The next morning Lily awoke with her head still leaned against the window pane. A soft blanket had been draped over her and tucked behind her shoulders, probably courtesy of her dad. She didn't like to close her bedroom door at night, so sometimes when she was lying awake she would hear him get up and pace the living room. He had a stressful job, one that there was a lot of competition for, and Lily didn't know how he handled it. She and her mom did everything they could to help, but her mom's job wasn't exactly low-maintenance either.

Turning her head to see the clock on the microwave, Lily found the boxy green digits staring back at her: 6:53. Dad was already gone, then, and Mom would be leaving around 7:15. Lily turned sleepily back to the window, watching people walk pointedly in the direction of their jobs while she was barely even awake. Car horns blared, voices drifted up, and the pale red morning shone down on all of it.

As the sky began to lighten from red to pink, Lily decided that getting ready for school could wait until she had seen the sun rise.

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That day at school Lily talked to only her closest friends during lunch. She didn't mean to be rude; she was thinking, that was all. She was thinking about History, trying to remember dates—dates of coronations, dates of growth, dates of war, dates of peace. She remembered the dates of peace most easily, as those were the ones that always seemed to mark a new era, a stable era.

She was thinking about Odyssey, too. What school did Odyssey go to? Was it Lily's school? Surely there were people at her school whom she hadn't met. If a person spent her school days trying not to be met, it was more than possible. All the same, Lily didn't see Odyssey at school that day, even though she looked. A few times, she had sighed silently to herself as she thought. Odyssey probably didn't go to her school anyway. Maybe, though, if she went home the same way as yesterday, she would pass Odyssey again. She hoped Odyssey wasn't missing the journal too much.

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Odyssey didn't go to school that day.

Her dad didn't make her go. Why should she go if he didn't make her?

It was odd. He usually made her go. She didn't like going, though. And today she didn't want to go at all. Why?

She didn't have her journal.

It was gone. She had cried yesterday and she had hit someone and she had fallen and she had dropped her books and she had picked them up again and the journal was gone. She needed her journal. She needed it, she needed to write her thoughts down, she couldn't keep them straight too many thoughts where was her journal oh yeah it was gone why was she crying.

She was crying. No stop crying. Crying makes people mad. Crying makes her dad mad and when her mom cries he hits her. Usually he hits her and then she cries and then he hits her more. He hits Odyssey sometimes. She doesn't hate being hit though, it gives her less thoughts and that's good. Usually her dad yells at her and that gives her more thoughts and all the thoughts he gives her make her feel useless. He's sometimes says he's going to leave but then he doesn't and Odyssey wishes he would but Odyssey's mom doesn't have a job so he has to stay but Odyssey doesn't know why he stays.

Even today Odyssey can hear her mom crying down the hall. She knows the neighbors can hear. The police came once and Odyssey thought it was going to be better and it almost was but then her dad acted like nothing was wrong and the police couldn't do anything so they left and the neighbors never bothered calling them again. Odyssey didn't want her dad to yell at her mom. She wanted to go in there and stop it. But if she stopped it then her dad would hit her and it would be okay but it would hurt and then he would yell at her and it would hurt more so Odyssey just curled herself into the tightest ball she could manage and hid behind the couch. Stop crying stop crying stop crying he'll hear you stop crying. Where was her journal if she could just write she could stop crying she didn't have her journal where was her journal. Her journal was gone.

Her dad heard her then.

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Lily came home that day to a house that was exactly as she and Mom had left it. Neither of her parents were home just yet, and Lily thought it might be fun to draw something new today to put on the living room wall. Taking her backpack off, she hung it on her chair at the kitchen table and pulled out her pencils and drawing book. After a moment's thought, she pulled out her math homework too. She wasn't really sure what she planned to draw, but maybe after she finished some of her homework she would have an idea.

Math homework wasn't so hard; Lily was taking Geometry that year and enjoyed the more logical side of it. She liked to find all the similarities between lines and watch everything come out to 360 when she calculated angles. She went ahead and finished her History reading, too, then grabbed her drawing book and moved to the windowsill. Looking down, she saw people bustling by even in the working hours of the day. The building across from her was full of men and women in swivel chairs, with laptops beneath their fingertips and coffee mugs at their elbows. Cars rushed by on the streets, less congested than at other times of the day, and voices floated up from the sidewalks below. Far off in the distance were the treetops in Central Park and the sun shining down on them.

Lily lowered her pencil to the paper and drew.

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Lying on her stomach on the floor an hour later, Lily searched through the rainbow of colored pencils around her for the green she had chosen. Of course, at this point, she might as well have dumped the contents of her pencil box out and just spread them around, because she had pulled almost every color out. Her drawing was an exact replica of her view from the window, glass pane included, except that certain pieces of the buildings had been changed to greenery. The office she had been watching before had one corner that was made entirely of grass, bits of the building around the green stripped down to the steel beams and columns. The people inside were still going on about their day, but everything was a bit brighter. The street was still the same, but the cars were all silver and white so they reflected the sun, and many of the windows set against the sidewalk were overflowing with moss and hanging potted plants. One little girl near Lily's apartment had a big handful of flowers that she was passing on to a homeless woman. The stop sign she was sitting against had been graced with a few small vines. Central Park was still just the same, and much of the city was left the way it was. The people who built it did so to give the world a new, solid place to come, and Lily didn't want to mess with that.

She was wondering if she had enough money saved to buy a plain aluminum frame for it when her mom walked in.

Mom stepped through the maze of pencils, laughing a little, to kiss Lily on the top of the head. Leaning over to see the drawing, she took Lily by the shoulders and congratulated her warmly on how beautiful it was. It wasn't colored all the way, Lily told her shyly, but Mom suggested she leave it just the way it was.

As Mom started getting things out to cook dinner, she handed Odyssey's journal back to Lily and told her that no one at work had known Odyssey. Even though they had planned to mail it back, Mom remembered at dinner the night before that she worked with several people from Brooklyn. Lily felt bad that Mom hadn't been able to find anyone who could take the journal back to its owner, but even so she thought maybe she could just take it herself. Or maybe they would just mail it.

After a moment's thought, Lily pulled out her pencil again and started to draw the notebook onto the windowsill in her picture.