The First Day the New Kid Knew Everyone

Redbrook Elementary smelled like fresh paint and floor wax, which is the official smell of summer being over. I stood by the trophy case with my backpack strap wound twice around my fist. Zipped into the front pocket, folded down to about the size of a sandwich, was the reason the next ten minutes were going to go badly.

I was the new kid, which I had done before and had a system for, and the one thing I was not supposed to be was the kid who already had everybody's name.

Mrs. Alden said, "Tell the class one thing about yourself." So I told them eleven things.

"That's Adaeze," I said. My arm was pointing before the rest of me got a vote. "Dashawn. Wendy. The twins are Cole and Emmett. And you're Simone, you sit by the window because of the birds on the fence."

The room went flat, and somebody's chair squeaked, and Dashawn leaned back like a guy getting out of the way of a sneeze while Mrs. Alden's smile stopped halfway across her face and stayed there.

"How do you know that?" Adaeze said. She wasn't being mean about it, she wanted an actual answer, and there wasn't one anywhere in that room.

I said something back, and I'm fairly sure the something was "lucky guess."

At recess I had the monkey bars to myself, which is not the same thing as getting the monkey bars, and everybody else stood down by the chain link in a clump doing the move where you look over and then unlook so fast it doesn't count as looking.

The kid I was at my old school would have stood there until the bell, gone home, and reported that the day went fine.

So I walked to the far end of the fence, where Simone was counting sparrows on the top rail, because birds were the one thing I had on anybody that didn't come out sounding like a threat.

"I'm sorry I knew your name," I said. "I can tell you how I got it. It isn't creepy. It's mostly just sad."

"Okay," Simone said. "How."

"My mom was in the hospital in the spring, and Mrs. Alden was her roommate in college, so she's been mailing her your class newsletter since March."

"The one with the spelling bee in it."

"That one, except Mom laid it face down on the blanket so she couldn't cheat off it."

"And then what."

"Then she'd go, 'Quiz me. Who sits by the window and loves the birds?'"

Simone had stopped counting sparrows. "And you'd say."

"Simone."

"How long did you do that for."

"Most days, so she squeezed maybe two hundred questions out of eleven pages."

"That's the nicest weird thing anybody has ever told me," Simone said, which I have not gotten a single word of wrong since. I said something back to it. Probably "okay."

The clump by the fence had gotten bigger, quieter, and entirely aimed at me. I got the newsletter out of my backpack and unfolded it, and the creases had gone soft from all the folding, and the top corner still had my mom's handwriting going up the margin.

"This is how," I said, and I held it up over my head so the whole fence could see it. "It's your class newsletter, my mom's had it since March, ask me anything printed in it."

"That's not real," Dashawn said.

"December issue, page two, whoever lost a tooth."

"Who lost a tooth."

"You did, plus it says right here that you swallowed it."

Wendy laughed so hard she had to sit down on the blacktop.

"Why does your mom have our newsletter," Adaeze said.

"She was sick in the spring, she's better now, Mrs. Alden mailed it to her, then she turned all of you into a game."

Nobody had anything for a second, and then Cole put his hand halfway up like we were still inside a classroom. "Am I in it?"

"Twice, counting the hamster."

"Do me," Adaeze said.

"Spelling bee, two years running, second place both times."

"Don't say second."

"It says second."

"Do the twins," Emmett said. "Nobody ever gets the twins."