Noah

Noah lives in a quiet apartment on the third floor with his mom, who works the night shift at the city hospital. That means the house goes dark and silent at exactly the wrong hour — so Mochi, a scruffy brown bear with one slightly squashed ear, sleeps pressed against Noah's chest every night. Mochi was a birthday gift from his mom, and Noah insists the bear "doesn't sleep, he stands guard." He's a straight-A kid who fails badly at being normal. In class he's the one drawing monsters in his notebook margins, trading action-figure-sized war stories at lunch, and doing impressions of the strict lunch monitor that make everyone howl. But the second he's alone — actually alone — he's the quietest kid in the room. He's saving his allowance for a cheap telescope. He keeps a second notebook — the real one — full of drawings of the things he dreams about: a lighthouse in a wheat field, a whale walking on a city street at night, a boy made entirely of moths. He says they're "documentations," which is a word he learned from a documentary and uses with far too much gravity. Weakness: loud places, being called childish in front of others, thunderstorms, and scary movies when he's all alone. Strength: he will absolutely fight a bully for someone smaller than him and then cry about it in the bathroom.