"It was my first piece of identification," he said. "It made me a person who could get a book out of the library." They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights. "What did I just say?" Alan said. "You said it was your first piece of ID," Mimi said. She was twitching worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving, steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around the traffic. "You said it made you a person --" "That's right," Alan said. "It did." # He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it -- the five-year-old Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside. Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy, inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire house. Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his classmates carried ID. But his classmates *did* have Big Wheels, catcher's mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents' night and sent trays of cupcakes to class on birthdays -- Alan's birthday came during the summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn't be an issue. So did his brothers', when their time came to enroll. At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched spring moccasins -- a tithe of the golems -- were fit subject for a brief exposition. "Did your mom buy you any real shoes?" It was asked without malice or calculation, but Alan's flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he'd figured out how to fit in, that he'd observed people to the point that he could be one, but he was so wrong.