By the time Max reached second grade, his parents were no longer together. The day his dad left was the day seven-year-old Max stopped checking for monsters under the bed. Monsters were make-believe. He was no longer scared of them. His dad, however, was really gone, and Max didn't know if the man would ever come back.

This terrified Max.

Max's mom started working six days a week between two jobs. As the bills began piling up, Max stopped going to daycare. To save money, Max stayed home by himself, and, on the days his mom couldn't drive him to school, he got himself to class on his skateboard. He made his own cereal for breakfast and microwaved Hot Pockets or tamales for dinner.

In time, the mind-numbing silence of being home alone got to be as bad as the heartbreaking sounds of his parents' machine-gun-like bickering. Sometimes, Max couldn't contain the big emotions running through him. He felt sad about losing his dad. He felt lonely when his mom was away at work. He felt guilty about his parents not being together anymore. He remembered how his parents used to fight over him all the time. He had heard them screaming at each other from his room. Day after day, these horrible thoughts and feelings and memories kept compounding and compounding in his brain until his heart felt like exploding. Max had to let it all out, somehow.

The worst of his kicking, screaming, purple-faced meltdowns were unleashed on his mom whenever she was home. He spewed poison like "Dad left because of you" and "te odio tanto como papá te odia" just to see if she would get mad enough to walk out on him, too. Thankfully, she always stayed, but something terrible inside him kept trying to drive her away.

At school, Max became a miniature Jekyll and Hyde.

On good days, he helped the dyslexic kid, Chase Reynolds, who sat beside him spell out tricky words like "dragon" and only caused minor disturbances, such as yelling out basketball stats at random or humming math facts to the tune of the SpongeBob theme song in the middle of story time.

On bad days, Mr. Jay, the security guard, would need to physically remove him for kicking over desks in a fit of hysterics or climbing on top of the wall cabinets and refusing to get down.

Then, there were the "wild card" days. November 2nd happened to be such a day. The class was in the middle of singing "happy birthday" to Smith Hawkins and Sharon Lee when Max suddenly stood up from his chair. His speedy, little legs dashed out the door before Ms. Martin could stop him. From there, Max vanished for one heart-stopping hour. His mom rushed to school. The security guard was notified. Mr. Jay eventually tracked Max down in the library next to the archived yearbooks. Together, they looked up old pictures of Danny Weiser when he was still a student at Rancho Valley Elementary before heading to the principal's office. Turned out, November 2nd was Danny's birthday.

Max had wanted to sing "happy birthday" to his dad, too.

Max's classmates giggled whenever his milder antics distracted them from the boredom of phonics and fractions, but none of them understood why he was so intense the rest of the time. Life for them was comfortable. Easy. They got excited about feeding their Tamagotchi's during recess and going to Disneyland on weekends. Their moms never forgot to pack their lunches or pick them up after school, and their dads attended all the STEM nights and school concerts.

Max tried not to notice all the annoying details that made their lives so perfect, but it was hard to look away. What he wanted most were the very things his classmates took for granted on a regular basis: Friends to play with during recess, a mom who was around more, and a dad who showed up. Max never shared these thoughts with anyone because people already stared at him like something was wrong with him. Even at his age, he had his pride.

By the end of second grade, school ended almost the same way it began for Max. His home was still broken. He was always in trouble at school. His mom had no idea how to help him, and his second grade teacher, Ms. Martin, could hardly wait to ship him off to third grade.

Yet, contrary to what the adults around him believed, Max wasn't a hopeless cause. Quite the opposite, actually. Karma was known to be bitchy, but she was a fair bitch. No one ever suffered in vain on her watch, and she often hid rewards in plain sight. At the core of Max's outbursts at home, defiant behavior at school, and resentful attitude toward peers, there existed a layer of sensitivity, tenacity, and attention to detail that far exceeded other children his age.

Max just needed a nudge from someone to help him see it, too.