Homeroom with Mrs. Tilly is crowded. I mentally graph the room and immediately see that the desks are too close together for me to fit through. They are in four rows of five, and bookshelves fill up every single wall.

I start to breathe a little fast and clamp my mouth shut so nobody can tell.

Mrs. Tilly isn’t here yet, but almost every student is. And everyone freezes. I’m wearing jeans and a green sweater, the most basic thing I could find, but suddenly I feel naked.

I don’t know what to do. Normally, I use my wheelchair with my tray on it as my desk, and the teachers leave a blank spot open for me in with all the other desks.

I wheel forward toward the front, near the teacher’s desk, and try to scoot along the far wall. There are backpacks in the way. Everybody pretends not to notice and nobody moves them. So I try to roll back around by the door, but one wheel gets caught on the edge of a rug in the area with a sign that says READING NOOK.

I want to cry.

I will not cry.

Now I’m sweating. Where is the teacher?

People start moving again, getting out books, sending last texts (probably about me), but nobody helps.

I’m reversing out the door when I hear it.

“Ellie! Back here.” Bert is waving from the last row. And then he’s standing and kicking backpacks out of the way like soccer balls, while three girls in front of him shout, “Don’t touch my stuff!”

Once the path is clear, I follow him back with my head down. The bell rings, and Mrs. Tilly walks in ten seconds late in a wave of flowy skirts and scarves. She is, unsurprisingly, also my English teacher.

“Sorry! Sorry! Late, late, late. New Year’s resolution already broken. Well, there’s always next year. Ha, ha!” She pauses, take a big swig of coffee, and then holds her hands out. “Lily! I see you’ve made it! You go by Ellie, right?” The girls in front of Bert laugh into their hands. “Let’s see if we can’t do a little rearranging, shall we?”

And then she makes everybody stand up and push all their desks five inches to the right, which basically does nothing. It is screechingly loud and I want to disappear. But that’s the one thing you can’t do in a wheelchair.

Next to me, Bert is sharpening an old-fashioned number two pencil and is completely unaware of everything else going on in the room. For one second I wish I could be like him. And then, because Mrs. Tilly was late and homeroom is only ten minutes, the bell rings and I have to leave to do it all over again.

And it happens in every class.