Mrs. James disappeared. The clock on the wall ticked hollowly. Mrs. James returned to her desk and made some phone calls. I tuned them out, because she was talking about me and I was tired of people talking about me—you and W, these ladies at the school. After I’d drawn a purple VW bug and trees and a sun, and started drawing a house and crossed it out, and licked the cracker crumbs off the plastic wrapper, and peeled the paper off the crayons, and sucked on the neckline of my T-shirt, and kicked the metal legs of the chair for a while, I lolled in the seat and sighed loudly.

“When can I go?”

“Do you need the bathroom, sweetie?” Mrs. James said.

She must have asked me other questions, because somehow they got word to W, who showed up as Mrs. James was jingling her keys and trying to argue herself out of taking me home for dinner. W had her down jacket on over her uniform, and she’d changed her shoes to fur-lined, olive-green rain boots. She was carrying an adult-size hooded sweatshirt.

“This is your daughter?” Mrs. James put her keys in her purse and sat down, like maybe she thought she would have to stay there with me longer, since this blond Polish woman couldn’t possibly be my mother.

“They live with me. Her mother’s sick.” She held the sweatshirt upside down for me. “Here, Sammy.”

I slipped my arms in and flipped the sweatshirt over my head. Our shared familiarity with the ritual (which we had never done before—we were good improvisers, I guess) convinced Mrs. James to let me go with W, though the sweatshirt hung to my knees and its arms dragged on the ground.

I liked wearing the sweatshirt. It made me feel like a big girl.

Outside, raindrops the size of silver pebbles were falling. W picked me up and bent her head over mine and ran with me to her burgundy Buick.

“God, you’re heavy.” She set me on the back seat and got behind the wheel. The car smelled like W’s house. We sat idling for a little while until the rain died down.

“Busy day, huh, Sammy girl? I nearly lost my mind with worry.”

“Is Mama mad?”

“Your Mama’s dead to the world.”

The word dead made my stomach curl into a fist and punch me from the inside. W must have seen panic on my face.

“Sleeping, Sammy, she’s sleeping.”

I growled. “I don’t want you to call me that.”

She adjusted the mirror so she could see me in the back seat. I covered my face with my arm—I wanted to disappear, to not be somewhere I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be nameless so no one could call me the wrong thing.