I knew where the sun was, obviously, and I knew the location of two planets orbiting it: Pluto—which was way, way out on the perimeter—and Earth. Today, I could probably locate only those two, but then again it’s been fifty-some years since Pluto was demoted—cast out from the solar system—and so it no longer matters. But in that chair back then I couldn’t write the answer—any answer—because looking on that white paper with different-size circles, I saw Earth and wondered how my sister Paige was getting on.

Mom was there with her, and so too was Frick, who drummed and sang to welcome the child. (He’d either taken the day off from working maintenance or this was around the time he had stopped showing up.) If I recall correctly, even Paige’s caseworker, Marla, was there, or at least she was at some point, because Mom would tell time and time again how at first she thought Marla was a nice woman but that she was wrong. When I was older, I’d tell Mom that Marla was doing her job, which, of course, my mother disagreed with. I wanted to be at the hospital with them all, but I’d had a coughing fit that morning—I swallowed water down the wrong hole was all—and Mom instantly thought I was sick and would get the child sick. So I had to go to school.

Jane smacked her gum. “David,” she said. “Birth. It rhymes with birth.”

“Earth,” I told her.

“Very good,” she said. “Write it down.”

She returned to her desk behind me and I wrote home below the planet, which was right but also wrong, the type of answer a cool teacher might give half points for and write clever next to. But those cool teachers did that only for the students who knew all the answers, the students who did all their work, the students who never had caseworkers and went to school each and every day.

That day—it was the start of September, a gray and cloudy afternoon—Frick picked me up from detention. Or maybe it wasn’t detention. I don’t know. Detention came about with your name on the chalkboard as well as a check mark next to it, both of which I never received. I was good, well-behaved. I had trouble with exams, with studying, with getting work done in school or at home, so oftentimes at the end of each day, when the long dull bell ended yet echoed in the ear, the science teacher—she had the biggest hips I ever saw—would wave me over and tell me she had extra work for me. I’d sit in the front office listening to Jane type away for an hour while I completed an assignment or two and ate animal crackers and drank water from waxy cups.