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on a biscuit when she was just twenty-one. “Is that so?” Mrs. Carr said.
    After lunch, she gave me back my “Ways to Be Safe” paper with red marks all over it. We were supposed to write about the policeman who had visited our school last week, but I had written about
The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained
instead. I told about the man in California who was struck dead when a hunk of meat fell from the sky, and the woman in Texas who burst into flames on top of a Ferris wheel. Also the baby in Oregon who was born half chicken, half boy, and pecked his mother to death.
    F. You have not followed the assignment
, Mrs. Carr wrote.
    A girl came over and asked me what I got on my paper. Her name was Darcy Edwards, but I called her Girl 8 secretly. This was because of something Edgar had said. One day he rode by my school at recess and saw me standing alone by the fence. He stopped to talk to me and we watched the other kids playing for a while. All the boys were shooting marbles and all the girls were jumping rope. Then all the girls moved to the swings and all the boys played whiffle ball. Edgar spun the pedals on his bike. “Did you ever think that everyone around you might be an ingenious robot and you’re the only one that’s not?” he asked. In fact, I had never thought this, but now I saw it could be true. It explained why all the girls knew how to play the clapping game and all the boys brought baseball cards to school. The next day, I changed all my classmates’ names to numbers to better reflect their metal hearts.
    “What did you get?” Girl 8 asked again. I covered the grade with my hands. “An A,” I told her. She snatched the paper away from me. “I knew you were lying,” she said. Later I stole her snowflake mittens and hid them inside my desk.

Just before Christmas, Mrs. Carr arranged a field trip to the raptor center where my mother worked. The day of the bird tour, I got up very early and drove with my mother on the highway out of town. She had brought along a box of slides and as she drove she held them up to the light and looked at them. When we got to the center, I sat in the lobby and waited for the rest of my class to arrive. On the bulletin board, there was a sign that said:
    50 Javan Rhinoceros
    30 California Condors
    18 Mauritan Pink Pigeons
    12 Chatham Island Robins
    6 Mauritian Kestrels
    5 Javan Tigers
    3 Kauai O-O-Honeyeaters
    2 Dusky Seaside Sparrows
    1 Abingdon Galapagos Tortoise
    Once my father had given me an old map that showed the world supported by a series of tortoises one on top of the other. “That was the way people thought of the Earth back then,” he explained. “Before they had sailed all the way around the world and seen that it was round.” At the bottom of the pyramid was a tremendous turtle with a weathered purple shell. This one I thought had survived.
    My mother went to the bulletin board and crossed out a line. There was only one dusky seaside sparrow in the world left now, she said, and it lived all alone in a cage in Disney World. She turned away so I couldn’t see her face. It was early still and the sky was gray. My mother closed her eyes. “Can we go see that bird?” I asked her. I knew about Disney World, about all the other things that were there. My mother turned to look at me. I made my face look sad. “We’ll see,” she said.
    My mother’s job at the center was to take care of the baby birds. At night, people left them in the parking lot in shoe boxes and shopping bags. BIRD , they wrote in block letters on the front. Most of them were not raptors, but she took them anyway. There were four in the center now. Eeny, Meeny, Miney, and Moe. Two were ospreys and two were sparrows. Only the ospreys were birds of prey, my mother said. Their heads were covered with white fuzz like the heads of old men. They had black wings and sharp, leathery claws that were bright yellow. The sparrows were dull brown and cried all the time. My mother fed them with eye