“What would lift your spirits?” asked Mrs. O’Brien.

Amelia shrugged. She knew that she could make any request and Mrs. O’Brien would try her best to fulfill it. Mrs. O’Brien was the adult in her life who made her feel most safe, most cared for. Amelia wore Mrs. O’Brien’s loving watchfulness like a protective cloak. “I’m going to the clay studio. Hopefully that’ll lift my spirits.”

“When will you be home?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

“What about lunch?”

“I’ll figure it out. The Professor gave me money yesterday.”

Amelia finished breakfast quickly, put her dishes in the sink, threw on her jacket, slung her backpack over her shoulder, yelled goodbye, and was out the door.

“Make something pretty for me,” called Mrs. O’Brien.

3 • Knobby Knees

The clay studio was Amelia’s second home, especially with Natalie away. It was only five blocks from her house, in the middle of a row of small, neat, brick-faced shops that also included a grocery, a coffee shop, an antique store, a florist’s, and a dry-cleaning business.

Amelia had been introduced to the studio when she was six. Her father had enrolled her in an after-school program. Something clicked the very first day of that very first class. From the moment she plunged her fingers into the squishy gray blob placed before her and began forming a pinch pot for Mrs. O’Brien, she was hooked.

Afterward she pleaded with her father to let her take any and every available class, and he was happy to oblige her. Although she learned how to use the potter’s wheel and throw fairly accomplished bowls and vases, what she came to love best was building small pieces by hand, animals of all kinds: birds, rabbits, elephants, whales. And so, lately, that’s what she’d been doing nearly every day after school and on Saturdays. Her growing menagerie seemed to multiply spontaneously. She kept it in her bedroom and on bookshelves and windowsills throughout the house.

Amelia covered the short distance at a clip, an oddly rhythmic clip. She was moving quickly because she was eager to work, but more to the point she was reinventing her walk, trying to make it faster and more graceful. Purposeful. Her legs had grown so much lately that she felt out of sync, as if her body belonged to someone or something else. And she’d recently decided that she hated her knees. They were big and knobby. Like a camel’s. She was skipping, or something close to it, when she tripped on the curb. She didn’t fall and no one was around to see her, but she could feel her face redden nonetheless. She slowed down and tried not to think about walking.

It was early April. The low cement skies of winter had lifted, but it was still chilly, cold even—a far cry from how she pictured Florida. Something about the weather put her in a wistful mood. She slipped into thinking about her mother. She had no memory of her. Nothing. Nothing lay curled in her mind; there was nothing to draw up and remember. Her father rarely talked about her; neither did Mrs. O’Brien. When Amelia thought of her mother, images from a few photographs were what she saw in her head, and what she experienced was a general, mild loneliness. Can you be lonely for someone you never knew?