Come on in, Sparrow,” Dr. Katz says with a smile as she opens the door.

There’s a notebook and a purple pen on the table where the Kleenex usually is. I take my seat and begin to pick at the stitching on the arms of the chair. From how frayed it is, I’d say I wasn’t the first to have this idea.

We begin our dance. She asks me a few easy questions:

“No mom today?”

“Nope.”

“Where is she?”

“Work.”

“What’s she do?”

“Something with IT at a bank.”

And on until she gets to one I won’t answer, and then I say nothing.

“How’s your sleep been?”

That’s the impossible one today. I’m tired all the time. I could fall asleep at a moment’s notice, but when I lie down at night, my mind spins and spins until morning. I think about the sky and the birds and wings and wind in my face, like I used to before bed. Still, I don’t sleep. I’m worried that if I say any of that, she’ll think I am crazier than she already does and I’ll have to take those terrible drugs they gave me at the hospital.

I shrug.

“Are you still taking the medications they gave you at the hospital?”

I nod, not wanting my voice to give away my lie. Not wanting to show I’m surprised that she seems to be able to hear my thoughts. The truth is, Mom gives them to me every morning and I make a big show of swallowing them, then tuck them under my tongue until she looks away, spit them into my hand, slide them from my hand to my pocket, and chuck them in the trash on the way to school. My pockets are disgusting, covered in spit and dust from the nearly swallowed pills, but it’s better than being drugged all the time.

Dr. Katz looks at me, brown eyes over silver frames. She takes a breath. “Listen, Sparrow, here’s the deal. You don’t have to talk to me, but you can’t lie to me. I know you haven’t had a great time lately, and I know that talking hasn’t gotten you very far. It’s going to take a while for me to convince you that I’m not going to tell you that you’re crazy if you open your mouth. Or, I guess more important, that I’m not going to tell your mom that. I’m not. Believe me, don’t believe me. But let’s get one thing straight. You’re not taking your meds—it doesn’t seem to me that you’re in any danger at the moment, but that’s not something that you lie to me about. It’s also not something you’re going to lie to Dr. Woo about at your next appointment. Do we understand each other?” I nod as slightly as I can.

“It seems to me that you’re pretty used to telling people the answers they want to hear. It’s a clever strategy, and I’d recommend using it in a lot of parts of your life. In here, it’s a waste of time. If you decide there’s something you want to tell me, there’s a notebook right there. Or, of course, you could speak up, but I’m not banking on that anytime soon. Me? I’m going to put on some music. It’s your time. Do what you like.”

I come down from the ceiling for a second only to see if she’s seriously about to put on some old-lady jams. She’s fiddling with an iPod dock. She has her sleeves rolled up, and I see the hint of a tattoo peeking out from under the white cotton of her button-down shirt. I go back to the ceiling, a little shocked by what she’s said, by what she knows, by the iPod dock and the tattoo.

I don’t recognize the song she puts on, but it’s not the hippie stuff I am expecting. It’s a man’s voice, which surprises me for some reason. I figured if she was going to play anyone, it would be Enya or something, something soothing and therapisty. Instead, it’s a gravel-voiced white guy with an electric guitar. I can’t make out what he’s saying at first, but the chorus is clear:

With your feet on the air and your head on the ground

Where is my mind?

How did she know? Who is this guy? And who is this old lady who likes his music? I am tempted to ask her, but I write it down instead.

Who is this?

I sit there listening to the rest of the album, eyes glued to the ceiling. Music is something you listen to with your friends, not with your therapist, but I don’t have friends, and if I don’t look at the tattooed woman in sneakers across from me, I can forget where I am and listen to the insistence and heart coming through the speakers. If I’m not careful, she’s going to be able to see my toes tapping through my sneakers. If I’m not careful, I’m going to dance.

It takes me the rest of the session to gather the courage to write the second question.

Can we switch seats?

When I get home from therapy, I see an extra pair of shoes by the coatrack downstairs and I know Aunt Joan must be visiting. The blare of video games tells me that my cousin, Curtis, is here too. I walk by the family room and see him completely obsessed with shooting something in some gross Shoot Lots of People game he loves. I know Aunt Joan must have told him what’s been up with me because he presses pause.

“Hey, cuz.”

“Hi, Curtis.”

“Um, how are you?” He has a concerned expression on his face that doesn’t look right. He’s eleven. He shouldn’t be concerned with anything but how many bad guys he has yet to kill today.

“I’m fine. Can we just be normal?”

He presses play. This is normal.

“Hey,” he says over the roar of machine guns, “I got you an iTunes card if you want to listen to some Taylor Swift or something. It’s on your bed.”

I throw a couch pillow at him, make him lose a round of artillery or something.

“Thanks, knuckle.”

That’d be short for knucklehead. This is normal.

“Our moms are in the kitchen?” He doesn’t hear me; he has enemies to waste.

I walk through the family room to the dining room. The table isn’t set—they must not be staying for dinner. I stop at the swing door between the dining room and the kitchen. I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but I haven’t heard Mom’s voice in normal conversation for so long I can’t help it. It’s muffled but it doesn’t take much to figure out the topic of conversation.

“So you think she’s okay?” Mom asks.

“Donna, listen, teenagers go through things. You remember how we were.”

“We weren’t hospitalized.”

“No, but we were teenagers. We were all emotions and roller coasters and secrets and trouble.”

“Maybe. I don’t know about that therapist, though.”

“Why?”

“She’s fine, I guess. Some hippie in pajama pants and sneakers. Like, really, are you going to be able to help my child? Are you going to be able to understand my child?”

