The Reading Group

Keyla slid into her seat on Monday morning and noticed two things right away. First, Mrs. Patterson's desk had been completely rearranged. Second, Mrs. Patterson wasn't there.

Instead, a tall man with a curly beard and mismatched socks stood at the front of the room. One sock was orange. The other had tiny dinosaurs on it.

"Good morning, everyone! I'm Mr. Trevino. Mrs. Patterson is out today, and I'll be your substitute teacher. Now—" He looked down at a messy stack of papers. "It says here you have reading groups this morning?"

The class nodded.

Keyla's stomach did a little flip. She always got that feeling when it was time for reading groups. There were three groups in Mrs. Patterson's class. The Blue Jays. The Cardinals. And the Sparrows.

Keyla was a Sparrow.

She didn't know exactly when she figured out what being a Sparrow meant, but she had. The Blue Jays read chapter books with small words on every page. The Cardinals read books with medium-sized words and some pictures. And the Sparrows? The Sparrows read books with big pictures and only a few sentences on each page.

Keyla wasn't bad at reading. At least, she didn't think she was. But the words sometimes jumbled up, and she had to read a sentence two or three times before it made sense. By then, everyone else had already moved on.

So. Sparrows.

"Alright!" Mr. Trevino said, flipping through a notebook. "I'm going to pass out your group books. Blue Jays... here we go. Cardinals... right. And Sparrows..."

He walked around the room handing out books. When he got to Keyla's table, he set a book down in front of her and smiled. "There you are!"

Keyla looked at the cover.

She blinked.

The book was called The Secret Sky Garden. It had a painting of a girl climbing a vine that curled up through the clouds. The title was written in gold letters. And it was thick—not Blue Jay thick, but definitely not a Sparrow book.

Keyla glanced over at Marcus and Destiny, the other Sparrows. They were holding their usual kind of book—thin, with a big friendly caterpillar on the cover.

Mr. Trevino had made a mistake.

Keyla opened her mouth to say something. She even raised her hand halfway. But Mr. Trevino was already across the room, helping a Blue Jay find the right page.

She looked at the book again.

The girl on the cover had brown skin and two braids, just like Keyla. She was reaching for a cloud with one hand and holding a watering can in the other.

I'll just look at the first page, Keyla thought. Then I'll give it back.

She opened the book.

Chapter One: The Roof

Maya wasn't supposed to go to the roof. But the roof was where the wind sounded like it was singing, and Maya liked to sing along.

Keyla read the sentence once. Then again. The words didn't jumble. She kept going.

Up on the roof, there was nothing but gray concrete and an old metal chair that wobbled when you sat in it. But Maya didn't see gray. She saw a garden waiting to happen.

Keyla turned the page. There was a small illustration of Maya dragging a bag of soil up a staircase, leaving a trail of dirt behind her. Keyla smiled.

She read on. Maya found old pots in a neighbor's recycling. She collected seeds from the fruit her grandmother cut up for breakfast—apple seeds, orange seeds, even a mango pit she wasn't sure about. She carried cups of water up four flights of stairs, sloshing most of it on her shoes.

Keyla got to the part where Maya planted the mango pit and whispered, "Grow if you want to. But I'm going to water you either way."

Keyla almost laughed out loud.

That was exactly the kind of thing Keyla would say.

She kept reading. Some words she had to try twice. Concrete took three tries. She whispered it under her breath—con-creet—and suddenly it clicked. A few pages later she hit impossible, and she broke it into pieces the way Mrs. Patterson had taught her: im-poss-i-ble. She said it quietly, like a spell.

She turned another page. And another.

Maya's garden started to grow. But not the way a normal garden grows. The vines twisted upward and kept going—past the edge of the roof, past the tops of the buildings, right up into the clouds. Maya climbed one of the vines and found a sky garden, floating above the city, full of flowers she had never seen before and vegetables the size of her head.

Keyla was so deep in the story that when Mr. Trevino said, "Alright, Sparrows, let's talk about your book!" she jumped.

Marcus and Destiny scooted their chairs into a circle. Keyla looked at the caterpillar book on the table, then at The Secret Sky Garden in her hands. She had read forty-three pages. She knew because she checked.

"Mr. Trevino?" Keyla said quietly.

He came over and crouched beside her. "What's up?"

"I think you gave me the wrong book. This one isn't a Sparrow book."

Mr. Trevino looked at the cover, then looked at the notebook, then looked at Keyla. His eyebrows went up. "Oh! You're right. I'm sorry about that. This one was meant for the Cardinals. Do you want me to swap it?"

Keyla held the book a little tighter.

"I already read forty-three pages," she said.

Mr. Trevino's eyebrows went even higher. "Forty-three pages? Just now?"

Keyla nodded. "Maya just found the sky garden. She's about to try the enormous tomato, and I think something important is going to happen because there's a bird up there that keeps following her, and I don't think it's a regular bird."

Mr. Trevino sat down in the empty chair next to her. "Tell me more about that bird."

So Keyla did. She told him how the bird had shown up on page twelve, just a small mention, and then again on page twenty, sitting on the vine. And then on page thirty-one, it was waiting for Maya in the sky garden like it had been there the whole time.

"I think the bird is the garden's keeper," Keyla said. "I think it decides who gets to visit."

Mr. Trevino was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Would you like to keep reading this one?"

Keyla looked over at Marcus and Destiny. "But I'm a Sparrow."

"Well," Mr. Trevino said, scratching his curly beard, "today you're a reader who's forty-three pages into a really good book. Seems like a shame to stop."

Keyla looked at the cover one more time. The girl with the braids and the watering can. The golden letters.

"Okay," she said. "I'll keep going."

She read for the rest of the morning. She didn't finish the whole book—it was too long for one day. But she got to the part where Maya discovered that the sky garden only bloomed for people who took care of things even when they couldn't see results yet. The mango pit Maya had planted on page eight? It hadn't sprouted a single leaf. But Maya kept watering it. Every single day.

When the lunch bell rang, Keyla tucked the book under her arm.

"Mr. Trevino?" she asked on her way to the door. "Will you be here tomorrow?"

"Nope. Mrs. Patterson will be back."

"Oh." Keyla looked at the book. "Can I take this home tonight?"

"It's yours until you finish it," he said.

That night, Keyla read under her covers with a flashlight. She read past her bedtime. She read until she got to the last page, where Maya sat in her rooftop garden—the regular one, not the sky one—and saw a tiny green leaf poking out of the mango pit's soil.

Keyla closed the book and held it against her chest.

The next morning, Mrs. Patterson was back. Everything was normal. The Blue Jays got their chapter books. The Cardinals got their chapter books. And when Mrs. Patterson handed Keyla the thin book with the caterpillar on the cover, Keyla took it.

Then she raised her hand.

"Mrs. Patterson? I finished a book last night. A chapter book. Could I—" She paused and took a breath. "Could I try something a little harder this time?"

Mrs. Patterson looked at Keyla for a long moment—the kind of look that's like a door opening.

"Tell me about the book you read," Mrs. Patterson said.

And Keyla did.