Love in English Read online

  We make our way to the picnic table, and Neo sits next to me. He’s got a bruise on his knuckle, but his all-telling eyebrows don’t tell any tales today. A couple of the others take the spots across from us.

  I pop a fry in my mouth. It’s delicious. I haven’t had much American fast food here yet, though back home I imagined that would be all I would eat. I take a sip from my drink. It is the size of a sand pail.

  I look in my bag and realize Mr. T. has given me the chicken nuggets. Neo has a burger. I shake the container of nuggets at him. He smiles. He should do that more. It changes his face in a way that’s almost startling, all light and sunshine. He has a little dip in his chin, and his teeth are perfect.

  He lays his palm flat and makes a slicing motion over it. The universal signal for half. He raises his eyebrows into a question. I nod. He opens the burger, cuts it in half, and hands me one part. I open the nuggets. I take one. Then he takes one. We fall into an easy rhythm until they’re all gone.

  I take a deep breath and stretch my neck up to the vivid blue sky. I love these unexpected gifts, these moments you just can’t plan for, a shiny penny in your path. My abuela always used to say to me, “Barriga llena, corazón contento.” Full belly, happy heart. Maybe Mr. T. knows that secret, too.

  A New Friend

  Art class is in a room that doesn’t look like it started its life as a classroom. Pipes run up one wall, and every once in a while a clanging sound makes me jump. But it smells like paint and clay and has high ceilings and decent light. The far side opposite the wall of pipes is floor-to-ceiling windows. The walls that run between the two are covered in portraits on canvas going all the way up to an irregularly slanted ceiling almost two stories above our heads.

  Everyone is in a uniform of black leggings and a loose top, or so it seems. Two guys have a game console under the table, and if the teacher hears the occasional ping or explosion from it like I do, she doesn’t say anything. Another girl texts on her phone furiously, like she’s having an all-out social media war of utmost importance. The teacher lets that slide, too.

  The thing I like about art is that I can shut off my brain. No talking, not too much trying to understand. The teacher shows us something artsy at the front of the class, and we spend the whole period replicating it. We don’t have art every day, and I look forward to it. We’ve made a print and an ink drawing. We’ve practiced shading by sketching fruits. Mine was a pomegranate, which was harder than I thought it would be. But it was an easy kind of hard, the kind with no consequences.

  The teacher starts handing out sketch pads, and as people in the front rows begin turning toward each other, I realize she’s breaking people up into pairs.

  My neighbor turns to me. She is wearing a crop top and leggings with studded ankle boots. “You and me,” she says. My eyes flick over her face to read if she’s disappointed or not. I can’t tell.

  “Speak Spanish?” she says.

  I let out a big breath. No one has asked me that here yet.

  “Sí. ¿Cómo supiste?” I ask.

  “You’re one of the ESL kids,” she says simply, in English, but I catch all the words. She jerks her head at the teacher. “Esta dice que hablemos.”

  I take a careful look at her. Metallic blue eyeshadow arcs around her yellow-brown eyes. Her contouring is runway ready, but perhaps a bit much for ten a.m. in a high school. Still, she looks like she’s preparing for the former and not caring so much for the latter.

  “¿Cómo te llamas?” she asks. Her accent is different, not from my country, but her Spanish is good. Relief.

  “Ana,” I say.

  “Altagracia.” She introduces herself with a toss of her curls, which seem to live independent of her.

  I smile. “Nice to meet you,” I say in English.

  “Tú primero.” She signals to my pad, indicating I should sketch her first.

  I look her up and down, wondering how I’m going to sketch someone who seems like she’s got the volume turned up on life. How to capture everything she’s got going on?

  She reads my face. “Okay. I’ll go first,” she says.

  She narrows her eyes again, studies me through her eyelashes. They’re so long I thought they were fake at first, but they look so real, they might just be. She says, “You have good skin. You should let me do a video on you. I have ten thousand followers on Instagram, you know. I do makeup.”

