A few weeks after Isabella began writing to Katherine, Princess School took a field trip into the city. The girls had been talking about it for days, although not because of the museum or the old cathedral they were going to visit. They were talking about the shops they would visit afterward.

The morning began at a museum, where they walked through rooms filled with paintings of people who had been dead for hundreds of years. Isabella looked at their faces, wondering if they had known someone would still be looking at them long after they were gone.

Afterward, they crossed the river and entered a very famous cathedral. The girls grew quiet without being told. Light came through the stained glass windows in pieces of red and blue and gold. Isabella stood beneath them and watched the colors move across the stone floor.

There were statues everywhere, but one made Isabella pause. Mother Mary was holding the dead body of her son, Jesus, across her lap.

Isabella knew who they were. Everyone did. But she had never thought much about Mother Mary as a mother before. She had always been Mother Mary. Holy. Certain. Someone in a story she'd heard a hundred times. Here, she was a mother holding her son.

Her head bent toward him, but the rest of her seemed strangely open. One arm reached outward. She wasn't curled around him or trying to hide from what had happened. Isabella stood there longer than the other girls. She wondered how a heart could hurt that much and still stay open. She wondered why God couldn't have stopped something so cruel.

"Isabella." Her teacher was calling.

Isabella looked at Mother Mary one more time, then hurried to catch up.

Their last stop was only a few streets away. A guide showed them old wooden doors with small marks where mezuzahs had once been. Some were still there.

Then they stood in a quiet square that remembered children who had once lived nearby. The guide told them that during the war, Jewish children had been taken from their homes and separated from their families. They were put on trains and sent to concentration camps. Most never came home. Isabella looked at their names and ages. Some were younger than she was.

The guide told them about people who had risked their own lives to hide Jewish families. And about others who had betrayed their neighbors. Isabella thought again about God. Wasn't God supposed to be able to stop things like this? She looked around at the girls from school. For once, nobody had anything to say.

Afterward, their teachers led them toward the shops, and within minutes, the girls became noisy again. Someone wanted shoes. Someone else had seen a sweater in a window on the walk over. Another girl knew a shop that sold bracelets you couldn't get anywhere else.

Isabella walked half a step behind them, listening. They talked about the boys from the school across the hill, and whose mother was the strictest, and a song everyone seemed to know the words to. Then one of the girls turned around.

"Why don't you say anything?"

Everyone looked at her.

Isabella shrugged. "Ummm. I don't know. I don't have anything to say."

They laughed. Not a mean laugh, exactly. Just the kind that closes a door. Then they turned back around and kept talking.

Isabella followed them into the first shop. The teachers stayed near the entrance while the girls moved through the racks in little groups. Isabella stayed close.

Then she saw something in the window. A tiny silver bird hanging from a chain, its wings open as if it had been caught just before taking flight. She stopped for a moment. She turned to show the girl beside her, proud that this time she would have something to say.

But when she turned around, no one was there. The girls were gone.

She found them outside, already halfway down the street. Isabella ran to catch up. None of them had even noticed she was gone.

It wasn't a big deal. Nobody had been mean. But it felt like a big deal to Isabella.

She stayed with them for the rest of the afternoon. She smiled when they asked what she thought. She held one girl's bag while she was in the dressing room. She told another girl the blue looked better than the green. She did everything exactly right.

On the bus home, Isabella sat by the window. She thought about the paintings. The stained glass. Mother Mary. The names in the square. The girls laughing. The silver bird. All of it had happened on the same day. Somehow, her mind kept returning to the girls.

That made her feel ashamed. She had stood in a square remembering children who never got to grow up, and she was upset because some girls had laughed and walked away without her. Compared to what she'd seen that day, this was nothing.

It shouldn't hurt. Nothing this small should hurt. But it did.

That night, Isabella opened her notebook.

Dear Katherine,

She stopped. Then wrote:

I think there might be something wrong with me.

She stared at the sentence. Usually, once she started writing to Katherine, the words came easily. Tonight they came all at once.

She wrote about the girls laughing. She wrote that they probably hadn't even noticed she wasn't with them. Then she wrote that maybe they had. She wrote that she'd always been strange. Then crossed out always.

She wrote: Nobody wanted me there.

She stopped. Nobody had said that.

Isabella looked at the sentence again. Nobody wanted me there. She crossed out nobody. Then she crossed out wanted. She didn't know what was true anymore, so she started over.

They left the shop without me.

She read it. That was true. Underneath it, she wrote:

I thought it meant they didn't want me.

She read that too. Something about the two sentences looked different sitting there. The first was what happened. The second was what happened inside her. Both hurt. But they weren't the same thing.

For one second, Isabella could see the difference.

Then it hurt again, and she kept writing.

She wrote about the silver bird. The stained glass. The wooden doors. The children in the square. Feeling bad about feeling bad. Mother Mary holding her son. She wrote until her hand hurt, and until every thought she'd had that day was on the page. She wanted to be seen.

Isabella reached the bottom. She kept writing into the space where the three blank lines went, right down to the edge of the paper. There was no room for Katherine to answer.

Isabella closed the notebook and went to sleep.

~

Awareness is one of the tools in the Love Map.

So much of what hurts us isn't only what happened. It's what we decide it means.

They left the shop without me. They don't want me.

Both can hurt, but they're not the same sentence. Sometimes we don't need to fix the story or replace it with a better one. We just need to notice that we wrote one.

Until next Friday,
Jenn