Chapter 1

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Cyrus Rastegar was eight years old, and he knew the number of many things.

He knew there were forty-seven tiles on the bathroom floor, because he had counted them while brushing his teeth. He knew there were twelve steps from his bedroom door to the kitchen table, because he had counted them every morning for as long as he could remember. He knew there were exactly one hundred and nine books on the shelf in the living room, because his mother had let him count them one rainy Saturday, and she had not hurried him even once.

Cyrus's room was a careful place. His pencils lived in a blue cup, sharp end down, and there were eight of them. His T-shirts were folded in three stacks of five. His model airplanes hung from the ceiling on pieces of fishing line, each one pointing the same direction, because it bothered him when they faced different ways. A weighted blanket, soft and heavy like a hug that stayed, lay folded at the foot of his bed.

On his desk sat a notebook with a dark blue cover. Inside, in his careful print, were lists. Lists of numbers. Lists of things Cyrus had counted.

His mother, Mitra, said Cyrus's brain liked to organize the world into rows. His father, Darius, said it was like Cyrus had a map inside him that the rest of them did not have. Cyrus did not know if that was true. He only knew that when he counted things, the world became quieter, and his thoughts stopped bumping into each other like too many people in a small room.

"Good morning, stargazer," his mother said, kissing the top of his head.

That was his nickname. Stargazer. She called him that because, when he was four, she had taken him out to the porch one cold night and held him in her arms and pointed up at the sky. She had said, "Look, Cyrus. Look how many." And he had not stopped looking for a long, long time.

"Today is Monday," Cyrus said to his cereal.

"That's right," his mother said.

"Monday has a science lesson. Science is at ten forty. The class has twenty-two students. There are three windows on the wall of my classroom."

"I remember," his mother said. She sat down across from him with her tea. The steam rose in a little curl.

Cyrus liked his mother's tea. The smell of it reminded him of his grandmother's house, where rugs with red flowers covered the floor, and where his grandmother sang songs in a language called Persian that rolled like water over stones. His grandmother called him joon, which meant dear one, which meant loved.

"Remember, joonam," his mother said, "if it feels too loud today, you know what to do."

"Breathe the square," Cyrus said. That was the trick Ms. Adeyemi had taught him. Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, hold for four. It drew a square in his chest. Squares were a good shape. They had four sides that were all the same, and nothing was more orderly than that.

"That's right."

His father came into the kitchen, his tie half-knotted. "Cyrus, my friend, you have the look of a boy ready for Monday."

"I have the look of a boy ready for Monday," Cyrus repeated. He liked repeating his father's sentences. It was like catching a ball his father had thrown, and then throwing it back.

His father smiled. He ruffled Cyrus's hair, which Cyrus usually did not love, but he had decided long ago that his father's hand did not count as strange, because his father was home, and home was safe.

Cyrus put on his backpack. He counted the things inside. Lunchbox, one. Notebook, one. Pencil case, one. Reading book, one. Small silver star he kept in the front pocket, one. The star was a keychain his grandmother had given him. He did not use it for keys. He used it for remembering.

Outside, the sky was the color of pale blue paint just slightly watered down. A breeze moved through the little tree by their walkway, and Cyrus stopped at the bottom step to count the leaves that fell. Three. Four. Five.

"Cyrus," his mother called gently. "The bus."

He nodded. He would finish counting later. The leaves would still be there.

He walked to the corner, careful not to step on the cracks, because stepping on cracks made the pattern uneven, and uneven patterns made him feel like his shirt was on inside out. His mother waved from the porch. Cyrus waved back in three small waves. Three was a good number. It was triangular, and triangles were strong.

At school, before the bell rang, Cyrus stood beside the long brick wall of the building and put his hand against it. The bricks were warm in the morning sun. They were red-brown, each one about the size of a loaf of bread, and they ran in neat rows from the ground up to the roof.

Cyrus began to count. It was his morning ritual. He had counted them a hundred times, and every time the answer was the same, and that was the best part. The sameness. The world being what it had been yesterday.

"Eight hundred and forty-three," he whispered, when he reached the last brick near the corner.

The wall always held eight hundred and forty-three. The wall would always hold eight hundred and forty-three. He put his palm flat against it, closed his eyes for one second, and then turned to walk to the door.

Behind him, a voice said, "Why are you touching the wall?"

Cyrus kept walking. He did not always know what to say to voices. Sometimes the words he needed were on a high shelf inside him, and he could not reach them fast enough.

The bell rang. Cyrus hurried inside, not because he was afraid, but because the bell meant it was time, and time was one of the rules.