  I smile. “Gracias.” I take the compliment though I can’t imagine ten thousand people seeing my face. Everything about her screams “look at me,” whereas I spend most of my time wishing I could walk around in a helmet. What would it be like, not to hide? I didn’t use to feel this way, I realize. Hiding is new. Hiding is not me.

  “It is nice people . . . see you . . .” I tell her. That’s not quite what I mean. “I want people to . . . see . . . me . . . too.” Ugh, I’m such a nerd. Why did I say that?

  The sun comes out from behind a cloud and makes her eyes look almost see-through. She doesn’t blink. Her brash attitude leaves her for the moment, and she’s not her carapace of fierce nails and geometric side-shave. She’s just a girl with round eyes and a steady gaze full of curiosity and another thing. What is it? Not pity but a distant relative, something closer to protectiveness.

  “I can help with that,” she says in English, and for once I understand every word.

  One Thousand Paper Tow Trucks

  Over the last few weeks, Altagracia has kept her word, and we’ve hung out a few times. She took me to Green Man, a café in town where I got the most enormous sundae I’ve ever seen. Sitting with her feels a little like having a spotlight turned on, and suddenly I remember what it’s like to have everyone say hello when they go by. It’s just Altagracia’s reflected light, since she’s the one they all know, but it feels good. I’ll take being a moon over being a black hole any day.

  My English is getting better, little by little; Mr. T. gave me an A on my poem. He didn’t write any comments on it, so I’m not sure what he liked about it. Since then, he’s had us turn in a few more assignments. The more I write in English, the more comfortable I get. Sometimes, if I let myself feel words instead of focusing on them hard, I see inside their shell into something familiar. Precious and precioso. Arbol and arboreal. Others are entirely foreign but hold a little pearl of surprise in them, like the word “beautiful.” How better to say that than “full of beauty”? English holds gifts and challenges. I think about it all the time, like a constantly unraveling mystery. It’s hard to turn it off at night, when it’s time to sleep. There is still so much to learn. But there are so many words that are mysteries to me, keeping me from saying everything I want to say.

  And then there’s math class, where, luckily, I can gaze at Harrison.

  I check him out from the corner of my eye. Messy hair in the back, like he left his house in a hurry. Stubble on his jaw. A blue button-down shirt and black jeans that make his legs look long. He’s distracting, every day in a new way.

  Harrison pulls out his box of papers, opens it, and picks one colored paper square. Yesterday it was a bright-yellow flower. The day before it was blue penguins. It baffles me, because all semblance of what’s printed on the paper goes away when he folds it into the bird shape. But maybe that’s the appeal. Only he knows what’s inside, the secret pattern.

  Well, him and me, although I try hard not to seem like I’m looking.

  He makes about three paper birds per class. He’s gotten more efficient, his nimble fingers handling the paper with more certainty. But even though he’s done in a few minutes, he stops at three instead of continuing to make them the whole class. Then he puts the blank papers at the bottom of the box, and the newly folded birds to one side. The box is getting more crowded since the first day he started.

  I keep the one he gave me in the front pocket of my backpack, in a smaller section behind the slots meant for pens. It’s just big enough for the paper bird, and I make sure not to put anything else there so it won’t get w
rinkled or torn. I’m sure he’s forgotten that he made it for me, but it makes me happy that it’s there, the first tangible sign of friendship I got here.

  The teacher turns away from the board just long enough to say, “Study time!” We are having a test tomorrow. She steadfastly avoids talking to us if she can help it. I reach into my backpack for a pencil to work the practice problems.

  Harrison leans over and whispers, “You still have the origami I made you.”

  I look down at my bag. I thought it was tucked in, but it was visible when I reached for the pencil. Mortifying. I learned that word the second week I was here, when I saw it in a passage in class and looked it up. It’s a perfect word, so close to the Spanish word for death, muerte. Because isn’t embarrassment a little like dying inside?

