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in the background. I kept my head up, my eyes open and seemingly alert. But in my mind, I was doing what I always did to calm myself, to escape into my own beautiful bubble.
    I played the violin. Brahms, Hungarian Dance No. 5. A loud, fast, unstoppable song. I could see the bow, feel the smooth wood even, so perfectly in my mind. The notes sang out, vibrating inside my skull, weaving a spell that made the rest of the class disappear.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Caleb and I sat at the kitchen table later that afternoon, piles of textbooks and folders sprawled out in front of us. I had to start brainstorming essay ideas for
The Handmaid’s Tale,
and study for a physics quiz, too, but the thought of doing either was entirely unappealing. I considered giving up and taking my yoga mat outside to our tiny backyard, but I wanted to at least pretend to be studious, for Caleb’s sake.
    â€œWhat are you working on, kiddo?” I asked, tossing a balled-up Post-it Note across the table. It hit Caleb on the lips, then bounced off to the floor.
    â€œHey!” He squirmed, grabbing for the paper andgrinning as he threw it back at me. Perfect shot, squarely between my eyes. “I’m looking up words that could be in the big fifth grade spelling bee next month. They pick a lot of local stuff, so I’m doing weird Brooklyn words right now.”
    I slid the paper he was studying across the table and read down the list.
    Gowanus, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ditmas, Canarsie, Livingston, Hoyt . . .
    â€œSchermerhorn?”
I asked, my mouth gaping open. “Seriously? They expect a ten-year-old to spell that?”
    â€œIt’s not
that
hard, Iris. S-c-h-e-r—”
    The loud trill of the door buzzer cut him off.
    â€œI’ll get it,” I said to Caleb, though before the words were even out, the buzzer blared again. “
Jeez
, I heard you. I’m coming—stop jabbing that awful thing.” I stood up and moved toward the kitchen counter, pressing down the SPEAK button on the wall panel.
    â€œHello?” I called out, leaning in close to the speaker. “Who is this?”
    â€œI’m looking for Mina.” A man’s voice crackled into the kitchen. “Does she live here?”
    â€œNo, no Mina here. Wrong address,” I said, pulling my hand back.
    â€œMina Dietrich? Are you sure? Or Mina Spero now, is it?”
    I looked over at Caleb, who had put down his penciland was staring back at me with a dramatically raised eyebrow. “Mina?” he mouthed, his forehead crinkling.
    Strange
. My mom’s last name
had
been Dietrich, before she’d married my dad and become a Spero. But her name was Noel, and I’d never heard of a Mina in our family. “We’re the Speros, yes, but there’s no Mina here. So I think maybe you got the names mixed up. Sorry.” I let go of the button and stepped back. But he buzzed again, one, two, three times, and without saying anything to each other, Caleb and I both ran up the first flight of stairs and knocked on Mom’s office door.
    There were very few causes that would have warranted interrupting her right now; she was deep inside the first chapters of her newest book, a literary thriller set in early seventeenth-century Manhattan. She was especially impossible to penetrate when she was in the process of first building a new world, constructing each detail—each name, each costume, each piece of furniture, and each bite of food—with painstaking historical research.
    But this overly desperate stranger—he seemed like more than enough cause.
    â€œMom?” I said softly, opening the door a crack and poking my head inside. “There’s a man who keeps buzzing from downstairs, and he said he’s looking for a Mina Dietrich. I told him that he must have gotten the wrong address, but he’s being pretty persistent.”
    My mom’s cloudy writing eyes snapped into focus,