I hate Tuesdays. Friday is really far away, and we have a double period of math after lunch. Mr. Garfield asked me for my homework again. I lied to him again, saying it was at home, or in the wrong folder, or whatever I told him today. He smiled and said no problem. I don’t even know what the homework was.

The morning goes by okay. Ms. Smith has us do grammar exercises with sentences we’ve written in our journals. After grammar, we do silent reading for the last ten minutes of class, and I think about starting The Perks of Being a Wallflower but reread Brown Girl Dreaming instead. I know I should be reading something new, but it’s like an old friend and I could use one of those right now. I sink into the book; it’s not as good as Mom’s shoulder, but it’s close.

During lunch, I go eat in the bathroom. I don’t even try the cafeteria. I don’t even think of it as weird anymore. I try to shake the feeling that Mrs. Wexler is frowning at me. I just go to my stall, put my feet up so no one can see me, and take out my sandwich. It’s not great, I guess, but it’s better than the cafeteria with its lights and noise and human degradation. I like this stall because I like the graffiti in here the best. There are a few tags, J.J. loves ME and that kind of stuff, and there’s this:

Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I hear the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing for me.

—T. S. Eliot

It’s not that I love the poem, I mean I do, but it’s mostly just nice to know that there’s someone as weird as I am in this school. Someone who copies poetry about peaches on the bathroom wall. I imagine it’s someone I haven’t met yet, someone I somehow missed while I was hiding out in the ornithology stacks and they were tearing through poetry and memorizing lines. I try not to think that it’s probably Leticia. Maybe it’s someone who graduated, I tell myself; maybe it’s someone I’ll meet next year in high school. I know I’m a little old for imaginary friends, but I imagine that she ate lunch in here too. Peaches, obviously.

After lunch, Mr. Rothman drones on about the Silk Road. Maybe he’s not droning. Maybe I just don’t care. Either way, I watch birds out the window. I put my hands down by my sides, see if I can get them light, see if I can remember how it feels to be above all this. I close my eyes and feel my body go soft and light, and then I force myself to stop. I can’t fly in the middle of social studies, no matter how boring it is. Anyway, he seems to have an announcement to make.

“So, there’s going to be a talent show.”

Mr. Rothman doesn’t seem excited, but then again, I don’t think he gets excited. The other kids in the class are, though. They start planning their routines immediately, Francis and Eric are talking about the magic tricks they want to perform, Naomi asks if she can sell cookies at the show to benefit charity, Destinee starts singing and Tracey tells her she sucks and then she tells Tracey she’s fat, and this is all anybody is going to talk about for the next twenty minutes, so maybe I could have taken off. I get out my National Geographic Complete Birds of North America and read it under the table until the period ends.

When I get home it’s only four and I get a text from Mom saying she won’t be home until seven. I put on the Pixies and go out to the porch. It’s almost April, and snow seems like a long time ago. So much seems like a long time ago. There are crocuses starting to poke through the dark earth. George from downstairs has already brought out my hammock. The bird feeder is empty; I fill it, letting a little bit drop on the ground near my feet, hoping it might get some bird to come and pick me up. It doesn’t take long. She is small, brown-gray, skinny, and not as shy as she looks. A swamp sparrow—kind of how I’ve been feeling lately. I stare at her until I can feel the familiar rise of my arms, my belly rounded out beneath me, and up we go. I follow her lead, but I know where we’re going. It’s only a minute before we’re sitting right at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge watching the traffic stall below. The honking sounds like a ringtone from this high up. It’s just the two of us. It’s never been like this before, I’m always part of a pack, but it’s just us up here. I stare down too long, wondering if I can see George making his way home across the bridge on his bike, and I almost lose her as she takes off for our next spot, but my feet are fast and my arms are strong and then I’m right there with her, zooming above office buildings, doing curlicues around the letters in the Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens. We stop for a second on top of the i. There’s a soccer game on Randall’s Island. We fly higher, and I’m out of breath as we head farther north, Connecticut maybe? It’s all bare trees and green grass. We keep going to an empty field with a big tree in the middle. I see more swamp sparrows as we get closer. Suddenly it’s like the bird version of the cafeteria. I don’t want to be in a pack today. This has never happened before, but I feel shy around them. I don’t belong here. They take off in a V and I turn tail without looking back, back through the woods and the Pepsi-Cola sign, past the Brooklyn Bridge to my porch. Mom is standing in the kitchen staring at me. She sees me see her and comes out.

“Sparrow, you need to come inside now.”

“Okay, I was just … ”

“What?” She’s expectant, even hopeful. Maybe I’ll finally give her the answer she’s been waiting months to hear. I try to think of something that won’t sound crazy, that won’t make her worry more. I don’t think telling her that I just had this weird interaction with a family of birds in a tree in Connecticut will do it.

“Filling the feeder.”

“I brought us sushi,” she says, defeated.

My mom is a great cook, but lately she hasn’t felt up to it. She puts miso soup in matching blue bowls and puts a California roll and a sweet potato tempura roll on a plate for me. She has sashimi and an eel roll. She always says that until I’m ready to eat eel, I can’t really say I like sushi. She doesn’t say that tonight. I put out napkins and the chopsticks Aunt Joan gave Mom for her birthday.

“Turn the music down please, Sparrow.”

“Sorry.” I turn it off.

“You didn’t need to turn it off, just down. Who was it, anyway?”

“The Pixies.”

“Where did you hear them?”

How do I explain? How do I tell my mother that my therapist is playing music for me because I refuse to talk to her too, but don’t worry, it’s helping.

“I don’t know, around.”

“How was school?”

“It was okay. There’s going to be a talent show, which is like all anybody can talk about it and it’s boring.”

“Are you going to go?”

“No.”

“You should think about it, Sparrow. You might have fun.”

“Yeah, maybe. It’s not until May.”

We each turn our attention to our soy sauce, Mom taking a whole mound of wasabi and stirring it in. I poke the end of my chopstick into the wasabi so there’s just a tiny hint of green on the tip and then stir that into my soy sauce. I see her smile at me, holding back a laugh. I smile back.

“You’re almost in high school; you still think that a little wasabi will kill you?”

“No, that’s exactly my point: A little wasabi won’t.” She laughs. It feels like I can breathe again.

“So,” she says, taking a deep breath that takes away the new freedom my lungs have just found—I can tell this isn’t going anywhere good—“what were you doing out on the porch?”

I drink my soup. I put a piece of sushi in my mouth. This has been so nice, this sitting here on our stools, closer to normal than we’ve been in almost two months. I hate what I’m about to do. I hate that I don’t know what else to do. I hate that she’ll blame herself.

“I said, filling the feeder.”

“Sparrow, that’s clearly not true. I watched you for thirty minutes; you were just standing there. You can tell me.”

I have to find the teenage angst within me to push my stool away and storm upstairs. Really, I want to ask if I can sleep in her bed tonight, if we can watch whatever she wants until I fall asleep. If she’ll read to me from Persuasion. If I can fall asleep on her shoulder with her arm around me.

I can’t even get myself to slam my door. So close to normal, and then, just like that, we’re back to this new, terrible normal where I’m stuck inside my room crying, listening to her downstairs cleaning up my dishes. I swear I can hear her sigh.