Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  _______

  When Sarah walks out of three hours of meetings, the sun has already begun to set. As she makes her way toward her office she has one thing on her mind: Samir, a Syrian senior, cannot be made to repeat his final year. Forcing him to stay another year would be devastating to him. He has five days to make up his missing work from the fall. If he doesn’t, his whole school year will be lost and he will likely never get an American high school degree.

  Samir arrived at Sullivan in 2016 with a wave of Syrian students, all of them fleeing the Syrian civil war that has made refugees of almost six million people. Samir was already fully bearded when he arrived at Sullivan and looked like a teacher. Like many older Syrian students, Samir had completed high school in Syria but he did not have time to gather his documents when he fled the country.

  Even though he probably never should have had to enroll in a U.S. high school, Samir has registered at Sullivan on multiple occasions since he rarely sticks with school for more than a few months at a time. But Sarah advocates for him each time he comes back. Lately, she has run out of negotiating room. His latest chance, which began in September, would likely be his last. When Samir showed up to re-enroll at Sullivan at the beginning of the year, Sarah informed him he’d be “on the shortest leash ever.” No mistakes. No missing work. No fights. By January, Samir’s record was marked mainly by the exact missteps Sarah warned him against.

  Sarah first heard reports of a fight from other students. Rumor was the brawl started when Samir confronted a freshman American-born boy who he overheard cursing at a female classmate. Samir, who is broad chested with a square jaw, and who towered over the freshman, confronted the name-caller. Within seconds, Samir took a punch to the face. Shortly after that, a small army of boys descended on Samir.

  The fight was just one of several between Syrian boys and their Black American classmates, which usually arose from miscommunication and clashing egos. Often when such tensions boiled over, Danny Rizk was asked to mitigate in both Arabic and English. On one such occasion, an older Syrian sophomore was eating popcorn and joking around in Arabic in his Spanish class, a period that included both ELL and native English speakers. When the Syrian boy made eye contact with a Black American classmate, the American took the glance as a threat.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he told his Syrian classmate.

  “Suck my dick,” the Syrian boy responded.

  “I’ll fucking kill you.”

  News of the brewing tension soon made its way to Danny. But by the time Danny found the Syrian student, the sophomore had already left school and returned with a friend. One had a chain wrapped around his hand and the other carried a lead pipe, which he’d removed from a vacuum cleaner. The boy and his friend were used to fending for themselves while living in exile. Danny, who is sinewy but slight, pulled Antoine Livingston and the security staff into the mix. Both students were suspended for two weeks, and the school staff put a long-term safety plan in place when they returned.

  Most misunderstandings did not escalate to violence. Instead, Danny usually played interlocutor for smaller clashes like two boys bumping each other or volleying foul insults. When issues of race and racism arose, like when Syrian boys asked Danny misguided questions such as why their Black classmates were poor and violent, Danny did not reprimand their ignorance. Instead, he offered them a truncated lesson in American history. “Okay so,” he’d say, “when this country was started four hundred years ago, they brought people from Africa in chains. They would beat them and make them work for free. After two hundred years, they said the slaves were free, but they weren’t really. This country has always been unfair to Black people.”

  Race was not the only issue Sarah and her staff tackled in the ELL “womb.” They also discussed gender dynamics, a topic that elicited a variety of responses. Sarah, for one, wrote A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle on the office whiteboard when a senior boy insisted that women depended on men. Ihina, who was in the room, offered her classmate another perspective. “Y’all be thirsty for girls with big boobs and big heels,” she told him. “We don’t need you; you need us. We strong. We don’t need no men at all.”

  The most common discussions, however, focused on matters of the heart.

  Among those lovesick students who regularly came to the “womb” was Nassim, a Syrian freshman. On one such occasion, Nassim, who was tall and clumsy as though midway through a growth spurt, came barreling into the ELL office, letting out a series of anguished groans as he threw himself against the file cabinet and pressed his forehead against the metal drawers, leaning his entire weight against it.

  “This is really an emergency,” he explained to Sarah as he moved to the doorframe, bouncing his agitated body from one side to the other. “It’s so bad. It’s this girl in my class. She says she like me.”

  Sarah cued up the R & B song “Sukiyaki” by 4 P.M. on her computer. She mouthed along to the crooner confessional, holding the words “you” and “blue” just a beat longer than the rest.

  “Well, I write an email asking her if she likes any boys in the class,” Nassim continued. “She wrote back and said she liked one boy in the class. So I said, you mean me?”

  “What’d you do then?” Sarah prodded.

  “I go out of the class. I came here. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Honey, this is just your first experience,” said Sarah, “That nervous feeling you have in the bottom of your stomach is the best and worst feeling. Get used to it. It’s a good thing.”

  “I’m not excited. My body is all nervous. It feels bad, man.”

  “It’s haram?” Sarah asked trying to understand what he means.

  “Yeah, what if my brothers find out. They might hit me because they don’t want me with a girl. Not a Mexican girl. And they will start making stuff up and tell my parents.”

  “If your brothers do that, you tell me,” said Sarah. “I will call your house. Hell, I will go to your house. I will talk to your family.”

  By the following Monday, Nassim’s flirtation had turned to a relationship. Five days later, the romance had run its course.

