ones she’s always announcing in assembly. I can hear her now: Hi, everyone, I just wanted to remind you that Sparrow is coming back to school, so I’d like to invite all of you who’d like to volunteer to be nice to her to meet after assembly today. Naomi is the person who makes the five-foot card for you and has everyone sign it. She’s the person who plans the secret party for the teacher’s birthday and makes sure everyone brings a treat. If you get picked last for a team in gym, Naomi will always say, “I would’ve picked you.” You have to be a terrible person to hate Naomi, but you have to be an idiot to trust her.

“I heard you were carried out of school in an ambulance. Are you okay?”

“An ambulance can’t fit inside a school, so no, one didn’t carry me out, and yeah, I’m fine.”

She looks so hurt. I feel like I just kicked a puppy.

“Sorry, Naomi. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m glad!” Squeak squeak.

Mrs. Robbins starts class. Nobody likes Mrs. Robbins but she’s a yeller, so nobody talks either. I’ve never been so glad to be in her class.

All morning all I thought about was what I was going to do during lunch. Now it’s here, and I still don’t know. I head down to the cafeteria with everyone else. I don’t want to, but it’s so much easier than drawing attention to myself by trying to go against the swarm of eighth graders headed in one direction. So I go. Down the stairs to the terrible green room that makes the noise and lights of this morning seem like a quiet walk in Prospect Park. I get food that I don’t plan to eat and look around at the sea of tables and shouting kids falling into place naturally, finding friends, saving seats, knowing just where to go. Where they belong. Naomi finds me and calls “Sparrow!” across the cafeteria, which causes other tables to look up and look at me, and I swear I see Janae mouth “hospital” to Brianna, who mouths “crazy” to Rebecca, and I drop my tray and leave. Not the inconspicuous exit I was hoping for. The lunch lady tries to grab my arm, but I’m small and I’m fast. By the time Ms. Grayson looks up from Jamal and Jarrod, who are throwing food at each other as usual in the back corner, I’m gone.

There’s nowhere to go without a hall pass. I duck into the first bathroom I see. I find a stall and tuck my feet up like a fugitive. Like someone is going to come and find me. I can’t catch my breath. The room is spinning, and I look for a window. What would I do, crawl out? Honestly, maybe. I let the room spin, and I close my eyes and feel my body whish and whirl and pound. I wait for it to pass.

Stuffing a sandwich into your face in the bathroom isn’t lunch, Sparrow. Mrs. Wexler’s voice makes me sob. I want to run into her office, I want her to tilt her head so all her earrings jangle and ask me what’s wrong. I might even tell her. My heart has returned to normal, the room isn’t going anywhere, I’m sobbing now. My feet against the door of the stall, my head against my knees, I’m thinking of what I would say to a dead woman and wondering how I am ever going to go to class. The bell rings. I don’t know how long I’ve been there but someone says my name.

I don’t answer.

“Sparrow, it’s Leticia. I know you’re in here, and Mr. Rothman is going to figure it out too. You should come to class before he notices you’re gone and they go looking for you.”

Leticia. I can hear Mrs. Wexler saying, Talk to her, Sparrow, she’s more like you than you know. That might have been true in sixth grade. It might even have been true a month ago. It is not true right now.

“Anyway, I hope you’re okay. I miss you, you know.”

My mouth opens up, but I can’t say anything. When the door closes, I take in as much air as I can. It’s like I was drowning and I didn’t even know. I wish I could’ve told her that I missed her too. That I miss Mrs. Wexler. That I miss being a Frequent Flyer. That I miss being her friend. I wish I could tell her to wait. Instead, I wait until I’m sure she’s long gone and there’s no one else in there. I put my feet down. I walk to the sink and run the water. I put my face right in the stream. I keep my eyes open for as long as I can. They sting. I don’t care. I try not to blink. It’s like I’m trying to wash my tears—past, present, future—down the drain. I’m sick of this. I stay underwater for as long as I can, until I’m choking and spluttering, but at least I’m not crying anymore. I dry my face and make sure the paper towel bits aren’t stuck on my skin. I sneak into class when Mr. Rothman has his back to the door. I don’t think he even noticed that I was gone.