Zach remembers standing alone in the shade of the big tree behind the special education trailer, watching the other children running and shouting and playing. He is nine now, and knows he is separated from them in a way he cannot understand.

The children move quickly, always bouncing off of each other, touching and grabbing. They are noisy, their shrieks and shouts drift across the playground. Zach cannot move like that; he is clumsy, and he hates it when people touch him. He is afraid of being hit by one of the soccer balls or Frisbees that are constantly thrown and kicked, so he prefers it here on the edge of the playground. Away from his classmates.

Some days he digs up rocks. He likes to collect them, and has shoebox after shoebox full under his bed, classified into sedimentary and igneous and metamorphic and shape and size and color. He likes to hold the smooth rocks in his hand, likes the cool dry way they feel against his palm. Other days Zach just stares up at the sky.

Days when there are clouds of all different shapes and heights are best, when he can see how big the sky really is. He likes it here, or at least it is tolerable. He can dig up rocks or look at clouds, absorbed in his own thoughts, and not worry about getting shoved or teased. It feels like if he looks up into the sky long enough he could make himself disappear,

And there are times he wants to.

Some of the boys on the playground come over to him sometimes, call him names or mimic his clumsy movements and hand-flapping. He ignores them; sitting down the cold grass with his hands over his ears and counts the Fibonacci series in his head.

"Spaz."

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…

“Retard.”

34, 55, 89…2,571…

Eventually they go away, but the feeling doesn’t. He feels like he was born on the wrong planet.

One day Zach finds a tiny bird skeleton under the big tree behind the special education trailer, and it was good. The sky is grey and cloudy. The date is October 3. After school his mother will come pick him up wearing a blue dress. He carefully lifts the fragile thing from the roots of the tree with a stick and lowers it onto the hard-pounded circle of dirt beneath the bench.

He sees the delicate wing bones, the large eye-sockets, the gently curved spine, and he finds it beautiful. He stares at it all recess, and comes back the next day to find it broken and shattered. But this is alright, because now he can see the bones are hollow, and he realizes that this is why birds can fly.

And this is good.