Teresa was six when the pigeons started talking to her.

 

In their cooing, bird-brained way—not really words and language, but ideas and images—they’d bring her their whispers of that electrical line there, third from the top was the best place to roost in the middle of the day, that space there was a safe spot to sit for hours (which Teresa knew was Mr. Garraughty’s crumbly old chimney), and the best of all scavenging was to be found next to the McDonald’s dumpsters two blocks away.

 

She cooed back, but they never seemed to understand.

 

The raccoons muttered of the wonders to be found in the alley garbage cans, the rats squeaked of the safety in the tunnels under her family’s garage, the possums hissed their pleasure at the comfort and luxury to be found beneath the Marzke’s deck, the alley cats yowled tales of their hunts.

 

After months of practice fueled by boredom and the pointlessness of school—what did she care what nine plus nine made?—she figured the trick of splitting herself between body and mind, and letting the inside eye ride along with the bats and the sparrows and the stray dogs. Oh, such eyes and ears and noses! For weeks, her head ached from trying to walk without wings, from trying to smell everywhere a shoe had been.

 

At eight, she began to hear the song of lost things when she fished a dented, scraped, rusty license plate out of the gutter.

 

“Teresa, put it back,” her mother said, towing her by the wrist out of the street. She took it home anyway, certain she’d find the ragged edges of belongingness that fit the ragged edges she already had in hand, and the edges would slot together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

 

She took to carrying the plate around at the bottom of her school backpack, under the paperback workbooks, the blunt and broken pencils, the crumpled remains of homework, the stick she’d found in the park without any bark, and her plastic lunchbox.

 

Weeks later, in the grocery store parking lot, the humming in her bag sang in time with another humming in the lot, a big, blue truck parked down the way. She slipped from the backseat and out of the van before her father could stop her and ran, license plate held like a shield, to the answering hum on the other side of the lot.

 

And nearly tripped to a stop. The truck, which sang the other half of the song that fit the ragged edge she held in her hand so perfectly, already had a plate above the back bumper, all shiny and crisp and new. She traced her fingers over the shape of the numbers on both the new plate and the old, and considered keeping the one she held but, no, that would deny the truck and its license plate its wholeness.

 

She wedged the plate down the gap between the truck’s body and the plastic bumper.

 

When her father caught her, he swatted her and yelled. Don’t ever do that! You’ll get hurt!

 

At twelve, she dug her bare toes into the earth and began to dance the network between the trees. Bottomside reflected topside; branches and twigs translated to roots and feelers, and the trees, all the trees, were forever jabbering to each other. Not like it was with people or animals, but something deeper, something older.

 

The part of her that didn’t always need—or even want—a body chased those threads of tree-presence down the roots, from one tree to the next, ever wider and wider, till, hours later, she stumbled out of the bounds of her neighborhood park and back onto the concrete and asphalt of the city.

 

But the city, even, spoke its own tongue.

 

One of dirt and steam and grit, of speed and a never-ending wakefulness, of car exhaust and drive-through grease and laundry soap and the glitter of broken glass on the sidewalk. Forever moving, moving, moving—the city had somewhere to go, somewhere to be, and always not here.

 

She lost herself in the subway, in the hum of electricity in the live rail, in the constant kthunk-kthunk-kthunk of train wheels on the tracks, in the soft voice announcing the stops over the speakers. The ebb and the flow of the people, stepping on, stepping off. Rush hour. The dead quiet spaces around midnight. Round and round and round, hopping transfers to keep from reaching the end of the line.

 

Her parents reported her missing. The police caught her in the middle of her endless circuit through the downtown heart of the train lines.

 

She lied and said she had run away, stayed with a friend. They told her she’d been gone for two days and didn’t she realize how worried her parents were? How was everything at home? At school? Was she running away from something? Did she feel unsafe? Okay, she said. Okay, and no, and no, but she’d forgotten to eat during the trance, could she have some of those cookies on the table?

 

Her parents grounded her.

 

She slipped her prison by riding the eyes of a passing seagull.

 

Afterward, she always brought along a battery-powered alarm clock to wake her from the trance of the train wheels when it came time to go home. Still, the city whispered for her to lose herself in the train lines, the bus routes, the rapid weave of the traffic along the arteries of the highways. The freight trains at three in the morning, shipping shiny new cars fresh off the assembly lines across the country. The dead radio stations that played nothing but static, except when you listened hard enough sideways, the static would form ghosts that echoed the whispers of the trees.

 

To fade into the concrete dust and car exhaust and leave behind all that made her human.

 

Her consciousness chased the electricity that danced along the underground cables. She trailed metaphysical fingers through the street lamps and traffic lights, popping one after another on and off and on again.

 

At fifteen, the paths of the sidewalks and the streets opened to her, different humming lines, humming frequencies, all layered on top of each other, all telling the story of the heartbeat of the city. A giant net that she could never, ever truly be lost in and, simultaneously, could always lose herself to.