Room 12 had three windows. Cyrus knew this. He also knew that there were twenty-two desks, one teacher's desk, a reading corner with a beanbag and eleven books on the shelf, a whiteboard with four markers (red, blue, green, and black), and a small cactus in a yellow pot that Ms. Adeyemi had named Mr. Prickles.

Ms. Adeyemi was tall. Her voice was low and warm, like the bottom note on a piano. She wore her hair in long braids that sometimes had small gold beads at the ends, and the beads made a soft click-click when she turned her head. Cyrus liked that sound. It was a sound with a pattern.

"Good morning, Room 12," Ms. Adeyemi said.

"Good morning, Ms. Adeyemi," the class replied.

Cyrus did not say it. His voice did not always come when called, especially not in the morning, when his throat still felt like a door that was stuck. Ms. Adeyemi had told him, at the start of the year, that he did not have to talk when he did not feel ready. "I'll know you're here another way," she had said. "I'll know by your eyes."

Today she looked at him as she said good morning, and her eyes said, I see you. I know you are here.

Cyrus blinked twice. That was his answer.

Math came first. Math was good. Numbers did what they were supposed to do. If you added three and four, you got seven every single time. Seven was not going to change its mind. Seven did not have moods. Seven was reliable.

Then came reading. Cyrus was a good reader, but sometimes the words slid together in his mind when other kids were talking around him, so Ms. Adeyemi let him sit at a small table near the window, where the sounds were softer, and the light was white and clean.

Then came recess.

Recess was the hardest part of the day.

When the bell rang for recess, Cyrus felt it in his teeth. The other children rushed to put their books away, their chairs scraping the floor, their voices climbing over each other like branches of a tree. Outside, the playground was a field of noise. Feet slapping the blacktop. Kids shouting. A soccer ball thunking. A whistle from the kickball game. Sometimes, on windy days, the basketball hoop net flapped, and the chain that held it clinked in a way that made Cyrus want to put his hands over his ears.

He went instead to the brick wall.

He sat with his back against it, and he closed his eyes, and he let the warm bricks press into his shoulder blades. He took out his small blue notebook. He began to count blades of grass along the crack in the sidewalk.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...

The counting built a soft shell around him. Inside the shell, the world was quiet.

He did not notice the girl at first.

She was standing about four feet away, her hands in the pockets of a green hoodie that was a size too big for her. Her dark hair hung in two braids. She had a Band-Aid on her knee. She was not looking at him in the way some kids looked at him, which was the way you look at something behind a glass case at a museum. She was looking at him the way you look at a new kind of bird that has landed on your windowsill.

"What are you counting?" she said.

Cyrus stopped. The counting broke, and he had to wait a moment for his throat to unstick.

"Grass," he said at last.

"How much is there?"

He looked at the crack. "I got to seventy-six before I stopped."

The girl crouched down beside him. Not close enough to touch. Not too far. A good distance.

"I'm Talia," she said.

"I'm Cyrus."

"I know. Ms. Adeyemi said your name." She tilted her head. "Are you counting the grass because you like to, or because you have to?"

This was an unusual question. Most kids asked why. Cyrus did not always know the answer to why. He thought for a long, careful moment.

"Both," he said.

Talia nodded, as if that made perfect sense. "I hum," she said.

"You hum?"

"My mom says I hum without noticing. In line at the store. In my sleep, even." She pulled at a blade of grass. "I don't know why. It just wants to come out."

Cyrus looked at her. He looked a little longer than he usually looked at people, because her face did not feel like a face he needed to look away from.

"I will count," he said, "and you can hum, if you like."

Talia smiled. It was a small, crooked smile, like a paper boat.

She hummed, very softly, a tune with no particular name. Cyrus counted. The recess bell rang before he reached one hundred.

They walked back inside together, not quite side by side, but not quite alone either.

That afternoon, Ms. Adeyemi stood at the front of the room and clapped her hands in the pattern she used when she had something exciting to say. Two short, one long. Cyrus liked that pattern. He had memorized it.

"Room 12," she said, "I have news."

The class leaned forward. Cyrus leaned forward too, a little.

"In two weeks," Ms. Adeyemi said, "our class will be going on a field trip. We are going to the Riverside Planetarium."

A ripple of noise went through the room. Cyrus did not know what a planetarium was. He knew plane, like airplane, and he knew rium, like aquarium. He thought about what those two things might make if you put them together. An airplane full of fish? That did not seem right.

Ms. Adeyemi saw his face, because Ms. Adeyemi was good at seeing faces.

