We all knew she was different and you would think we would have made fun of her, but that’s not what happened. Instead we all went pretty much out of our way to behave like normal. The teachers, too, didn’t make a big thing out of mispronouncing her name, just asked her what she wanted to be called and she said Lisa. We didn’t talk to her much but we didn’t not talk to her. For example if she would turn to you in class and whisper about what’s today’s date, you would whisper it back to her and she’d scrawl it at the top of her paper and that would be that. She was forgetful about names and dates and the words to the clean-up songs. She especially had trouble with birthdays. Her face would do this squeezing thing each time somebody brought in cupcakes. You could tell she couldn’t figure out how it was someone’s birthday again when birthdays were supposed to only happen once a year. We never did a birthday thing for her, but on the last day of class when we did cupcakes for all the summer birthdays, somebody made some extra ones for her, with green icing with little black dots. It was like that. People were mostly nice to her.

For a while we thought she didn’t know anything, because she never raised her hand in class. Then we realized the thing she was waving was the closest she could come to a hand. It was kind of flimsy, like a spiderweb, and you almost couldn’t see it unless you knew to look for it. Once the teachers caught on they were calling on her all the time, and it turned out she knew everything they knew, except sometimes she knew it differently. Like they would ask who knew the three types of rocks and she would list six types of rocks, igneous metamorphic oortian kuiperian and so on. The teachers never addressed the extra stuff in her answers, just brightly said, “Thank you, Lisa,” and then if any of us raised our hands and asked about what was kuiperian rock, they would say we’d study those next year in fourth grade.

You could tell the teachers were always keeping an eye to see if anybody was bullying her, and how they made sure she had a partner for the science projects. She was definitely not the most unpopular kid in the third grade, because that was Mikey Buttedahl, who was always asleep and smelled like dead cats. It’s true that nobody sat next to Lisa at lunch. Watching her eat was something we all tried as much as possible not to do. She wasn’t messy, but there was a slurp sound you could hear if you got close enough that would make your bones chill. It sounded like if she forgot to stop with the stuff in her lunchbox then she might suck up the table and chairs and any third-graders that happened to sit near her, so nobody did.

At recess she sat on one of the benches near the swings. She had this way of sitting where you would never think she was bored. She was always in motion kind of, wriggling. Sometimes we made her part of our games, like where if you ran and sat on the bench beside her you were safe and couldn’t be tagged out. But you would notice most kids would get close to the bench but then let themselves be tagged out, like they couldn’t quite make it in time, but you would wonder.

I didn’t like running, so I sat on Lisa’s bench all the time. You had to give Lisa a berth somewhat because on hot days she would ooze a little bit, like water. But we sat close enough that we could have a conversation and I would ask her questions. Like, “Do they play tag where you’re from?” And, “Do they have bumblebees where you’re from?” She would usually think and suck her face for a while and then answer. I got the sense that the place she was from was like the ocean and sky mixed together, like the ocean except things were always getting sucked sideways and crashing and there was gravity, lots of it. I think she liked me because in the spring when it started getting warmer and the bench where she sat got too puddly for anyone to go near it, I would feel her watching me sometimes, and if I looked back, her flaps would kind of flutter, like an air conditioner turning on.

The last day of class she ate cupcakes just like the rest of us, and then on the first day of fourth grade she wasn’t there. People said she got moved to another class, like she skipped a grade. For some reason nobody said that the aliens had come to pick her back up, even though that was obviously what had happened. With Lisa gone I was back to being the second most unpopular kid in my grade, after Mikey Buttedahl. Some people tried to make fun of Lisa, a little bit, after she was gone. They would say how gross it was that sometimes her tentacles would drape across your desk if you sat behind her, and you had to lift them up with a pencil and they’d leave a big wet mark behind. Or on the playground if they didn’t want you included in the tag game they would say, “Why don’t you go hang out with Lisa?” and then you had to sit on the empty bench until the bell rang to go back inside. But it didn’t really catch on, and after a few months nobody mentioned Lisa at all or seemed to remember she had ever existed, and Mikey Buttedahl got held back and had to do fourth grade over again, so from that point on it was pretty much just down to me.