I'm writing this down in the waterproof field notebook at the end of August, so I won't forget the order things happened in, starting with the morning my mother said, "Not yet, Maya," and my father came down the stairs holding the truth out in front of him like a candle he was afraid would go out. The fellowship ended two weeks ago. My name is on the data report, fourth from the bottom, alphabetical, right between a girl from Oregon and Joaquín, who has sent me a picture of a marine iguana every single day since, even after he got home to Tucson, where there are no marine iguanas, so that I am fairly sure now that he is just sending me the same twelve iguanas over and over. I haven't told him I've noticed. Yusra says this is how she knows I like him. Yusra has been, as promised, a vault. She has also started a group chat with herself, me, and Ms. Dobrin's office's appointment reminder number, which she claims is a joke and which I'm fairly sure is not.
I returned the orange pack to Mr. Thackeray in July. I knocked on the door of his little house on Lake Avenue Extension and stood on his porch with it, and I had planned to make something up, and instead I told him the truth, all of it, in about four sentences. He stood there in his socks and listened. When I was finished he took the binoculars out of the front pocket, and looked at them, and then he hung the strap around my neck.
"Those I'm keeping," he said, meaning the pack. "These, you're keeping. That's not a loan. It's a long-term research instrument assignment." He cleared his throat. "Come by when you start your college essays. I've read a lot of them. I want to read the one you write now."
The clock starts on November fourteenth. Ms. Dobrin says we have things in motion, real things, with receipt numbers and bar codes, and that I'm not to read the news about the courts more than once a week, which I am failing at. My mother reads it with me. We sit at the kitchen table and read it together, out loud, every word, and when it's bad, which is mostly, she doesn't say it will be fine. She says, "That's bad," and I say, "Yeah," and then one of us gets up and makes coffee. My father has started telling me things too, without being asked, at random moments, in the truck. The name of the street the workshop was on. The color he used to paint the borders of the tiles, a cobalt blue he mixed himself. The name of