"A planetarium, Cyrus," she said, "is like a theater. Only instead of showing a movie on a flat screen in front of you, the planetarium shows the whole sky on a great round ceiling above you. You lean back in your seat, and the room becomes the universe."

Cyrus's mouth opened. He did not mean for it to. It just opened.

"All the stars?" he said.

"All the stars. And the planets. And the moon. And the shapes that the ancient people saw in the stars, which are called constellations."

The universe. On a ceiling.

Cyrus's hand went to his pocket. He touched the small silver star that his grandmother had given him. He pressed his thumb along its edges and counted the points. Five. A star had five points. Five was a number that felt like a pointed thing, like a leaf or a hand with fingers spread.

"There will be a permission slip," Ms. Adeyemi said. "Please bring it back signed."

At the end of the day, Cyrus carried the permission slip home in his backpack as if it were made of glass. He put it on the kitchen table as soon as he came in. He smoothed it flat. He lined up its corners with the edge of the table.

"Look," he said. "Look, Mama."

His mother came over, still holding the wooden spoon she had been stirring something with. She read the paper. She set down the spoon. She put both hands on Cyrus's shoulders, and she looked into his face.

"A planetarium," she said, and her voice had a smile in it. "Joonam, they made a room just for you."

She said it like a joke, but also like a truth, and Cyrus knew the difference between jokes that mocked and jokes that loved, and this one loved. He let himself smile back, a small smile, not his biggest, but real.

His mother signed the slip right away, in her careful handwriting. She folded it once and slid it back into his folder.

That night, Cyrus lay under his weighted blanket and looked up at the ceiling. His ceiling was just a ceiling. White, with one little water stain shaped like a jellyfish in the corner. But tonight, Cyrus tried to imagine it as the sky. He tried to imagine stars appearing, one by one, until there were too many to hold in his head.

Too many to count.

The thought should have made him nervous. Too many of anything usually made him nervous. But this thought did not. This thought made him feel, just for a moment, like he was floating in a warm bath.

Too many stars to count, he thought, and he fell asleep smiling.

The next day, in the school library, Cyrus found a book.

Cyrus took the book down. It was heavier than he expected. He sat cross-legged on the carpet and opened it.

Inside, there were pictures. Oh, the pictures.

There were pictures of swirls of stars that looked like spilled flour. There were pictures of planets striped in orange and cream, and planets with rings so thin they could not be real except they were. There were pictures of the moon, full and round and cratered, like a loaf of bread that someone had pressed their fingers into.

And there were numbers.

Cyrus read a paragraph three times, just to be sure.

There are, it said, around one hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. And there are perhaps two trillion galaxies in the universe.

Cyrus closed the book. He opened it. He read it again.

One hundred billion.

Two trillion.

A billion was past the top of the tree. A billion was up in the clouds.

And the sky had a hundred of those.

Cyrus sat on the library carpet and did not move. He did not count anything. He did not speak. He just held the book on his lap and stared at the cover.

"Cyrus?" It was the librarian, Mrs. Park, who always wore purple cardigans. "Time to head back to class, sweetheart."

Cyrus looked up. "May I check out this book?"

"Of course you may."

He carried it to the desk as if it were a living thing. He tucked it carefully into his backpack. He zipped the backpack closed, and then unzipped it just to make sure the book was still there, and then zipped it again.

He carried that book like a lantern for the rest of the day.

The morning of the field trip came on a Tuesday. Cyrus had circled the date on his calendar in three colors, and he had crossed off each day leading up to it, and now there were no more days to cross off. The day itself had arrived.

He wore his favorite shirt. It was soft and gray, and he had washed it so many times that all the scratchy seams had gone quiet. He had his permission slip, signed. He had his backpack with his notebook inside. He had his silver star in his pocket. He had, in his head, a count of how many stars he expected to see (a lot) and how many seats were on the school bus (he was not sure, but he would count them when he got on).

At school, Ms. Adeyemi took attendance. She gave out bag lunches in brown paper bags. She lined everyone up by the door.

"Quiet feet, please," she said. "Walking feet."

Cyrus's feet were quiet. Cyrus's feet were walking.

The bus was big and yellow and loud. It sat at the curb with its engine rumbling like a giant cat purring. Cyrus could feel the rumble through the soles of his sneakers from ten feet away.

He got on the bus. He counted the seats. There were twenty-four. Forty-eight kids could fit, two to a seat, though not all the seats were full today because it was only one class. Cyrus sat in the third row from the front, by the window, where he always liked to sit. The window was cool against his forehead.

