First Day, New School

Ivy stood in front of Jefferson Elementary and counted the windows. Fourteen on the bottom, fourteen on the top. Twenty-eight windows total. She always counted the windows.

This was her fourth new school in three years. Her mom's job moved them around like a pinball — ping to one city, ping to another. And every single time, Ivy's stomach did the exact same thing. It twisted up like a washcloth someone was wringing out. Twist, twist, twist.

"You okay, lovebug?" her mom asked, crouching down to fix Ivy's collar.

"Yep," Ivy said. Which was only a tiny lie.

Her mom kissed her forehead. "You've done this before. You're a pro."

Ivy nodded. She had done this before. That was true. And because she had done this before, she had a trick.

The trick was this: find one person who looks like they need a friend, and ask them one question. Not "will you be my friend" — that was too big, too fast, too scary for everyone. Just one small question. About anything.

The trick had worked at Riverside Elementary. It had worked at Meadow Creek. It had worked at St. Bernard's, where she'd only lasted five months but still managed to find Priya, who she video-called every Sunday.

Ivy took a deep breath, pulled her backpack straps tight, and walked inside.

The hallway smelled like floor wax and cinnamon, which was a pretty good combination for a school. Her new teacher, Mr. Thornton, had a big red beard and a voice like a friendly tuba. He introduced her to the class, and twenty-three faces stared at her like she was a math problem they weren't sure how to solve.

"Welcome, Ivy! Grab any open seat you'd like," said Mr. Thornton.

She scanned the room. There were two open seats. One was next to a group of kids who were already giggling together about something — an inside joke, probably. They looked nice. But they also looked full. Like a table at a restaurant where every chair was taken and someone would have to squeeze in sideways.

The other seat was next to a boy with brown hair that stuck up in three different directions. He was drawing something in a notebook, and he hadn't looked up when she walked in. Not even once.

Ivy sat next to the boy.

He still didn't look up.

She waited. She watched him draw. It was a dragon, but not a scary one. It had round glasses and was reading a tiny book.

Okay, she thought. One question.

"Does your dragon need a name?" she whispered.

The boy's pencil stopped. He looked at her sideways, like a suspicious cat deciding whether to accept a chin scratch.

"He has a name," the boy said.

"Oh," said Ivy. "Cool."

The boy looked back at his drawing. Then, so quietly she almost missed it, he said, "It's Bernard."

"Bernard," Ivy repeated. "That's a really good name for a dragon with glasses."

The boy almost smiled. Almost. His mouth twitched like it was thinking about it.

At recess, Ivy sat on the low brick wall near the four-square courts and opened her snack — apple slices and a little container of peanut butter. The giggling group from class ran past her toward the swings, a blur of shouts and sneakers. One of them, a girl with two long braids, slowed down and called out, "Hey, new girl! Wanna swing?"

Ivy's stomach twisted again. "Maybe in a minute!" she called back.

The girl shrugged happily and kept running.

Ivy ate an apple slice and looked around. The boy — she'd learned his name was Owen — was sitting alone under a tree at the edge of the playground. He had his notebook again. No snack. Just Bernard the dragon, getting more details by the minute.

Ivy picked up her apple slices and walked over.

"Can I sit here?" she asked.

Owen shrugged, which Ivy had learned from her other schools could mean a lot of things. This shrug meant yes but I'm not going to make a big deal about it.

She sat down and ate her snack. She didn't say anything for a while. Sometimes quiet was the best thing you could offer somebody. That was something she'd learned the hard way at Meadow Creek, where she'd talked too much on her first day and accidentally overwhelmed a girl named Suki, who needed things to be gentle and slow.

After a minute, Owen said, "Bernard is getting a castle now."

Ivy looked. It was a very good castle, with crooked towers and a flag on top that said "B."

"Does he live alone in there?" Ivy asked.

Owen frowned at the drawing. "Yeah."

"That's a lot of rooms for one dragon."

Owen was quiet for a long time. He added a window to the castle. Then another window. Then he said, "Maybe he has a roommate."

"What kind of roommate?"

"I don't know. Something small. Like a hedgehog."

"A hedgehog who just moved to a new castle?" Ivy said, and she couldn't help grinning.

Owen looked at her. This time, he did smile. A real one. Small, but real, like a light coming on in one of those castle windows.

"Yeah," he said. "The hedgehog keeps moving to different castles. But this one might be okay."

"Does the hedgehog have a name?" Ivy asked.

Owen thought about it. "Ivy," he said.

And Ivy laughed — big and loud and surprised — and Owen laughed too, and it was the kind of laugh that sounds like a door opening.

The rest of the day wasn't perfect. Ivy got lost finding the bathroom and ended up in the music room, where a startled teacher pointed her the right way. She didn't know any of the songs the class sang during afternoon meeting. She spelled "rhythm" wrong on a practice quiz, which was honestly unfair because that word didn't have nearly enough vowels.

But at lunch, Owen sat next to her, and he showed her the finished drawing. Bernard the dragon in his castle, reading his tiny book, wearing his round glasses. And there, on the windowsill of the tallest tower, a small hedgehog with a suitcase, looking out at the view.

"You can have it," Owen said, and slid the paper across the table.

Ivy looked at it for a long moment. At every new school, there was a moment like this — a moment that felt like the first stitch in something. Not a finished thing. Not yet. Just the very beginning. A tiny thread connecting her to this new place.

"Thank you," she said, and she meant it with every room in her heart.

That night, Ivy taped the drawing above her desk in her new bedroom, which still had boxes stacked against the walls and no curtains on the windows. Her mom poked her head in.

"How was it?"

Ivy looked at Bernard and the hedgehog. "My stomach did the thing," she said.

"And?"

"And I did my trick."

Her mom smiled. "Did it work?"

Ivy thought about Owen's almost-smile turning into a real smile. She thought about the hedgehog on the windowsill. She thought about how twenty-eight windows was a lot, and behind every single one there was probably a person with their own twist-washcloth stomach, waiting for someone to ask them one small question.

"Yeah," Ivy said. "It worked."

Her mom turned off the light. Ivy lay in the dark, in her new room, in her new city, and for the first time in weeks, her stomach was perfectly still.