Even though Bertie is way smaller than me, she has a strong fist and she’s pretty fast. We played until the whistle blew.

“Bye, Austin!” Bertie waved. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

I walked around to the front of the school and waited until the vest kid waved me through.

“Take it easy,” he said.

“Take it easy,” I said.

I breathed in the clean-laundry smell and thought about all the things I was going to tell my mom. I would tell her about Bertie and how welcoming she was to new people. And how she was definitely one of the smart kids at this school, and how she had, like, a million vocabulary points already, and how there were a lot of things about Bertie and me that were similar. We had written them down on our eyeballs.

I tried to think about three ways Bertie and I were different. I was a new kid. She wasn’t. I was a big kid. She wasn’t. Those were easy. But besides that, all I could think of were more similar things about us. It felt like all the things I liked were things Bertie would like, too.

I would tell my mom about playing wallball at recess, just the two of us, which wasn’t easy because there was no time to rest between turns. It was hit, run around, hit, run around. And that’s why I was so hot and sweaty.

I passed the pool. The gate was locked, and there was a sign tied to the fence. It had a stick person swimming over some wavy water lines and a big scarlet slash through it. I wondered when the pool opened up. I thought about feeling the cool water and seeing all the blues it could be—azure and aquamarine and cornflower.

When I got inside the apartment, my mom was in the kitchen. It looked like she was having a fight with the sink. She was stabbing a chopstick down the drain.

When I got closer, I could see that the sink was half-full. The water was cloudy and still. It wasn’t any kind of blue. The garbage can at the end of the counter was stuffed with soggy paper towels.

“Hi,” I said.

I don’t know if she heard me. And that’s one thing about my mom and the nice phone lady that’s definitely different. The phone lady always says something, even if it’s just to let you know she heard you.

I tried to think if I had put something down the drain I wasn’t supposed to, something that would have gotten stuck. I didn’t think so.

My mom put down her chopstick and wiped her hands on a towel. She brushed the hair out of her eyes with the inside of her elbow.

“How did it go?” she asked. She smiled, but it was definitely a fake grown-up one.