Then the noise began.

Not the bus engine. The engine was steady, and Cyrus was used to steady. The noise was the other children. They shouted across the aisle. They laughed at things Cyrus could not hear clearly. A boy in the back made a siren sound with his mouth. Someone kicked the back of a seat in a rhythm that was not even.

Cyrus's hands pressed flat against his thighs. He breathed the square. In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. The noise was a bright scribble in his ears.

The bus jerked forward. The driver turned a corner. A paper cup rolled down the aisle. Someone screamed, not a scared scream, a laughing scream, but Cyrus's body did not always know the difference in the moment, and his shoulders pulled up toward his ears.

"May I sit here?"

It was Talia. She stood in the aisle holding onto the seat back. Her two braids swung.

Cyrus nodded. He moved a little toward the window, even though there was already room.

Talia sat down. She did not say anything for a while. She took a small, folded paper from her pocket and began to open it. Then she looked at Cyrus and saw his hands pressed on his thighs, and she saw his eyes looking out the window very hard.

"Do you want me to hum?" she said.

"Please," he whispered.

She hummed. It was the same tune from the grass day. A low, easy tune that went up and then down and then came back around. Cyrus focused on it. The humming was a thread. The thread went from Talia's chest to his ears, and he followed it, and the scribble of noise became a little softer, because he was listening to the thread instead.

Outside the window, the town slid past. Shops. Trees. A dog on a leash. A woman in a red coat. Cyrus counted red things. Red stoplight. Red truck. Red scarf. Red umbrella (closed). Red door of a barber shop.

By the time the bus pulled into the planetarium parking lot, Cyrus had counted twenty-seven red things and had made a list of them in his head. Talia had hummed three songs without names. And his hands were no longer pressed on his thighs.

The planetarium was a building shaped like a half-sphere, like a bowl turned upside down. White. Big. Important-looking. Cyrus stopped for a moment on the walkway to look at it. He had never been inside a building shaped like a ball before.

Inside the lobby, the air was cool. There was a gift shop. There were posters on the walls showing planets and galaxies. There was a man in a blue vest who greeted Ms. Adeyemi and shook her hand.

"Room 12, please follow me," said the man in the vest. His name tag said ROBERTO.

They walked down a hallway and through two heavy doors and into a room that made Cyrus stop walking.

The ceiling was huge. It was round and high and curved over the room like the inside of an egg. The seats tilted back, so that when you sat in one, your face pointed up, not forward. Soft blue lights glowed along the floor to show the way to the seats. The air felt hushed, the way a library feels hushed, the way a church feels hushed, the way a snowy morning feels hushed.

"Find a seat, class," Ms. Adeyemi whispered. Even she whispered in here. The room made you whisper.

Cyrus found a seat in the middle of a row. He leaned back. The chair reclined with a small click. Above him, the dome ceiling stretched out gray-blue and empty.

Talia took the seat to his left. Ms. Adeyemi, he noticed, took the seat to his right. Not by accident. She had known where to sit.

The lights went down.

And down.

And down.

The room became dark in the way a room is dark when someone has turned out every single light. Cyrus's first instinct was to hold onto the armrest, because sometimes the dark could feel like falling.

But then the stars came.

Not all at once. They came in slowly, like raindrops at the very start of a storm. First one, bright and steady, directly above his head. Then three more, spread out. Then a dozen. Then a hundred. The dome was filling with them like a sieve filling with salt.

Cyrus's breath caught in his throat. He did not know he had made a sound, but a small gasp escaped him, a little "oh."

Ms. Adeyemi leaned toward him. Her voice was as quiet as the stars.

"There are hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone," she whispered. "You could count forever, Cyrus. You would never reach the end."

The stars kept coming. They kept coming until the dome was powdered with light, until there were so many that if you tried to see the gaps between them, you couldn't. The stars were the ceiling, and the ceiling was the stars, and Cyrus was below them, and somehow also, it felt, inside them.

A soft voice, like a kind grandfather, began to speak from hidden speakers. It told them the names of stars. Sirius. Betelgeuse. Polaris, which did not move, because the whole sky turned around it like a wheel around its axle.

It told them the names of shapes the ancient people had drawn with the stars. The Big Bear. The Hunter. The Swan. Cyrus squinted, and if he tilted his head a certain way, he could almost see them too.

He did not start counting right away. For a long moment, he just let the stars be there. He let them wash over him. It was like being in a warm bath. It was like being under his weighted blanket, but made of light.

And then, quietly, because counting was his way of loving, he began.

One. Two. Three. Four.

