Macy doesn’t answer; she just shakes her head.

“Do you have one?” I ask her. “A dog, I mean.”

She shakes her head again.

“I have a cat—well, she’s technically my brother’s cat, but . . .” I don’t want to jinx it by talking anymore, so I stop mid-sentence.

“I have a rabbit,” she offers.

“Oh.”

I don’t know what to say, so we don’t say anything else as we wait for the bus to get there, and as we climb up the steps and walk down the aisle, I stay a few extra paces behind Macy so I never again step on the back of her shoe. Thankfully, there’s an empty seat toward the middle—the middle is always the safest. You can get lost in the middle, not so much of a target.

The bus slogs down the road, and as it picks up speed I swear I see a flash of fur and a big bushy tail running through the trees alongside us.

Wait! Wait for me! I hear in my mind.

During school, I can’t pay attention, but today it has nothing to do with my IEP or LD stuff. It’s more that I can’t get the dog out of my head. I keep checking the big clock on the wall, but it feels like time is moving extra slowly today.

I look over at Macy in the desk across the aisle from mine. She doesn’t look like she’s paying attention either—she is folding a piece of paper into a tiny bird; the inside of her desk is lined with a whole zoo of origami animals. Still, she somehow always gets perfect scores on her tests. She gets stickers and notes like “GREAT JOB!”

I only know because I see when she gets them back from Ms. Avery, which makes me wonder if she sees my grades when I get horrible scores, and notes like “SEE ME” written in big letters across the top.

I remember last year in fourth grade, when we were learning about Asian and Pacific Islander history, we had some guest speakers come to visit our class. And I remember one of the people who came was Macy’s grandmother. She told us about what it was like growing up in Japan as a little girl. I liked her. She seemed so much nicer and friendlier than Macy, I wondered if they could really be related. But I could see the resemblance in their faces, even if Macy didn’t smile nearly as much as her grandma. Macy has a sprinkling of freckles dusted over her nose and cheeks, and curly hair, sort of like mine—not straight and shiny like her grandmother’s.