  I smile weakly at him.

  “I’m making them for my sister,” he says. I turn to face him. His eyes make their way around my face, to my neck. Heat creeps up there.

  “Your sister? How old?” I ask. I sound like a child who doesn’t know the connecting words, a rusty faucet making noise as it struggles to run clean.

  “Oh, way older. I was the oops baby. She’s twenty-six.”

  I laugh. I’ve never heard it put that way, but I understand it instantly. Oops baby. Yes. My mother was la sorpresita. The little surprise.

  “She’s getting married. Her fiancé is from Japan,” he adds. I glance up at the front of the room to see if the teacher is watching. I catch a flash of straight black hair turning away. The girl who watched us the other day. She whispers something to the girl with the straight bangs, one of the Very American Girls. The teacher is busy pretending the whole class isn’t chatting.

  “Japan?”

  “She went to study abroad there one year, fell in love. She’s getting married in a few months. That’s why the ########.”

  “The . . .” He used a word I didn’t understand.

  He pulls out his notebook, writes it with his steady handwriting, turns it around for me to see. C-R-A-N-E-S. He pantomimes folding paper.

  Oh. The folded things he’s making. Cranes must be another word for folded paper creatures.

  “You will bring . . . cranes? To sister?”

  “Yes. I was googling how . . . I just wanted to do something ############## ######## for a present. So . . .” He shrugs. “Cranes.”

  I hold up a finger and check “crane” on my translate app. Maybe that will be my word for today.

  It translates to grúa, which means tow truck. That cannot be right. I scrunch up my nose.

  “What?” he asks. I google a picture of a tow truck for him. “This is crane?” I smile.

  He laughs. “Man, that app does not always seem helpful, huh? It led me astray constantly when I took Spanish in middle school. Here, hold on, let me.”

  He takes my phone with easy familiarity. Then he turns it back around to me. A long-necked white bird with black tips on its wings flies against a bright-blue sky.

  Oh. Crane is a kind of bird. I laugh. How can a tow truck and a bird share a name? I’ll add this to my list.

  “They are supposed to be good luck,” he says. “It is said that if you make someone one thousand paper cranes, you will have good luck. And they will too.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ve figured out that if I make three per day, I’ll be done a week before the wedding. This teacher is totally out to lunch.”

  I nod. This teacher never eats her lunch in class, so I don’t know what he means there. But, okay.

  “I like ####### ########## #######. Kind of slows me down.”

  There’s so much I wish I could ask him about—does he have other brothers and sisters? What’s his favorite subject? How did he come to like that band whose sticker is on his box of cranes?—but I can’t catch any of the words needed to form those questions. They swim in my brain, some visible, some shapeless, but none want to coalesce into sentences. It’s so frustrating. It’s like someone stole all my words.

  The bell rings. Math is last period today, so it’s time to leave. He says, “I go out the Smith door. Which way do you go out?” A tingle runs up my body. The thought of walking anywhere with him makes my skin feel alive. I bite the edge of my top lip.

  “Smith door,” I lie. I didn’t even know the doors had names. But whatever door he’s heading for, I’m headed there, too.

  He gets up, gets his bag ready faster than he normally does. I sling mine over my shoulder. “C’mon,” he says. He walks down his row, and I mine. At the front of the rows, he takes a step in my direction, and I feel the warmth of his body, smell the scent of his clean clothes. We stand next to each other while kids stream out of class around us. He starts to walk, and I do too. We bump into each other.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says with a laugh. He holds out his arm. “Ladies first.” For a second, I want to grab his hand and hold it. Or pull him toward me, and we will have our first kiss here in our math classroom. Which is an impossible idea, of course. I can’t do that.

  But maybe one day the impossible will be possible.

  Same but different

  Someone mentioned the right to bare arms

  It took me weeks to figure out it was bear, not bare

  A girl was talking about high waste pants in the hall

  And I didn’t know what that meant either

  And when I finally figured it out it all came rushing over me, the foolishness of my confusion.

