Ma, said Mom, picking at the ends of her ponytail.
I’m not clingy, I said.
She is extremely clingy, said Joseph. What rocks did you find?
How are things there, Ma? Mom asked. All’s good?
No, Grandma said, all is not good. They’re taking away my driver’s license. Basalt, Joseph, she said. We found a whole lot of basalt. I’ll send you some.
Boxes of it, the following week. Dark and glassy. We repopulated the garden. When a teacher had us draw our grandparents for an assignment on ancestry, I monopolized the black crayon, and my picture had been of a thick black box with grating, lines extending outward to indicate voice.
5
After lunch, my teacher sent me to the nurse.
We studied nature in the afternoons on Wednesdays. In third grade, the nature section was all about bugs and I had been very excited about the upcoming lesson on fireflies, but my mood had changed drastically during the lunch hour, and as soon as we were back in the classroom, I put my head on my desk. I didn’t intend to do it; it was like someone had attached a magnet to my forehead, and then tucked another inside my notebook. That was where my head had to go.
My teacher stopped halfway through her lesson.
Close your eyes, class, she called out, and imagine you’re a firefly, flying and blinking in the darkness of the night.
Then she walked to my desk and knelt by my side and asked if I was okay. I told her I thought I was sick, and my friend Eliza, imagining next to me, popped open one eye and explained how I’d spent the entire lunch hour at the drinking fountain.
She was very, very thirsty, Eliza whispered.
Is it the heat? asked our teacher.
I don’t think so, I said.
I stood at her desk as she signed a pass with my name on it. While my classmates extended arms to make wings, I walked down empty halls, past old trophies and paintings of houses, up to the open door of the infirmary, where I stood, gripping the hall pass, waiting. I had never visited the nurse before. I was rarely sick. I never faked.