I don’t think about the last time you picked me up from school, unexpected, waiting under the tree like a shadow. The way you held my hand as we walked home, loosely, with your finger and thumb pinching and releasing the skin on the back of my hand. You got irritated with my dawdling. Come on and you drew my name out the way you do when you’re getting frustrated, into two long syllables. You started cooking when we got home. Chopping carrots and onion, with the big heavy pot heating on the stove. But nothing went into it. When I came out from my room the butter had burned to the bottom, the carrots and onions sat in tiny cubes on the board, and you sat at the bench staring out at the shed. The look on your face made my stomach hurt.

So I don’t think about that.

I walk past the other parents and out the gate. It’s about 342 footsteps till home, depending on which way I cross the road. I didn’t used to be a counter, not like Quentin at school, but I’ve found it helps when I’ve got a head full of bees. I look at my feet and count the steps, and the bees get less loud. Or maybe they like numbers. Some days I think of all the words for things instead, like all the words that mean walking. The best I got was ten: strolling, sauntering, plodding, hiking, marching, wandering, trekking, meandering, traipsing, shuffling. I made a few up too: streeting, avoidulating, stepolating. I wonder how you get words into the dictionary. Do you just e-mail someone? Sometimes if counting and words don’t work I’ll figure out how many heartbeats it takes to get home. If my heart’s racing I’ll have 2 heartbeats per step. That’s 342 times 2 heartbeats to get to the front door, which is 600 plus 80 plus 4, which equals 684 heartbeats to get home. Though I’m not sure if that’s right. Is a heartbeat the lub-dub I can feel in my chest or the single pulse I can feel in my wrist? If it’s the one in the chest, that would make it 4 heartbeats per step, which would be 1,200 plus 160 plus 8, which is 1,368 heartbeats home. But that seems a lot. I heard somewhere that you should have 60 heartbeats a minute. Which means that it must be the lub and the dub together, otherwise my heart would be beating way too fast. Sometimes it feels like that, though. Other times it feels like it’s stopped.