The house’s ceiling was upside down.
            I lay on my side near my cot in the winter of 1935, gazing at the model house I’d placed in front of me. Roof tiles were painted on the ceiling, imitation plaster on the roof. I ran my fingers along the sanded wood, pulling on the door that opened backwards and locked from the inside. I’d painted the house red, the miniature wooden shutters dark green, the trim around the doorway cream. Across the room was my other model house, the right one, the one with the door that locked from the outside and had a real roof and whose carpet was in the right spot.
            My hair was beginning to fall in my face as I fingered one of the green shutters, my fingernails catching in the little indentations. All the other twelve-year-old boys at the Jonas Campbell Boarding School had asked me why I’d built a house that was all backwards; they’d asked me why I had to spend all my time building it when I already had a perfect one. The less inquisitive ones preferred to tease me, calling them girly dollhouses.
            None of the other boys had wanted to room with me. The dorms, covered in peeling white paint, were divided up into spacious bedrooms that were lined with cots. I was supposed to be placed with three other boys, but they all begged the schoolmaster to be transferred out and into another room. They were all decent enough kids—Henry had nice woolen red-and-gold socks that he pulled up to his knees during the winter, Jacob always stacked up his papers in neat piles, and Gerard could draw the best elephants I’d ever seen. I’d asked him if he wanted to help me with my backwards house, as I’d just mixed the paint, but he smiled and shook his head and said no thank you.
            One day later, Gerard and Henry and Jacob complained to the schoolmaster that my paint was stinking up the room and the fumes were making them feel sick, so they wanted to be transferred out.
            Now I lay on the floor, shifting my focus from the house to the closet. The edges of the house grew soft and then sharp, soft and then sharp. All was quiet; I was supposed to be in mathematics, but I couldn’t stand the teacher and I couldn’t stand the kids—the teacher ignored me and the kids stuck chewing gum on my desk.
            The floorboards creaked underneath me as I rolled on to my back, gazing up at the ceiling. It had been white once, I imagined, but now it was streaked with browns and grays and a single dot of white. Once, when Henry and Gerard and Jacob were rooming with me, Henry had thrown chewing gum up at the ceiling to see if it would stick. I’d stood there and watched him, not giving a single objection; I was glad I wasn’t the target for once.
            I fingered the folded letter in my pocket, the corners of the paper soft and rounded. I’d received it the previous day when yet another package came in the mail—a light blue sweater-vest with a dark chevron pattern, a pair of gray socks that I could pull up to my knees like Henry did, a white button-down shirt to go with the vest, and brown corduroy pants. My mother sent me packages nearly every month, along with a letter or two. But the letters, no matter how neatly handwritten they were, were just letters. They were just words describing how the prices at the market had gone up and how she fired the cleaning lady and did you hear about how hard the Depression is hitting all the unlucky folks, isn’t that too bad for them? They were words that equated to practicalities and statements, half-truths and fillers. Not a single word, not even Dear Emmett or Your Mother, gave any sign of love.
            She sent me shirts and pants, ties and caps, fabric for my building projects, books for mathematics, novels for enjoyment. She said she would send me a Swiss watch for my birthday, which was in a little less than a month. But she never used any more words to tell me how she was doing except “well”; she never told me about my father, whether he left or whether he was still there. She never told me whether she was okay, whether she needed my father, whether she needed me.
            She and my father had sent me to boarding school in South Carolina a year ago, far away from our home in Massachusetts. I missed the frigid winters, the trees with their thin, bare branches that stood frozen as newspaper images, the piles of snow that came down from the heavens, the feeling of my hands thawing near a fire, the white puffs of my breath in the freezing air. Here, especially in the summertime, I got nothing but mosquitoes and bugs and stifling heat and humidity thick as soup. More than once I wondered what made my parents choose South Carolina and not any other state, and why they’d decided to send me away in the first place. I spent hours figuring that out, putting the pieces together like the tiny beams of wood in my model houses, and the more I did the more I felt terribly alone.
            I stared at my school uniform hanging in the closet—dark blue blazer, black slacks, white dress shirt, blue tie. The only classes I had that day were mathematics and economics, my least favorite classes, and as I sat up I decided that I would not attend them that day.
            I usually spent time by myself, either walking the school grounds and admiring the trees or building models. The other boys called me “Wooden Emmett”, which was a two-folded joke: they always found me with little wood pieces in my pockets, and they believed I was dull and impassive as wood.
            But they didn’t know anything about me.
