The Night Maya Looked Up

The Night Maya Looked Up

The Girl Who Wasn't There

The thing about being invisible, Maya Reyes had learned by the middle of October, was that it didn't feel like anything dramatic. Nobody tied her to a flagpole. Nobody taped nasty things to her locker. The popular kids didn't even bother to be cruel to her. Cruelty, she had come to understand, required acknowledgment. Cruelty required that you existed enough to be a target. Cruelty was a compliment, in its ugly way. Invisibility was just the absence of a ripple.

She was fifteen years old. She weighed one hundred and eighteen pounds, which felt like either too much or too little depending on the day. She had black hair her mother kept insisting she cut into something "more manageable," and brown eyes that she had been told, by a fourth-grade classmate who was probably trying to be nice, looked like "those fancy coffee drinks." She lived with her mother and her younger brother Mateo in apartment 4-G of a building in Queens that smelled, depending on the hour, like either fried plantains or the lobby's lemon floor cleaner. She was a sophomore at Hillcrest High, where she maintained a 3.6 GPA that no teacher ever seemed to remember when report-card season came around and her mother asked, "Did anyone say anything nice?" The honest answer was: sometimes, but never to Maya directly.

She had exactly two friends, Priya and Jonas, who had found her in middle school the way lost animals find each other in woods — by accident, by the recognition of a particular loneliness. They ate lunch together at the table near the gym bleachers that nobody else wanted because the heater vent above it made a sound like a small, persistent engine of doom. Priya was loud and certain about things. Jonas was quiet and uncertain about everything, including himself. Maya was somewhere in the middle, which made her, in the social physics of a public high school, mostly stationary.

That afternoon — the afternoon before her birthday, the afternoon before everything — had been a small museum of small humiliations. In English class, Mrs. Hassan had asked the room, "Who can remind us what the green light symbolizes at the end of *The Great Gatsby*?" Maya's hand had gone up. Mrs. Hassan's eyes had scanned the room. They had passed over Maya like a flashlight over furniture. Jonas had answered instead, less correctly, and gotten the nod. In chemistry, she had been the only one to notice that Mr. Greene had written the equation for photosynthesis on the board backward, and she had said so, and Mr. Greene had paused, looked at the board, said, "Oh. Huh," and then moved on without acknowledging that the girl in the second row had noticed. At lunch, Priya had told a story about a party Maya hadn't been invited to, and Maya had laughed at the right parts and felt a small, cold coin of something drop into her stomach.

By the time the final bell rang, she had perfected the expression she wore on the walk home: a face that was pleasant and absent, the face of someone who was definitely fine, who had plans, who was texting a friend on her way to something important. The face of someone who was, in other words, somebody.

She was not, on the walk home, looking up.

She was looking at her phone, where the group chat she was in — "sophomores who like books," a name Priya had chosen because it sounded more literary than "my four friends and me" — had been discussing a viral video of a capybara at a Japanese zoo that had escaped its enclosure and was now, allegedly, living in the onsen. The capybara, Priya had written, was living her best life. Maya had replied with a single emoji: 🫠. She had not typed the words she was thinking, which were: *The capybara is the only one of us who has ever pulled off the great escape.*

She got home at 4:15. Her mother was at work, an ER nurse who pulled doubles on Tuesdays. Mateo, twelve, was at a soccer practice. The apartment was empty in the way empty apartments are empty: humming with small sounds — the refrigerator, the neighbor's television through the wall, the building's ancient boiler doing its best — but absent of any voice that knew her name. She put her backpack down. She opened the fridge. She closed the fridge. She stood in the kitchen for a while, holding a single baby carrot, and then she put the carrot back, because even the carrot seemed to require more energy than she currently had.

She climbed the seven flights to the roof because the roof was the only place in the building where she could be alone without being reminded of being alone. The lobby had a security camera and Mr. Ferrara, who said hello. The hallway had Mrs. Yoon next door, who said hello. Her room had Mateo's old hamster cage in the corner, now empty because the hamster had died in July and her mother had been unable to throw the cage out, because her mother — Maya understood this about her mother and forgave her for it — was the kind of person who held onto empty structures in case the thing they had once held came back.

The roof, though, was hers. The door to it was technically locked, but the lock had been broken since the year Maya was in third grade, and the building's super had fixed it twice and broken it again and finally given up and installed a sign that read, in fading Sharpie on a piece of cardboard, ROOF CLOSED. NO TRESPASSING. (That means you.) Maya interpreted the parenthetical as a personal invitation. She had been climbing up here, off and on, since she was eleven. She knew which parts of the gravel didn't crunch. She knew which side of the water tower faced east and which side faced west. She knew that if you sat on the metal fire-escape landing two floors down and looked between the buildings, you could see a single square of sky, framed like a postcard, and that square of sky changed color every day of her life and she had never, until recently, thought to wonder why.

That evening, she climbed up because tomorrow was her birthday, and she had not been able to think of a single person to tell that to.

Not because she was sad. Or — not *only* because she was sad. It was more that the birthday, the way her mother had been whispering about it on the phone to her tía in the Dominican Republic, had begun to feel like an event she was supposed to perform. Tomorrow there would be a small cake from the bakery on Broadway. Tomorrow her mother would come home early and pretend not to cry. Tomorrow Mateo would give her a card he had clearly written in the eleven minutes before she got home. Tomorrow Priya would text her something affectionate. Tomorrow the world would, for the duration of a single afternoon, ask her how she felt, and she would have to come up with an answer that was both true and bearable, and she did not, this evening, have the energy to rehearse that answer.

So she climbed up. The wind was cool. The sky over Queens was the kind of city sky that was never truly dark — there was always a base layer of orange from the streetlights, and above that a bruised purple, and above that, only if you looked hard enough, the stars. Maya looked hard. She had started doing this recently — looking, *really* looking, up — and she didn't entirely know why. Maybe it was because the sky was the only place she went where she was not, by default, the wrong size. The sky didn't care if she was loud or quiet. The sky didn't remember that she had raised her hand in English. The sky was not her English teacher.

She sat down on the flat part of the roof behind the water tower, where the gravel was softer and the wind was broken, and she pulled her knees up to her chest and looked up.

There was one star that night that was brighter than the others. She didn't know it yet, but it was Vega, in the constellation Lyra, and it was bright because it was summer-late in its cycle, and because the air over Queens was unusually clear that night, the air being that strange combination of crisp and warm that happens in Oc