Draw another shirt? No. Something alive that would keep still. I held up my left hand. Index finger pointed at the ceiling, the others curled into the palm. With my right hand I started to sketch. The hand of the Serenity statue must have looked like that before it was broken off. Elegant gesture. Terrible drawing! I scribbled it out. Maybe shirts were all I was capable of. I got up and crossed the room. Coming back, I encountered my faraway self, straining to see out of the mirror to where I was. Corner of your room? Clothes hanging in your closet? Dare you to draw yourself. Dare you! Too hard, somebody whispered. Too sad.

I dragged the chair to the mirror and began before I could talk myself out of it, thinking this time about Antonio’s smile in the photo. Warm, like his emails, but not giving anything away. What if Antonio could see me now, a bald girl with hoop earrings drawing a bald girl with hoop earrings? If he could see me now, he would know. I didn’t want him to know, and not because I hadn’t told my mother about him yet. I just didn’t want him to. Couldn’t I be a normal girl for once? Besides, if he felt sorry for me, I would never know what he really thought.

Once again, the rhythm of looking up and down and matching the shapes left no room for my thoughts. My mother had an annoying habit of being right. Drawing made you think only: Things are what they are. The light falls where it falls. The shape of my forehead is what it is. The trick in doing a face, according to Mr. Yam, is to pretend it’s an object like any object in the world. The other trick is to keep the overall look of the thing and the tiniest details in mind at the same time, or to be able to flip back and forth between them. Once I started, I remembered that I had always been good at both tricks.

This time when I showed the drawing to my mother, she shook her head slowly while blinking fast. I guess it was her child with no hair, trapped inside a mirror. We were sitting on the couch. I felt something pass between us, by way of the drawing.

“That bad, Mom?”

“It’s a superb drawing, Maddy. Extraordinary. You look . . .”

“What?” I demanded. “What do I look?”

Eyes on the picture, she said: “Beseeching . . . but also defiant.”

“What’s beseeching again?”

“Beseeching is: Please help me. Defiant is: Don’t mess with me.”

“Feisty, you mean?”

“I guess.”

“That’s a good thing to be?”

“In your case, yes. You’ve always had that side to you.”

“And the other side?”

Her eyes filmed over. “Understandable.” She kissed my forehead and tried to sound breezy while holding on to me for dear life. “Completely and totally understandable.”