            If they knew how much I wanted my mother to show she loved me, if they knew I wished my father would love her again, if they knew I spent time at night behind closed doors staring at the backwards house and trying not to cry, then they would say otherwise.
            When my mother told me that she and my father were sending me to boarding school, she’d told me that it was for my own good. That it would help me in my future, which I saw through immediately. That she and my father were doing what they thought was right.
            “Ever since the crash, times have been growing harder. Unemployment is rising, and people without jobs are…”
            It was a male voice over a radio, backed by static and muffled through my door.
            I stood, opening the door and poking my head out into the hallway. The radio was coming from the room across the hall; four boys lived there, three Southerners and one Northerner—Melvin, Tucker, Sherman, and Thomas. They were generally noisy, all but Sherman. More than once Tucker and Melvin had held food fights and pie-smashing contests, characterized by snobbish thoughtlessness while the schoolmaster played news reports on economic collapse. Many boys in the school acted and thought this way: they all liked to sit down to a meal of T-bone steak and mashed potatoes, destroy the varnished, handcrafted backrests of their mothers’ dining chairs, and shoot rounds of bullets at deer just for fun.
            Sherman was the only boy I knew there who was of any interest. He came from a wealthy family in Alabama, he played football and soccer and volleyball, he went out into the river to shoot at birds—but there was always something about him that was a little different from the other boys. There was something about the way he looked in class, particularly the curvature of his brows and lips, that was characteristic of a curious student. I had the feeling that there was more to him than football and sports, that he would be the kind of person that you can truly talk to, that he would be able to look at me and see who I really was. More than once I’d considered asking him whether he wanted to help me build my models, but I never did.
            I tiptoed out into the hallway, the sound of the radio crackling through the still air. I saw Sherman’s shoes, his brown ones with the heels that clicked, sticking out from his long legs. He was eight months older than me and tall for his age, but his hair was still light blond and puffy like duckling fuzz.
            I stood near the doorway, watching through one eye. Sherman was sitting on his cot with his legs stretched out, listening to the radio. He was wearing a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up at the elbows, and his uniform black slacks. Usually he tried to comb his hair, but today it was messier than usual. The back was usually sticking up like a little boy’s, and today it was downright unruly.
            He was lowering the volume on the radio when he noticed me watching him. He stood and walked to the doorway, his brows raising. “Emmett?” he said, and then lowered his voice. “What are you doing here?”
            I looked past him at the radio, which was still playing to itself. “I heard your radio, and…”
            “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” he said in a forced whisper. “The schoolmaster’s gonna catch you. Or the maid, otherwise.”
            “They could catch you too.”
            “Yeah, but—” he paused and then shook his head. “Well, if you wanna cut class, then so be it.”
            His voice was changing, caught in the awkward stage between high and low, touched with a Southern twang that sounded sweet on some and awkward on him. I watched him as he walked back into his room and switched off the radio. My own voice was still high like a little kid’s, and I felt very self-conscious as I stood in the doorway of his room.
            He glanced at me as he began to make up his cot, throwing the covers on carelessly. “What’s wrong, Wooden Emmett?”
            I looked between him and the radio, my fingers brushing against the letter in my pocket. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said.
            “You look a little disturbed,” he said, placing his hands on his hips as he faced me.
            I shifted my weight, looking down at my feet. The letter was like a hot iron in my pocket: it was smoking, sizzling, burning me up. “It’s nothing,” I mumbled.
            He looked at me for a bit before patting the radio, speaking a little louder this time. “So, you said you heard the radio?”
            I nodded, wiping my nose.
            “I like to play it sometimes, just to think of something else.”
            I swallowed, pushing the letter deeper into my pocket. “I like it too,” I said.
            He nodded, looking me up and down. He was wondering what kind of person I was, I knew. He was wondering what made me different from everyone else in the school.
            “You can come in,” he said, motioning for me to come forward. “You don’t have to stand by the door.”
            I took a few steps into the room, the floorboards creaking beneath my weight. I stood there in the mild winter sunlight that was streaming through the window, running my thumb over the soft edges of the letter.
            “Why don’t the people on the radio talk about all the problems?” I asked Sherman.
            He knit his brows as he leant against the wardrobe. “How do you mean?”
            “They don’t talk about the problems. The towns that keep popping up. All the misfortunate people.”
            “Oh,” he said, “You mean the shanty towns.”
            “Yeah. Why don’t they talk about them?”
            He looked at me for a moment before he crossed his arms over his chest and looked up at nothing. “Well,” he sighed, “I reckon they don’t wanna tell us the truth. They wanna… spare us.”
