“Okay.”
“Sometimes things do change, right?” she said. “I mean, I know you don’t like it—lots of people don’t like change—but sometimes it has to, like driving a different car to school.”
I nodded again.
“So how do you cope with that?”
“I think about it beforehand,” I told her. “If I get upset just thinking about it, I usually don’t do it, but if thinking about it is okay, I think about it some more. I imagine in my head what it would look like. Then when it happens, I’m not taken off guard as much.”
“Hmm,” Mayra murmured. She sat quietly for a minute before turning her body toward mine. “So, if you took some time before school starts to think about me coming up to you at your locker to say hello, would that be okay?”
I froze as I wandered through the scenario in my head. This morning was awful, but I had been blindsided. I thought about what it would look like to glance over my shoulder and see Mayra standing next to my locker with me. That led to wondering who else would be there in the hallway, looking at us.
“Would you have other people with you?” I asked.
“It would be better if it was just me, huh?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Just me, then.”
“Okay.” I rubbed the tips of my fingers over my thighs, feeling the rough denim texture of my jeans. I went over various versions of Mayra coming up to me at school and saying hello. Sometimes she just said “Hey” or “Hi.” In my mind, I echoed her back. It felt all right.
“Do you want to watch TV?” Mayra asked.
“Okay,” I said.
“What do you like to watch?”
“Top Gear,” I told her. “I like history shows, too. And MythBusters.”
“I love MythBusters!” Mayra said with a smile.
We went to sit in the reclining loveseat in the family room where the TV was. I picked up the remote and flipped through the guide, but MythBusters wasn’t on. We settled on Big Bang Theory.
“You’re kind of like Sheldon, you know,” Mayra said.
“Yeah, Bethany says that, too. She keeps telling me I should go to school for physics. I don’t want to be like him though. He’s mean to people.”
“I think he’s cute,” she said, then tried to hold back a smile. Her cheeks turned pink, and I narrowed my eyes at her.
“What do you mean?”
“Just some of the things he does. He’s so precise about everything. He thinks about things in a different way from everyone else.”
“I guess so.”
The show ended and the local news started up. Mayra’s finger touched the edge of my hand.
“Thinking differently is okay, you know.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “Travis tells me that all the time.”
“Aimee always felt different when we were younger,” Mayra said. “She had a lot of trouble in class because she couldn’t focus on what the teacher was saying. They thought she was learning disabled, but she was
n’t. She just learns differently than other people.”
“I get lost in my head,” I said quietly.