I had written my application essay about that drought. I had written that what I loved about it was that the birds didn't know anything was happening to them. They just woke up one morning and the world had changed its rules, and the ones who were already built for the new world survived, and none of them had chosen it.
I thought about that, sitting at the kitchen table with the little green-and-gold booklet open in front of me. I thought that I had been very pleased with that sentence when I wrote it. I thought I would like to go back to the girl who wrote it and slap her.
"You're lying," I said.
I knew they weren't. I said it anyway, because it was the only thing in my mouth.
"I wish," my father said. "Maya. I swear to God I wish."
"I have a social security number. I have a—I had a job at the Stew Leonard's in the deli, I filled out the forms, I—"
"You have an ITIN," my father said. "A tax number. It's not the same thing. Your mother did the forms. You remember? You remember she did the forms?"
I remembered. I remembered sitting in the break room at Stew's last summer with the manager while my mother leaned over the table and filled in every line herself, in those same careful capitals, while I rolled my eyes and said I could do it, I was sixteen, I wasn't a baby, and she said, "Let me, let me, I know how they like it."
"My learner's permit," I said. "You said the insurance—"
"We couldn't take you to the DMV," my mother said from the counter. Her voice was very small. "In Connecticut there is a license now, for people like us. A different license. It says on it. It says on the front, 'Not for federal identification.' Everybody would see it. Your friends would see it in your wallet when you paid for your coffee. I didn't want—"
"People like us," I said.
Nobody said anything.
The thing about finding out something like that is that it doesn't come in as one piece of information. It comes in as a hundred, all at once, and every one of them is something you already knew. Every one of them had been sitting in the house with you the whole time like furniture. The eighth-grade trip to Montreal that I had missed because I came down with a stomach bug the day before, that my mother had been so sure was coming that she had already called the school. The way my father drove exactly the speed limit, always, with his hands at ten and two, even on 84 with trucks blowing past him and honking, even when I begged. The way my mother went still in the supermarket when a cop came down the aisle, just for a