There is a man who works in the house to make it clean. He has a face of lines. There are long thin eels under the skin of his hands. They move as he works.

The man comes up the steps at night when we are to sleep. He cleans the classroom and the offices, he washes the bathrooms and the floors and walls. His sound is different from the others in the house. I like to watch him. The man is quiet. Like the little diggers that tunnel into the sand. So, so quiet.

The man does not look through my window. He looks at the floor when he cleans in front of my room. Only the floor.

Why does the man not look at me?

In the quiet night, he carries his mop past my room and the handle hits my door. I am making a little song on my recorder. The mop sounds like knocking. I put my recorder down. I think maybe the man wants to play with me. I want to play all the time. But Doctor Beck and Sandy and Shay and the others, they are all sleeping at night in their rooms. This man has with him water. He uses it to make all the floor shining like the wet skin of my dolphin mother.

When I come to the door, the man looks up for only a moment. His head is down, his shoulders down, but he lifts his eyes to me. There is something in his eyes that hurts inside me. He turns away from my door and suddenly he is falling over his bucket, making it spill on the floor. He makes a sound like the dolphin in trouble.

I try to open the door to go to the man. To help him. The door will not open. I am trapped inside the glass of the door. It is like the television. I cannot come out. I beat my hands on the glass. I beat my hands on the locked door. I beat my hands until my blood comes.

I beat against the glass, against the wall, against the window.

Justin comes. He yells through the door at me to stop.

I look at my hands that held the fin of my dolphin mother. My hands bleed.

Doctor Beck comes and opens the door. She looks at me. She says, What were you thinking?

I don’t know. I don’t know what I am thinking. But I am alone. I am trapped in the net of the room. In the net of humans. I think maybe I am drowning in the net of humans.