“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she says, putting a hand on her hip. “What is the problem?”

Isabelle stares up the street at the girls leaping from the bus in their basketball uniforms, being delivered back to school from some away game, their mouths smeared with chocolate icing from the cupcakes someone must have brought for a postgame snack. If things were normal, she herself would be coming off that bus, eager to get to the safety of her bedroom. The past hours would have been spent being bumped and yelled at by girls bigger than she, dizzy in the fluorescent light of an unfamiliar gymnasium, undoubtedly cold in her shorts and netted jersey, the screech of sneakers against the varnished floor grating in her ears. Why on earth had she ever subjected herself to any of that?

“Maggie!” the girls are saying, a handful of them gathered around her dog, a familiar sight from the soccer games to which her mother always brought the dog along to watch. From yards down the street and in the failing light, Isabelle watches, her eyes narrowed. She can see the girl who was her closest friend, Caroline, whispering in the ear of a girl she doesn’t recognize, a new girl, Isabelle thinks. Caroline had sent her letters for a while when she first stopped coming to school, but not since before the summer. She looks different to Isabelle, maybe because of her haircut, but then when she looks at other of her old schoolmates, they look different, too, all of them familiar and foreign at once, the versions of themselves that might appear in dreams, themselves, but not themselves.

“Isabelle!” Her mother calls, gesturing her over and at the same time alerting the girls to Isabelle’s presence. They stop their chattering and cries of Maggie! They fall silent and stare in Isabelle’s direction, as if she were some strange specimen, or a ghost returned from the dead. Isabelle drops her gaze to the sidewalk.

“Hi, Isabelle,” one girl calls, and a few others mutter the same. Isabelle does not look up. Her whole body is hot with shame. She does not want to be seen this way. She does not want these girls to think of her this way, because then it will be harder to return to the way she used to be, which she can hardly remember herself. It wasn’t all horrible, she knows. It wasn’t all cold gymnasiums and competition. There were times when she roughhoused on the bus with the rest of them, had cupcake-eating contests, threw cookie crumbs into the open windows of nearby taxis. That is how she wants these girls to think of her. That is the self she wants to return to, when she can. But for everyone to see her like this—it adds weight to her silence, a weight that is harder to get out from under. It makes it more permanent; it makes it more who she is.