And I need you not to do anything in the next five months that gets you arrested, gets you in a car with somebody who's driving drunk, gets you anywhere near a fake ID, or gets you on an airplane. Can you do that?"
"Yes," I said.
"I believe you," she said. "You look like a person who makes lists."
She gave my mother a list of documents as long as my packing list had been. I watched my mother fold it into her purse with the same care she had used to fold the letters from Abuelita, and I thought, she's going to cross every one of these off. She's going to make a fat X with her whole arm.
Before we left, Ms. Dobrin stopped me at the door. My parents had already gone down the stairs to the street, my father holding the rail.
"For what it's worth," she said, more quietly. "Your mother asked me, before you got here, whether it would have made any difference if they'd told you earlier. Legally."
"Would it?"
"Legally? No. There was nothing to file. There's nothing you could have done at thirteen that you can't do now." She pushed her glasses up her nose. "But that's not what she was asking me. And I couldn't answer what she was asking me. So I'm telling you, because I think she's going to carry it around for a long time, and you're the only one who can ever answer it for her."
That night at six o'clock, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop, and the screen filled up with ten sunburned faces in a room with screens instead of windows and the sound of the ocean coming right in. Dr. Brindle was there, in a big straw hat, and Oskar the graduate student, who was Danish and enormous and gentle and had a bandage on his thumb where a booby had bitten him, and Joaquín from Tucson, who was small and quick and wore glasses held together on one side with what looked like dental floss, and who leaned into the camera and said, "Are you Maya? Dr. Brindle said you're the reason I'm here. I owe you, like, my whole life."
"You don't owe me anything," I said. "Did you get the window?"
"23F," he said. "I took like four hundred pictures of a cloud."
The first night's data was a mess. I had known it would be. Two of the students had entered wing chord measurements in the beak depth column, and one had typed the date in a European format so that half the birds appeared to have been banded