His mouth moved without sound. His finger moved in tiny pointings, barely lifted from the armrest.

Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

He did not count them all. No one could. Ms. Adeyemi had said so. But he counted them the way you might greet a crowd one handshake at a time, not to remember every face, but to honor that every face was there.

At one point, a tear slid down the side of his cheek and into his hair. He did not know why, at first. But then he understood.

The thing that made people call him weird was the same thing that let him love this.

The sky was made for counters.

On the morning after the field trip, Cyrus walked into school carrying his library book about the night sky. He had been quiet in the car home. He had been quiet at dinner. His mother had known not to ask too many questions; she had just touched his shoulder once in a while as she passed behind his chair. That was their way.

But in his chest, something was working.

He had decided, sometime during the night, that he would bring his book to school. He would show other people the pictures. It felt like a new thing to do. A brave thing. But also, it felt like a right thing.

At morning recess, Cyrus did not go to the brick wall. He went to the edge of the blacktop, where there was a bench under a small tree. He sat on the bench and opened the book on his knees.

He had not been sitting long when Talia appeared, as if she had been waiting to see where he would go.

"Is that your book?" she said.

"It is from the library," Cyrus said. "But it is mine for three weeks."

"Can I see?"

Cyrus moved the book between them so they were both looking at it. He turned the pages slowly, because some of the pictures needed long looks. He showed her a spiral galaxy, which was called a spiral because of its shape. He showed her Saturn's rings, which were made of ice and rock, not of metal. He showed her Jupiter's big red storm, which had been storming for more than three hundred years.

"Three hundred years," Talia said. "That's really old."

"It is older than America," Cyrus said. "It is older than Ms. Adeyemi's great-great-grandmother."

A few other children drifted over. First a boy named Sam, who loved animals and was always drawing foxes in the margins of his worksheets. Then a girl named Ruby, who had freckles across her nose and wore two different-colored socks on purpose. Then a boy named Jin, quiet like Cyrus was quiet, but in a different way. Then more.

Soon there were six kids around the bench, looking at the book.

Cyrus felt something he had not felt in a while at school. He felt like he was at the middle of something. Not on the outside. Not looking in through a window. In.

He turned another page. The book said, on that page, that the light from some of the stars we see at night is so old that the star itself has already burned out. Some of the stars we look at are ghosts.

"Whoa," said Sam. "So we see stars that don't exist?"

"Not exactly," Cyrus said. He had to think carefully about how to say it. Sometimes when he thought about a thing, the words came out slow, like syrup. "They existed. When the light left them. The light just takes a long time to reach us. So when we see a star, we are seeing it how it was. Not how it is."

There was a small silence.

"That is the coolest thing I have ever heard," Ruby said.

Cyrus's face grew warm. He looked down at the book. He turned the page.

The bell rang. The crowd scattered. But one or two of them said, "That was cool, Cyrus." And Jin, who did not often speak, said, "Tomorrow will you bring it again?"

Cyrus nodded. He could not quite find the word yes. But he nodded.

Not every day is a bright day.

The third day after the planetarium trip, Cyrus was in the hallway walking from the drinking fountain back to Room 12. His hands were flapping a little at his sides. He did not always notice when his hands flapped. It happened when he was happy, or when he was worried, or when his thoughts were moving too fast inside him and some of them needed to come out through his fingers. Today his hands were flapping because he was thinking about what he would show at the science corner. He had decided he wanted to bring his small silver star and tell the class about the five points.

Brayden was by the lockers. Brayden was a boy who was taller than most of the class and who laughed loudly, and whose laugh was the kind of laugh that usually meant something else was getting smaller because of it.

Brayden saw Cyrus. Brayden looked at his friend Marcus. Brayden began to flap his hands.

"Look at me, I'm Cyrus," Brayden said, in a voice that was not his own voice. He flapped harder. Marcus laughed, a thin laugh that did not sound like he really wanted to laugh.

Cyrus stopped in the hallway. His hands, which had been loose, curled up into fists. His face grew hot, and the hot went all the way down into his stomach, where it became a kind of sick feeling.

He did not say anything. He could not find any words at all. His throat had closed up again, like a door stuck by rain.

He walked past Brayden, very fast, and into the classroom. He sat down at his desk. He put his head on his arms.

He did not look up when Talia came in.

But Talia had seen.

Talia had been at the drinking fountain too, around the corner, and she had heard it and seen it. And Talia, who had not confronted many people in her eight years, did a thing she had not planned on doing.

She walked up to Brayden in the hall.

"What?" Brayden said.

