Ms. G. finished and turned from the board. “Oh, sorry, Austin,” she said. “I keep forgetting you just got here. Don’t worry about writing this down. You’re going to do your own in a moment.”

I flipped my pencil around and started erasing, slowly this time.

“How about another example?” Ms. G. asked. She was right by my desk, but I didn’t think she was asking me specifically. I had just gotten there.

The kid next to me raised his hand. “You’re both in this class?” he said.

“Could someone help Ty find some language that’s a little more specific?” Ms. G. asked. She pointed to a girl with her hand up. “Lena?”

“How about you both spend school days in room number 204,” the girl said.

“Super,” Ms. G. said, and she wrote that down in the middle of her eyeballs.

“Okay, let’s come up with one more example of something Bertie and I have in common.”

That’s when a kid I hadn’t seen yet came into the classroom. He dumped his stuff in his cubby and went to the empty desk way up in the front of the room.

“You can go ahead and take out your notebook,” Ms. G. said to him.

He sat down louder than I’d heard anyone sit down at this school. At my last school, everybody was so loud, you wouldn’t notice one kid. But here, where everybody was pretty quiet, it sounded really loud. Then he took out a notebook and started flip, flip, flipping through the pages. Even flipping pages can be loud if you want it to be.

Ms. G. walked over to his desk and helped him find a clean page. Then she turned to the rest of the class.

“Okay,” she said again. “One more example. How are Bertie and I similar?”

The new kid stood up and went to the electric pencil sharpener on the bookshelf. Then he sharpened his pencil for what felt like a million minutes. It sounded like extra-bad radio static, on and off, then on again.

He finally sat down and started writing in his notebook. But from where I was sitting, it looked more like he was scribbling big, smudgy lines all over the empty page.

“Anyone have an idea?” Ms. G. tried again.

I’m not one to feel bad for teachers. Usually I don’t give them any problems, and they don’t give me any problems. But Ms. G. had been nice to me. And even with all Bertie’s words buzzing around everywhere, so had she. I slowly raised my hand.

“Ye-hes?” Ms. G. said with a big sigh in the middle of it, like she thought I was going to ask to go to the bathroom or something.

“You’re both welcoming to new people,” I said.

Bertie’s desk was one up and two over from mine, but I could still see a small blue smile.