  Everything is a riddle.

  Content: the stuff that fills my ESL notebook. The things I write.

  Content: how I want to feel here.

  Close: what my father wants me to do. Close the door on everything that came before

  Close: how I want to feel. To someone.

  I want a piece of peace

  A week without feeling weak

  A scene I’ve seen before.

  I want to be whole, complete, unabridged, intact.

  When the Going Gets Tough

  Classes are not at the same time each day. They cycle in some pattern I haven’t fully figured out yet, something about A days and B days, all the way through D days. Today is a C day, and that makes ESL the last period of the day. I’m relieved to almost be going home. The hall is thick with bodies and people free a period early.

  Neo is almost at the door to our ESL classroom. I want to say hi to him, but I remind myself we’re not really friends, just classmates. Neo isn’t watching where he’s going, and it happens almost in slow motion: A boy with army-short hair is standing with his back to Neo, closing his locker door. His jeans have bright-red stitching, and his black T-shirt is skintight, an even-sided cross glowing in gold on it. I don’t know him, so I can’t explain the tingling of alarm, except that I know his type. He looks like the kind of boy who believes the world is the way it is for his benefit.

  The boy turns and crashes straight into Neo. He glares at Neo. For a sickeningly slow moment, he stands back and ugly things play over his face: disgust, maybe. Anger. I quicken my step because I’ve seen that look, and about half the time it ends up in someone taking a swing. The air between them crackles with something bigger than a simple accidental bump.

  “Watch where you’re fucking going,” the crew cut boy says. Neo holds his eyes steady, not escalating anything but not stepping away. Finally he turns around and goes into the classroom.

  Inside, Neo throws himself into his chair like he’s mad at it. I slide into mine. I can feel the anger radiating off him.

  Mr. T. makes his way to the front of the classroom. On the board, he’s written several lines:

  A bird in hand is worth two in the bush

  A stitch in time saves nine

  Have your cake and eat it too

  Put lipstick on a pig

  Don’t be a wet blanket

  “Hello, everyone, settle in. Today we’re going off book. The more I read your assignments, the more I realize one of the hardest things about learning English is understanding the phras
es that really just don’t make sense ###### ###### an app. Every language has them, ######### ########### in groups of two. We’ll keep these groups ###### semester, so you can get used to working together. I’ll hand ######## paper with ########. First I want you to talk to each other and ######## means. Then you can use your phones ######## in the back to look up the meaning. ########? Hopefully we’ll have a few laughs.”

  He pairs us up, and I get Neo. I can almost see the angry little cloud of squiggles over his head, still vibrating from the encounter in the hallway. Mr. T. hands us our slip. It reads: When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

  It’s got one of the dreaded “ough” words in it. I have made a list and none of these rhyme. Cough, tough, bough, although. It is baffling.

  I look at Neo. “You want to try to figure this out?”

  He shakes his head. His expressive eyebrows telegraphing universal frustration, his head clearly still out in the hall.

  I stare at it. We’re supposed to guess what it means first, before looking it up. I look at the first part. When the going gets tough. When the road is rocky? When it is difficult to leave? When it’s hard to say goodbye?

  Getting nowhere, I look it up on my phone. When things get hard, people who are tough try harder.

  I breathe it in.

  I don’t know if I’m “the tough,” but I do know I want to be. I know that being here and learning English is tough. I know that it must be tough for Neo.

  “Hey, Neo?”

  He looks at me.

  I slide over the slip of paper Mr. T. gave us, then I show him the meaning on my phone.

  He looks at the words a long time. Then a slow smile spreads across his face. Not the kind that lights up his face, but a quieter type. He takes my phone and starts typing. For a second, I wonder what he’s doing when I realize he’s in the translate app. He’s writing me a note, translating what he wants to say from Greek to English.