“White?”

“Mixed. Black and Jewish, I think.”

“Sparrow will tell you if she doesn’t think it’s a fit.”

“She’d have to talk to me to do that.”

“She’ll come back to you, sis.”

“I really hope so, Joanie. I don’t know what to do.”

This is what I get for eavesdropping. Everything is just as bad as I thought it would be. Well, at least Aunt Joan doesn’t think I’m completely nuts. Maybe she’s just saying that, though, to make my mom feel better.

“THANKS FOR THE GIFT CARD, CURTIS!” I shout so they’ll change the subject. Then I walk through. It’s quiet in the kitchen. They’re both looking at me like I’m a wild animal who’s somehow worked her way out of the zoo.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Aunt Joan.”

“Hi, baby,” they say in unison. Twins, jeez.

“How are you, Sparrow?” Aunt Joan asks.

“Good. How are you?” I get myself a glass of water. I keep my voice light. I try to sound like Naomi, squeak squeak. Nobody thinks she’s crazy.

“I’m fine, just catching up with your mom.”

“I’ll let you do that, then.” I head up the stairs to my room.

“Dinner’s in an hour, Sparrow,” calls my mom.

“I’m not that hungry.”

“You have to eat.”

“Okay.”

I am hungry. I may be skinny and named after a bird, but I don’t eat like one. What I’m not in the mood for is sitting at the island, me and Mom on our stools, not talking, not listening to music, not reading. Picking at our meal and waiting for it to be over. I’m not in the mood for any of that.

I find Curtis’s card on my bed. It’s a get-well card with a little bottle of pills with a smiley face on it. It says Laughter is the best medicine. It’s so awful it makes me laugh. He scrawled his name and stuffed the gift card inside. Still, it’s the first thing that’s made me laugh in a while. I sit down on my bed and take out my computer. I remember enough of the lyrics from this afternoon and I google them. The Pixies. I enter the gift card and buy the album. I lie on my bed and listen to it while I stare out the window and watch the sun set on the neighborhood. A pigeon lands on the windowsill. Stay, I think. He does. I set the album to repeat.

I wake up, and my room is dark except for the shine of the streetlights and the planes and maybe the moon. My computer is closed, and there’s a sandwich on a plate on my desk. Honey, wanted to let you sleep, but thought you might be hungry. PB, B, & J. Love you, Mom. Peanut butter, banana, and jelly. I could roll my eyes and go, God, Mom, just because it was my favorite food when I was six doesn’t mean it still is, but the truth is, I’m hungry and I miss her. I like imagining her making me a sandwich, imagining that it will make me happy. That she can make me happy again like when I was little and all it would take would be my favorite sandwich and a trip to the library or the park. Or just her. Then I think about her crying as she makes a sandwich for her faraway, difficult daughter who doesn’t talk to her. I get through half before I think I might choke on it, or on the tears I can feel starting up.

I go to my bookshelf. I know I won’t be able to sleep. I look at the books we read in Frequent Flyers. The Pushcart War, Redwall, The Hobbit, The Book Thief—we each got to pick a book and the rest of the group had to read it. Buzz would bring snacks, astronaut ice cream most of the time. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Buzz’s choice), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Mrs. Wexler’s), The House on Mango Street (Leticia’s), Something Wicked This Way Comes (that’d be Francis and Eric), Flygirl (me), and An Abundance of Katherines (which Emilio put on the table one Friday, terrified we’d make fun of him for wanting to read a “girl” book, but we all loved it, even Francis and Eric). The last one Mrs. Wexler wanted us to read before she died was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I take it down and hold it to my chest. I can’t get myself to read it yet. I wanted to read with her, and with Leticia.

Leticia’s popular. She’s an undercover nerd. Her hair falls in perfect curls, she speaks just enough Spanish to tell people off, and on the first day of school she came in wearing jeans rolled in the exact same way as the rest of the popular girls with color-coordinated T-shirts and the same hoodie they’d all gotten at a One Direction concert. The thing about the popular girls, though, is that they don’t read, and Leticia loves to read. When we started Frequent Flyers, I stayed away from her, until one day when I came in to eat lunch and Mrs. Wexler sat down next to me and said, “I see that you don’t talk much to Leticia.”

“You see that I don’t talk much, period. Right?” I grinned at her.

“I do see that. You should talk to Leticia.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve got way more in common than you think.”

I didn’t think much about it until we read The Book Thief. We read the first page, and Leticia slammed the book down and said, “Oh my God, the narrator is Death! The narrator is Death! This is so COOL!” I’d never seen a non-loser so excited about a narrator before.

After that, she started putting her mat next to mine. She’d come in after lunch with her friends and find me and sit next to me and we’d read together. Sometimes she’d stop after a sad part, and I’d finish the same sad part, and we’d each pretend not to notice the other was crying. I started getting her mat for her, putting it down next to mine and waiting for her to come from lunch. Sometimes she’d bring me a graphic novel—she likes to draw—and we’d read Persepolis together, and American Born Chinese.

Last June, when John Green came and did a reading at the Brooklyn Public Library, we went together and stood on line starting at three in the afternoon, when school got out. We couldn’t stop giggling as we got closer to the table for him to sign our books (the library said he would only sign one each, so I picked An Abundance of Katherines to give to Emilio because he didn’t want to ask his parents to let him come, and Leticia picked The Fault in Our Stars, which we decided we would share). When we finally got up to the table, she introduced us as Speticia and Larrow and we both laughed so hard we had tears in our eyes. Maybe you had to be there. I still think of her as Speticia, even if we haven’t talked in months.