"That wasn't funny," Talia said. Her voice shook a little, but she kept going. "You were making fun of him. He's my friend. Don't do that again."

Brayden's face did something strange. It went from a smirk to something a little less sure. Marcus was no longer laughing.

"I was just kidding," Brayden said, in a smaller voice.

"Well, kid about something else," Talia said. She turned around. She walked into the classroom.

She sat at her desk, which was across the room from Cyrus's. But she looked at him, and Cyrus, lifting his head just a little from his arms, saw her look, and in her look was something that felt like a warm hand on his shoulder.

He did not know, yet, that she had said anything. He would not know until later. But somehow he felt less alone.

Ms. Adeyemi came in a minute later. She saw Cyrus's head on his desk. She saw the color of his face. She did not ask him what had happened right then. She only put a small square of paper on his desk, very quietly. On the paper, in her careful handwriting, was a single word.

Breathe.

Cyrus breathed. Square breath. Four in. Four hold. Four out. Four hold.

The fist in his stomach loosened, just a little.

That afternoon, Ms. Adeyemi did something different.

She did not teach the social studies lesson she had planned. She put the social studies book aside. She sat on the stool at the front of the room, and she looked at the class for a long, quiet moment.

"I want to tell you a story," she said.

The class settled. Ms. Adeyemi's stories were the kind that made everybody quiet, even Brayden.

"When I was a little girl in Nigeria," she said, "my grandfather took me to hear an orchestra. Do you know what an orchestra is?"

A few hands went up.

"It is a big group of musicians playing different instruments all together," Ms. Adeyemi said. "There are the violins, which make a sound like a running stream. There are the cellos, which make a sound like a deep voice humming. There are the flutes, light like birds. There are the drums, strong like a heartbeat. There are the horns, bright like sunlight."

She let her hand lift, and fall, as if she were drawing the orchestra in the air.

"And my grandfather said to me, 'Listen, Folake. Listen carefully. If the orchestra was only violins, what would happen?'"

She waited.

"Only violins would get boring," said Ruby.

"Indeed," said Ms. Adeyemi. "Only violins would be a beautiful sound, yes, but only one sound. A whole sky of the same color. The orchestra is beautiful because every instrument is different. Because each one makes its own kind of music. And when they all play together, the music is bigger than any one of them alone."

She looked slowly around the room.

"People," she said, "are like an orchestra. Our minds do not all work the same way. Some people think in pictures. Some people think in words. Some people count. Some people hum. Some people feel sounds in their bodies. Some people feel lights on their skin like tickles or like hurts. Some people look you in the eye when they talk to you; some people look away, because looking in the eye is too much, too loud, like staring at the sun."

Nobody spoke. Cyrus sat very still.

"Every one of you," Ms. Adeyemi said, "is a different instrument. And the music of our class, the music of our school, the music of our whole world, is more beautiful because you are each different. If anyone ever tells you your instrument is wrong, they have misunderstood how music works."

She tapped her chest. "They have misunderstood what an orchestra is."

She did not look at Brayden. She did not look at Cyrus. She looked at everyone the same. But Cyrus, who noticed small things, saw that Brayden's ears were a little red.

That was all Ms. Adeyemi said about it. They went on to read a story about a kangaroo.

But at the end of the day, as the students were packing up, Brayden came slowly over to Cyrus's desk. He stood there, shifting from one foot to the other.

"Hey," he said.

Cyrus looked up. He did not say anything, because he did not know what to say.

"I'm sorry," Brayden said. It came out fast, like a thing he had to throw before it got too heavy. "What I did this morning. It wasn't nice."

Cyrus looked at him. He looked at his eyes, even though it was hard, just for a second.

"Thank you," he said.

Brayden nodded. He walked away. He did not quite look back.

Talia, at her own desk, saw this, and she smiled a small paper-boat smile. Cyrus caught her smile and sent one back.

The orchestra had added another instrument that day.

Talia lived in a small yellow house with a garden in front, and the garden had bright orange flowers Cyrus's mother said were called marigolds. Marigold, Cyrus thought. A good word. It sounded like a color and a gold at the same time.

Talia's mother, Mrs. Ortiz, opened the door. She had warm eyes and wore a shirt with a picture of a whale on it. She held out her hand to Cyrus, and then stopped, and instead gave a small friendly wave.

"Hi, Cyrus," she said. "Talia's been waiting all morning."

Cyrus smiled. He had read, in a book, that some people like handshakes and some people like waves and some people like to bump elbows and some people like a simple hi with no touching at all. He was glad Talia's mother had waved. Waves were one of his favorite greetings.