            I swallowed hard, memories surfacing as my mother’s voice came back to me.
            “I guess they think it’s for the better, to protect us or somethin’. They think it’s for our own good.”
            I bit my lower lip, remembering the day I’d left for boarding school. Remembering my mother’s hug, the smell of fresh pine about her clothes, the whisper of breath as she said goodbye into my ear.
            It’s for your own good, Emmett…
            But what if it wasn’t for my own good?
            What if that was a lie, a flat-out lie?
            What if it was to hide things from me, to hide problems from me, to hide the fact that everything was falling apart?
            “Emmett,” Sherman said, “what’s that house you built, the model one? The one with the upside down ceiling?”
            I shrugged, looking down at the floorboards. There was a nail sticking out of one of them and I leaned my weight into it with my foot.
            “Why’d you build a house with everything backwards?” he asked.
            I glanced up at him before shifting my gaze back down to my feet. “Because not everything’s right,” I said.
            He stood up straighter, uncrossing his arms. “Like the news reports?”
            “Yeah,” I said.
            He nodded, drawing in his lower lip as if all of this made sense.
            “Why do you play football?” I asked him.
            His light brown eyes met mine and he crossed his arms over his chest again. “’Cause it’s fun,” he said lamely.
            “You don’t like it,” I said, looking up at him as he shook his head and looked away. “You like geometry, I know you do.”
            He shook his head again, smiling as if my words were absurd. “Nobody likes geometry,” he said. “Nobody’d be that crazy.”
            “Then why do you pretend?”
            He was staring at me now, his eyes transfixed on me with the beginnings of wonder and concern.
            “Why do you pretend and play football when you really don’t like it?”
            “You’re ridiculous.”
            “You don’t have to pretend anymore, Sherman.”
            He looked at me, his resistance dissipating as his face grew mystified. “Who are you, Emmett?”
            I pushed my hands deeper into my pockets, the only answer I could think of escaping from my lips. “I don’t know.”
            “You know everything about everyone else, but nobody knows—I mean, nobody knows anything about you. Why do you build all those houses? Everyone thinks you’re crazy for doin’ it, but…”
            I closed my eyes for a moment, the image of packages upon packages in my mind. Opening them again, I said, “Do you ever feel like you’re falling upwards?”
            “What?”
            “Falling upwards.”
            “What’s the difference between falling down and falling up?”          
            “Down means you can hit the ground. Up means you keep falling, but you never reach anything. You just keep falling.”
            He gaped at me.
            “Sometimes I feel that way,” I said, the swirls in the wooden floors staring up at me. “Sometimes I feel that everything’s backwards now, that it used to be fine and now it’s not…”
            He kept looking at me, his eyes distant. “The door of that backwards house, it’s—it’s locked from the inside, isn’t it?”
            I looked up at him, my eyes beginning to water.
            “Sometimes,” he said, “it doesn’t matter how backwards things are. Sometimes you gotta… sometimes you gotta let people through the door.”
            I felt as if my mother’s letter was disintegrating, melting into the fabric of my pocket, becoming nothing. I could feel Sherman’s eyes on me as I sat down cross-legged on the floor, my chest tight. I remembered when I’d left for boarding school, how my mother smelled like pine needles and my father’s hand was smooth and how I sat on the train as it rocked me to sleep, tears in my eyes and an icy shiver rippling through my body. I remembered the clear whistle sounding at every stop, the chug-chug-chug of the train clacking over the rails, the swaying of the boxcars. I remembered the pain that had mounted within me, gathering in my chest and arms and legs, emotions packed higher than the tallest skyscraper, the door bolted from the inside. I remembered all the sweltering afternoons I’d walked across the school campus, pretending to look at the architecture and the sky and the clouds, all the while aching for understanding and companionship while the world fell apart.
            I fingered the letter in my pocket as the pain lessened, seeping out of me like slow drips of rain. My eyes were filled with tears and I watched Sherman’s blurry image as he sat down across from me, resting his elbows on his knees.
            “It’s okay,” he said. “I have to—I have to let people in, too.”
            I blinked, a tear slipping down my cheek.
            “I’ll help you build a house,” he said. “I’ll help you build another house, how’s that?”
            His hair was a shock of yellow in my watery eyes, his shirt and pants blobs of black and white. But he was smiling at me, smiling like nobody had done ever since I left home.
            “That sounds good to me,” I said quietly, a smile making its way onto my lips.
            “Not backwards this time,” he said.
            “Not backwards,” I repeated.
            “Deal?” he said, holding out his hand.
            I put my hand out and we shook.