“Okay,” I say. What else can I say? It’s not up to me.

“Pass me to your mother again,” he says, before hanging up. “I want to exchange some civil words. And, Ben?” He waits for me to say something, but I’m just listening—I don’t know that I can talk anymore. It’s like a kind of staring competition; this time I win. “Good luck at school,” he says eventually. “It’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be.”

Mom drives me to school on the first day, but on the way, she says, “Tomorrow, you have to take the bus, like everyone else. I don’t want you to be one of those weird kids who comes to work with Mommy.”

A week ago, she finally told me herself what was going on. She didn’t know I’d overheard her and Granma talking. “I found a job,” she’d said. “That’s what I’ve been doing all summer, looking for work. I’ll be teaching social studies at your school. Just part-time.”

“But you haven’t taught in years.”

“Teaching is one of those careers where people are always leaving or starting over.” She looked at me; for some reason, she seemed emotional. “This is a big deal for me. I haven’t worked in fifteen years. I need to hear you say that it’s okay, that you don’t mind.”

“Of course it’s okay,” I told her.

I guess it’s Mom’s first day of school today, too. Which is why she’s all dressed up—she wears a skirt and a blouse, and I can smell her perfume in the car. She looks like a teacher now, like some woman you don’t really know, who talks to you in a friendly way but like a stranger.

For the rest of the twenty-minute ride, we don’t say much, until we pull up at the school. It’s more like a campus; there’s a parking lot and the grounds are huge and covered in fresh-cut grass, like a park. My old school in New York always seemed pretty big to me, but it was nothing like this. The building looks like it was just finished, like it’s a Lego model of a building instead of the real thing. It’s got white bricks with red around the edges, and there’s a big chunky archway you have to walk through to get inside. There are shiny tiles in the hallways, and everything echoes. It feels like there are thousands of kids. That’s the other thing: the kids in my New York school were pretty rich, but there was a uniform so we all dressed the same. Here people wear whatever they want, except shorts, which seems dumb, because it’s like . . . a hundred degrees out. I hear some kids speaking Spanish in the hallways. Everybody seems to know where they’re going.

Mom takes me into the main office to introduce me. There’s a woman at the reception desk, talking on the phone, but she smiles at me. Somebody is watering a plant on a filing cabinet. Mom tells me their names, but I can’t remember them—it’s all a blur. She says, “Where’s your homeroom?” and I stare at my schedule, which is printed on a piece of paper. None of it makes sense to me. The rooms are just numbers, but the man with the watering can points me in the right direction, and Mom says, “Good luck, Ben,” then changes her mind and gives me a quick hug. After that I’m on my own.