 

She followed the ghost-trails of other people’s journeys. Listened for the slight shift in tone and texture that told one pair of shoes from another. She taught herself to recognize the walks of her neighbors, of Mrs. Morales, of Mr. Ross, of Aaliyah and Raphi and Ms. Jordan. Of the man who lived in the house across the street and worked nights, and the echo of his shoes on the sidewalk was the only glimpse she ever had of him. Of Mrs. Cruz and Mrs. Simpson and their afternoon pilgrimage to evening mass.

 

She took to marking her paths in sidewalk chalk, different colors, then streaks of colors, then mingling and blurring of colors to differentiate each path of each set of feet.

 

The rain washed it to mud; she turned to other mediums. Namely, a bag of paint-crusted and nearly empty cans of spray paint she had scrounged from under the industrial trash bin behind an auto-body and used-tire shop. Soon, the colors weren’t enough to keep it all in order, and she began marking lines and letters and symbols. Things she’d seen before, things she made up. Things that just felt right. In a month, she managed to have the whole of the nine-block radius around her home marked and sorted before a passing police officer on a bike caught her at it.

 

They fined her for vandalism.

 

That summer, her parents made her scrub every streak of paint off of every sidewalk she’d tagged. The task lasted well into October.

 

At school, classmates paired up, broke up, paired up again—different configurations, same designs. Fractals and webs, the connections invisible silver threads.

 

She was always the odd one out. Always the third one, the other friend, the shadow, trailing along behind.

 

Freak.

 

At seventeen, a friend of her mother’s found her that job at the neighborhood grocery store. Part-time, afterschool, minimum wage. Smile, scan items, shunt them down the conveyor belt to Shawn to bag. Take the money, input the amount, make the change. Always accurate change. Always count it out.

 

Numbers flowed between her fingers like ribbons of sand. She never did see the point of nickels. Less than dimes yet twice the size. Like fat, silver pennies.

 

And always, always, always the endless hum of the city…

 

…the texture of the sidewalks…

 

…the smell of cooking grease and hot asphalt...

 

…the sound of rain overflowing the gutters…

 

…the rattle-chunk-chunk-chunk of train wheels...

 

The store manager asked her to come into the back office the next Monday. Her name was Claire, printed nice and neat on the little metal plate held over her heart by magnetic backing. Asked if there was anything wrong, if Teresa had any questions about anything, was she sure she knew how to use the cash register because, well, she seemed a little… distracted, and customers had complained about wrong change and Ted, one of the regulars from down the road, had a receipt charging for a jar of pickles he’d neither wanted nor received. Was she sure, really sure, absolutely sure, everything was all right? Because, of course, the store would be disappointed—the store, as if the store were a person, a single entity made of brick and concrete and faded linoleum tiles—but the store would be disappointed to lose a new employee so soon.

 

She shifted in her chair, her head pulling, pulling, pulling to turn, to face the door, to face the call of magic.

 

A week later, Claire fired her.

 

She hid it from her parents. Her mother continued to drive her, dressed in cheap black slacks and white shirts. Once the taillights of the truck turned the corner, she ducked around the side of the building, through the alley, and sequestered herself in the library for the four hours of her nonexistent shift.

 

In the library’s quiet room, in those battered, threadbare recliners, the springs pressing their outlines on the undersides of the cushions, the reclining levers broken off stubs, surrounded by the smell of dust and paper and dry, whispery mold, she let herself sink into that other awareness, the one of the thrumming, humming all-connectedness of the city.

 

Tried to capture that sound, that perfect sound, with her imperfect, human vocal chords.

 

It never worked. But sometimes, she thought, she got a little bit closer, yet it was always just slightly out of tune.

 

At nineteen, she found herself divided, caught between the humdrum of expectation and the glories of magic.

 

Go to college, expectation said, get a degree, start a career. Go achieve, go become, go learn to be who you are when you are an adult. Do something, be something, but most of all, leave this dead-end neighborhood. Finish high school—don’t you dare drop out—and go to college—there’s scholarships for bright girls like you!—get a job—any job but make sure it’s a good one—and stop all this nonsense with spray paint and song and getting lost. It wouldn’t lead anywhere good.

 

Be like your aunt, go into business.

 

Be like your older cousin, become a doctor.

 

And her younger sister, saying, “Te-ree-sa, why are you always so weird?”

 

Tighter and tighter, the two sides pulled, stretching her out ever wider between, stretching her like emotional taffy. Be the self her parents dreamed for her, or be the self in love with the magic that hummed beneath her feet, that laced every breath, that harmonized with parts of her soul like nothing else could.

 

Be one, be the other.

 

But you can’t be both.

 

Why can’t I be both?

 

What were jobs and careers when the city sang her to sleep with the cry of sirens and the rumble of freight trains and the endless swish of tires on asphalt? What was a paycheck when the pigeons and the rats and the cats had already taught her what she needed to be free, truly free? What was adulthood when the trees had long ago shown her the deeper web of the world, the truth of what hid beneath the earth and what reached for the sky?

 

What was life, when she already had so much life?

 

Then go find more life, the magic of the world whispered, the wisdom of the tree roots hummed. Go find more life, different life. Feel it, experience it, live it in all its vast permutations, for everywhere was a different here. For life and magic were reflections and refrations of each other, but the real challenge was to find the balance in between.

 

And so she left.

 

To be more like herself.

 

To be more like magic.