Every morning, Ilanka was ready for school before her mother was ready to drive her there. So every morning she stood at the windows— jacket and backpack on—and watched the day take shape. She wished she could get to school on her own like everybody else did. But it was too far to walk and there was no other great way to get there. The water taxi would get her from her neighborhood, Hunters Point, to the Astoria waterfront, but then the walk from the landing to school was like twenty minutes. The subway didn’t help at all, and there was no way Ilanka was taking a city bus.

So she waited patiently as the sun lit up the sky—today a white blue—and then the skyscrapers across the East River. She kept binoculars by the windowed walls and studied people on boats, because maybe there was some kind of lesson she could learn about how one became the kind of person who owned a boat, which seemed like pretty much the opposite of the kind of person who rode the bus. She watched people in the park fourteen stories down, doing yoga or jogging or walking their dogs, and wondered how not to become them—people who clearly belonged in California and had wildly miscalculated.

Sometimes she dreamed she was already on her own, and on a yacht, heading out into the harbor and on to someplace fabulous. Or maybe she was one of the people in the helicopters that floated by all day. Who were they? What made them so important that they had access to helicopters that literally put them above it all?

Sometimes she imagined there was a long tightrope from their apartment that stretched across the river to Manhattan, where she felt she belonged. She would open up the windows that didn’t actually open and step out, find her balance, and inch her way across, parasol in hand.

Queens was, well, Queens.

“You ready?” her mother asked.

Ilanka had to stifle her scoff. “Yup!”

By the elevator bank, her mother applied lipstick using a mirrored wall panel. Because her mother was not one of those moms who dropped their kids off in pajamas or sweatpants. Her mother always looked good, and it had rubbed off on Ilanka, too—this notion of always being put together so that no one could see you were falling apart.

In the elevator, her mother’s perfume was like a tight bubble around her, keeping Ilanka from wanting to stand too close lest she accidently pop it and choke on lavender fumes. They traveled down without stopping—or talking—then went through the lobby and into the parking garage, where they had a reserved spot they paid for.