I sit on the floor near the wall where nobody steps. My brother is two and my sister is three. They need things. They cry and someone comes. They want things and someone brings them. I learned how to be quiet instead. Being normal means being the one they forget about. The playpen takes up half the room now. It has bright colors on all sides. My brother stands inside it and shakes the mesh when he wants out. Someone always comes to get him. I used to sit in that spot by the window. Now the playpen sits there and I sit here by the wall. My doll is on the floor near my sister. She has brown hair like mine. The doll, I mean. My sister pulled her from my hands this morning and I let go. I didn't want my face to get hot from all the voices that would come if I held on. The doll stares at the ceiling. My sister already forgot about her and went to play with blocks. I move closer to the bookshelf in the corner. The bottom shelf is empty. I can fit behind it if I make myself small. I pull my knees up and press my back against the wall. From here I can see everyone but they have to look hard to see me. My brother cries. My sister drops a block. Footsteps come into the room and walk right past the bookshelf. Nobody says my name. This is what normal feels like.

The car ride is long and I press my forehead against the cool window. Nobody told me where we were going this morning. They just said to get dressed and we got in the car. My brother and sister stayed home. Just me. Inside the building it's cold and loud. People are everywhere. Rows and rows of faces stacked up high around a circle of white ice. A red carpet stretches across the middle of it like a ribbon. Someone takes my hand and pulls me toward the bright lights. My face gets hot. I want to look at the floor but the ice is too shiny and it reflects everything. A man in a blue and white uniform bends down. He has a number on his chest. He says something I don't hear because the noise is too big. Then his hands are under my arms and I'm lifting up into the air. He carries me out onto the red carpet and all those faces turn toward us. Thousands of hands wave from every direction. The hot feeling spreads from my face down through my whole body. I make myself small in his arms and stare at the number fourteen on his chest. Not at the people. Not at the hands. Just the number. When he puts me down I'm back behind the boards where it's darker. My legs feel strange like they might not hold me. Someone pats my shoulder and says I did great. But I didn't do anything. I just got carried and looked at and now everyone has seen me. On the car ride home I don't talk. I press my forehead against the window again and wonder if being chosen is the opposite of being normal. If it is then I never want to be chosen again.

After the hockey arena I thought things would go back to how they were before. But the next Monday morning my sister and I wait by the front door with our coats on. My grandparents tell us a car is coming to take us somewhere new. The yellow cab pulls up outside. The driver honks once. My sister carries her own bag but mine feels heavy even though there's nothing inside except a notebook I don't use. In the back seat I press against the door and my sister sits in the middle. The vinyl is cold through my coat. The driver doesn't talk to us. He just drives and the streets go by in a blur of gray buildings and I don't know where we're going. My face starts to get hot just thinking about arriving somewhere with people who will look at me. The school is smaller than I thought it would be. Inside there are only a few other children and they don't stare. Nobody makes me talk. A woman shows me a desk near a window and leaves me alone. I sit very still and wait for someone to need something from me but nobody does. An hour passes. Then another. My face stays cool. At one point my sister walks past my door with a different woman and she doesn't wave. I don't wave either. We both just keep going. When the cab comes back at the end of the day I get in without my legs feeling strange. My sister climbs in beside me. We ride home in silence while the city scrolls past the window. When we turn onto my grandparents' street I can see the pear tree in the front yard with its yellow fruit hanging down. The cab stops and we get out. My grandparents ask how it was. I say okay. And I mean it. Because today nobody chose me and nobody looked at me and I sat somewhere quiet doing nothing and that felt exactly like being normal. Tomorrow the cab will come again and I won't be afraid of it.

After the first week the cab stops coming. My grandparents walk us to school instead and the route becomes familiar. The building is small and quiet and most days I sit at my desk without anyone asking me questions. But I notice something different about this place. There are other children who look like my sister and me. One boy uses metal sticks to walk. A girl wears thick glasses that make her eyes look huge. And there's a girl in a wheelchair with bright metal wheels who sits under the maple tree at recess every day. She doesn't run around like the others. She just sits there with a notebook in her lap. On Friday I walk past her three times before she looks up and smiles. My face gets hot but she's already looking back down at her page. The next Monday I walk past again and she says hello. I stop because stopping feels easier than walking away. She asks if I want to see what she's drawing. I sit down in the grass beside her wheelchair and she shows me a picture of a bird. I tell her it's nice. She asks if I want to try. I take the notebook and draw a tree that looks wrong but she says it's good anyway. After that we sit under the maple tree every recess. She tells me about her dog and I tell her about the pear tree at my grandparents' house. She doesn't ask me why I live there or why my face gets red when other kids look over at us. She just talks about normal things like what she had for breakfast or whether it might rain. Sometimes we don't talk at all and that's fine too. One day she lets me push her wheelchair back to the building when the bell rings. My hands grip the handles and I can feel the weight of her and the chair moving forward. Other kids stare as we go past but I'm looking at the back of her head and thinking about what she said about her dog. My face stays cool. When we reach her classroom she says thank you and see you tomorrow. I say see you tomorrow back. That afternoon my grandparents ask how school was and I say good. But this time something is different. I'm not just saying it to make them stop asking. I mean it because today I had somewhere to be and someone who wanted me there. Not because I was chosen or special but because I walked past her tree enough times that she said hello. Being normal isn't just sitting alone anymore. It's sitting beside someone who doesn't need me to be anything except there.