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have been was secondary. There were so many students, nearly two thousand, it was very possible, if not guaranteed, you would know only 50 percent of your graduating class. The only way to survive was to organize everybody into categories, so every five people could be treated as one, four hundred as two. That way, you felt like you knew everybody without actually having to.
    Ms. Nailer made us put unpeeled bananas in jars so we could draw pictures of decay in our notebooks for a whole semester. We had to observe the banana turning to mush, and then draw every new maggot that hatched. We had to open the jar every week and describe the scent. Nasty , I wrote on my lab sheet. Even nastier , I wrote a week later.
    Annie the Bird or Bear was Richard’s lab partner and she was standing tall and proud, holding their banana jar level with her massive breasts, confident that Richard was not someone who could ever hurt her, even though I figured he was the only person who would. She took pride in her new high school identity the way a superhero uses their defining mutation as a source of power. She made boys bleed in the parking lot. She scared away lunch tables just by sitting down at them, the students scattering like sparrows. She embraced her solitude and used it as a form of freedom. She spread her lunch out on the whole table like she was happy about all the room, made animal sounds down the hallway, bird calls, bear cries, lion roars. Mostly everybody thought this was hilarious; they fell against their lockers, crippled by laughter that spread like a disease as Annie the Bird or Bear walked by, neighing like a dying, vengeful creature.
    I could hardly watch. But, of course, I did.
    It was September of freshman year, when the earth began to tilt away from the sun, the flowers still upright, the shrubs on their last breath, the bees slowing in flight, making dizzy, drunken loops in the air like parade planes. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING , Ms. Nailer wrote on the board in all caps and drew an arrow pointing to the outside. Her observations, while not mind-blowing, were at least correct. Caterpillars were lined up on my driveway like remains of a drive-by shooting, and when I added their souls to our dinnertime prayer, my mother said, “Emily, enough about the caterpillars.” My mother and father started to maximize the efficiency of our dinnertime appeals to God as though prayer was a science of exclusion. We no longer prayed for a successful town apple festival like we normally did at the start of fall; or for Ms. O’Malley, my thirty-year-old algebra teacher who needed a new heart pump, because she got one; or for my father’s gums to quit receding, because it stopped being funny.
    My father was still living with us until he moved to Prague after New Year’s Eve, but if you weren’t listening hard, you wouldn’t even notice. Every night, my father kicked his shoes off and they hit hard against the wall, the bed squeaked as he slid under the sheets across the hall from my mother, and if I was tired enough, I mistook the creaks of his bed for the cracks of his bones. I had nightmares of his skeleton breaking at the joints, and I woke to his spoon clacking against his six A.M . cereal bowl. From my bed, I could hear him put the coffee grinds in the trash can, the bowl in the sink like any good father, and for a moment that was what he sounded like—any good father who cleared his throat and walked out the door to go to work.
    But he couldn’t just leave like that, like any good father. One morning before school I jumped out of bed to say, “I saw you, Dad ,” to stand wounded and victimized in front of the door until we both remembered everything: my father and Mrs. Resnick with their mouths pressed together; my father and my mother both teary-eyed and pink-faced on the porch in August, blowing their noses and then laughing deep sorrowful laughs, and me listening from my bedroom wanting to shout, It’s not funny! ; my father