Inside, Talia had made a plan. She had made a list, because Cyrus had told her that he liked lists. On the list were the activities for the afternoon. Stargazing equipment check was number one. Drawing constellations was number two. Making hot chocolate was number three. Listening to my favorite hum songs (optional for Cyrus) was number four. Stargazing in the yard after dark was number five.

Cyrus looked at the list for a long moment. He felt a thing in his chest like warm soup.

"This is a good list," he said.

"Thanks," Talia said. "I wrote it last night."

They laid the telescope out on the kitchen floor. It was an old one that had belonged to Talia's uncle. The lenses were a little dusty, but they worked. Cyrus cleaned them very carefully with a soft cloth Talia's mother gave him.

They drew constellations on big pieces of paper, connecting dots they made with a marker. Cyrus was careful with his lines. He liked that you could invent your own constellation if you wanted. Talia drew one that looked like a cat and said, "That one is the Big Kitten," and Cyrus laughed — a real laugh, a surprised one, that came out of him like a hiccup.

They made hot chocolate. Cyrus measured the cocoa powder. Two spoonfuls. He liked measuring.

When it got dark, they went out into the yard with the telescope and a thick blanket. The blanket had red and white stripes, seven of each, Cyrus counted. The sky was not as dark here as it might be in the countryside, because they were in a town, and the town had its own small glow. But the stars were still there, waiting, and Cyrus pointed them out one by one as they came into view.

"That one," he said. "There, near the tree. That's bright. That might be Sirius."

"Sirius," Talia repeated.

"It's the brightest star in the sky. It's in the constellation Canis Major. That means Big Dog."

Talia laughed. "There is a Big Dog and a Big Kitten now."

Cyrus showed her how to count. Not all of them. Just a patch.

"Pick a square of sky," he said. "With your two hands." He held up his hands and made a small frame with his fingers and thumbs. "Now count just what's inside the frame."

Talia held up her hands. She squinted. "One," she said. "Two. Three. Four... oh wait, was that one a plane? Planes move."

"Planes move," Cyrus agreed.

"Okay. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten."

She let her hands drop. "Ten stars, in one little window."

"And that is only a tiny square," Cyrus said. "The rest of the sky is much bigger."

"How many are in the whole sky, total?"

"On a clear night with no moon and no city, people say you can see about three thousand stars with just your eyes. But the galaxy has a hundred billion."

"A hundred billion," Talia whispered.

They were quiet for a while. The blanket was warm. Cyrus could hear a cricket, and then another cricket, and then a third. He counted them in his head. Three crickets. Good.

"Can you teach me how to hum now?" Cyrus said.

Talia turned her head toward him. "You want to learn?"

"You teach me, I teach you. It is the list."

"It's the list," she agreed.

So Talia taught him how to hum. It was harder than Cyrus thought. At first his lips would not stay the right shape, and the sound came out thin. But Talia said, "It is not about being good. It is about making the sound that wants to come out of you."

Cyrus tried again. He let out a low hum from the back of his throat, and for a moment it wobbled, and then it settled, and then it was his. It was a hum that was his hum, and not anyone else's.

They hummed together under the stars.

Counting and humming, at the same time.

It sounded, Cyrus thought, a little like music.

A week later, Cyrus's parents had an idea.

"We should invite Talia's family," his mother said at dinner. "We have a good view of the sky from the backyard. Perhaps we could have them over for a stargazing night."

Cyrus put down his fork. He had been cutting a piece of chicken. He nodded slowly.

"Yes," he said. "I would like that."

"On Friday?"

"On Friday."

Friday was three days away. Cyrus made a list of what they would need. Blankets (four). Cups for hot chocolate (six, in case someone wanted two). Marshmallows. His notebook. His silver star from Grandma. The book from the library, which he had renewed.

On Friday, Talia arrived at six o'clock with her mother and her younger brother, who was a kindergartener named Mateo. Mateo had energy like a string of Christmas lights all blinking at once. Cyrus was a little nervous about him. But Mateo saw a cat on the back fence and ran to look at it, and Cyrus saw that Mateo was a boy who could be distracted by a cat, and he decided that was all right.

Cyrus's father had set up the backyard. He had spread three large blankets in a line on the grass, and he had put small candles in jars along the patio, and he had set out a plate of his mother's Persian sweets, which were sticky with rose water and dusted with tiny green bits that were ground pistachios. The air smelled like night air and sugar.

Cyrus's grandmother was there too, visiting for the weekend. She had her red coat on, because the evening was cool, and her hair was silver like a coin. She sat in a lawn chair with a blanket over her lap, and she smiled at everyone who spoke to her, even when she did not understand all the English.

"Joonam," she said to Cyrus in Persian, and she patted the chair next to her. Cyrus sat.

The dark came slowly.

First the sky turned pink at the edges. Then orange. Then a deep dusty blue. Then the first star winked on. Cyrus saw it, and his heart, which had been a little tight all day with waiting, unwound.

"There," he said, pointing. "The first one."

"Where?" said Mateo, tumbling over. "I don't see."

"There. Just above the tree. It does not twinkle so much. It might be Venus. A planet. Planets do not twinkle. Stars do."

"Ooh," said Mateo, impressed.

Soon there were more. Then many more. The sky filled in the way a page fills in when you color it with little dots.

Cyrus lay down on the middle blanket on his back. Talia lay next to him. Talia's mother lay on Talia's other side. Cyrus's mother and father lay on the third blanket. Mateo ran around for a while and then flopped down next to his sister, out of breath. Cyrus's grandmother watched from her chair, wrapped in her red coat, her eyes turned up.

"Cyrus," his mother said, quietly, after a while. "Will you count for us?"

Cyrus thought about this. Most of the time his counting was private. It stayed inside him like a secret garden. But tonight, with these people, with the sky like a great quiet bowl above them, he felt that his counting might be something to share. Not because anyone had made him. Because he wanted to.

"I will count to a thousand," he said.

"A thousand?" said Mateo. "That is a lot."

"It is not that much," Cyrus said. "There are a hundred billion in our galaxy. A thousand is very small."

He began.

One.

Two.

Three.

His voice was soft but steady. He did not rush. He pointed, sometimes, with his finger, though he could not keep up with his voice. He was not counting specific stars. He was counting the feeling of stars. He was counting the night.

Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Somewhere around forty, Talia started to hum along, softly, a tune without words, a tune that fit under his counting like a shelf under a book.

Around one hundred, Cyrus's father murmured, "Afarin, pesaram," which meant, "Well done, my son," in Persian.

Around two hundred, Mateo fell asleep with his mouth open.

Around five hundred, Cyrus's mother began to cry, very quietly, in the way she cried when she was happy, which was different from the way she cried when she was sad. Cyrus knew the difference. She did not wipe her face. She let the tears come and go.

Around seven hundred, Cyrus's grandmother began to whisper in Persian, and the whisper sounded like a prayer, and the prayer was the sound of a woman who had crossed oceans and lost and found and raised and held, a woman who had seen many skies, and who was seeing this one now with her grandson.

Around eight hundred, the sky seemed to come closer. Cyrus felt that if he just lifted his hand, he could put a star in his pocket.

Nine hundred. Nine hundred and fifty. Nine hundred and ninety-nine.

One thousand.

He stopped.

He breathed out. A long breath. A breath that had been waiting in him his whole life to come out under a sky like this.

Talia turned her head to look at him. "That was the best counting I have ever heard," she whispered.

"Thank you," Cyrus whispered back.

Above them, the sky did not pause. The stars kept being stars. The galaxy kept spinning the way it had spun for billions of years. Somewhere, a star was being born. Somewhere, a star was winking out, its last light beginning a journey that would not reach another eye for a thousand thousand years.

And here, in a small backyard in a small town on a small planet, a boy had counted to a thousand, and a girl had hummed, and a family had listened, and the universe, which cared nothing for clocks or for calendars, had made room for all of it.

Cyrus reached out his hand in the dark. Talia found it. They held on, just loosely, because neither of them liked too much holding for too long, and that was okay.

"Mama," Cyrus said. "Mama, there are more to count."

"There always will be, joonam," his mother said.

"Good," said Cyrus.

He looked up again at the sky that could not be counted. He smiled.

There was, he thought, a kind of safety in a thing you would never finish. The world would always have more stars. Always. There would always, always be more.

He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to feel.

Above him, the sky kept shining.

Inside him, the counting kept going, soft as a heartbeat.

And this whole wide universe, said the quiet inside him, is an orchestra you are part of.

THE END

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

Dear Reader,

Cyrus is a fictional boy, but boys and girls like him are real. Autistic children — and autistic adults — experience the world in their own beautiful ways. Some love to count. Some love to sort, or to spin, or to memorize train schedules, or to learn every kind of dinosaur by heart. Some speak a lot; some speak very little. Some feel sounds and lights more strongly than other people do. These are not flaws to fix. They are ways of being.

With love, Crimson Ark Publishing