  But when Samir told Sarah about the cafeteria fight, he wasn’t seeking wisdom. The senior spun it his own way: “One hero and seventeen hundred babies,” he told her. In Samir’s version, he was the hero standing up for women. The telling made Sarah laugh. Samir always made Sarah laugh. When Samir would regale Sarah, he’d often begin with the same opening line: “I have a good story. Enjoy.” Samir would amuse Sarah with reports of his father’s absentee parenting. “He thinks it’s just like watching a movie,” he’d say. “He watch and do nothing.” If his father’s behavior sounded careless, Samir never narrated it that way. He’d tell her about his brief affair with a Ukrainian woman. At first, he recounted their weekend-long dates at a Wisconsin golf club where the two would spend the entire day poolside surrounded by potted palm trees. When the girl broke up with Samir, he cried to Sarah. The breakup, he said, had been a stab in the heart. Samir also shared stories about long nights at his favorite hookah bar, Cairo Nights, and the time a police officer pulled him over for reckless driving. He was an endless source of new stories.

  The fight, however, came with more serious consequences. Together, Sarah and Samir decided he should transfer to Harry S. Truman Middle College, an institution that gives students like Samir the flexibility to earn their degree while still working full-time. But before leaving for good, Samir got one final chance. He could come to Sullivan and spend time in the library to catch up on homework, but he could not attend the classes. If he completed the assignments, he could likely graduate in June. It wasn’t an impossible proposal. Samir, after all, had been through high school already. He just needed to discipline himself to do the work. So far, he had not. He sat in the library falling behind every day.

  Refugee students can end up leaving Sullivan for any number of reasons. Oftentimes, families move. Sometimes students collapse under the pressure to both
attend school and work to support their families. Other students marry and simply disappear. Sarah will give students as many chances as she can to return to school. If Sarah could keep Samir at Sullivan, she would. But now, no matter what, his last semester before graduation will be at another institution, on someone else’s watch.

  Back in her office, Sarah sits down next to Samir who’s been waiting for her. He’s only halfway through his day but Samir is cranky. He spent the morning on reading questions related to Paul Fleischman’s young adult novel Seedfolks, a story about how immigrant groups in Cleveland come together around a community garden. Samir’s had enough. He wants to go home to rest before he starts his evening shift at work.

  As he complains, students begin to pour into the office. Among them is Ihina who throws herself down into a seat. She puts a container of instant ramen in the microwave and swivels toward Samir.

  “Damn, it smells like someone got their period in here,” she says. “It smells like shit.”

  Sarah, who thoroughly enjoys Ihina, laughs. Samir looks on in astonishment. He may like to entertain, but he can’t compete with Ihina.

  “I can’t eat my noodles in here,” Ihina continues, now gripping her Maruchan cup. “I’m out.”

  The Nepalese senior disappears as quickly as she arrived. She’ll be back in a couple hours to do her makeup—a multi-step process that requires the office mirror—before heading to Devon Avenue, where she works the phones at an Indian restaurant. Sarah looks forward to it.

  Looking at Samir, Sarah tells him that he has to work through his American history homework first. She starts with the basics.

  “Who wrote the Constitution?” she asks him, looking over a worksheet provided by Samir’s history teacher.

  He looks at her blankly. She tries another. “Who is John Adams? What about George Washington?”

  Samir shrugs. “Ma, why do you make me learn this?” he protests.

  “Come on, man,” Sarah replies. “You have to try.”

  “I don’t have to study this thing, it’s not my business.”

  “If you want to become an American citizen you do.”

  “I just want to graduate. I don’t care from where,” Samir says. “Here, next door, heaven, the moon. I just want to finish. I am too old.”

  “Yeah,” says Sarah, “this is why you broke my heart.”

  “But I love you, Ma,” he says, genuinely.

  “I love you, too.”

  The following week, Annmarie Handley marches Nassim into the ELL office. Today’s issue has nothing to do with young love. Standing inside the door, Nassim wears his Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps uniform, which includes a camel-colored army shirt paired with navy slacks. The uniform also includes a plastic-molded rifle, which Nassim slings over his shoulder, but he left the prop in Annmarie’s classroom. Annmarie explains that Nassim has been throwing up gang gestures in her classroom and in the hallways. She says she’s seen it herself and other students have reported it to her as well. She asks Sarah to explain to Nassim what the gestures signify and the dangers he might face flashing them in the wrong crowd. Teachers often delegate these kinds of tasks to Sarah, perhaps because she is “the cool teacher” the students trust with the details of their lives.

  Sarah looks at Nassim. She often sees him zipping from one end of the school to the other, his head and shoulders leaning slightly forward and a camera hanging from his neck. He is one of the yearbook photographers and has a talent with portraits in natural light. His images capture students bent over classroom chemistry experiments and playing guitar in a nook of the first floor. Sarah is certain Nassim is ignorant of what he’s doing when flashing coded gestures. She asks him to show her the symbols he’s been making. He giggles and raises his left hand.

  “Are you kidding me?” she says to Nassim. “What do you think you’re doing? This isn’t a joke.” Sarah pauses with an idea. She makes her way toward the door. “Follow me.”

  Sarah marches the boy down the first-floor hallway and to the school cafeteria. Pushing her way through the swinging wood door, she tells Nassim to wait against the wall by the security guards who are stationed there. She walks into the cafeteria, a wide room that’s alive with noise. She circles the space, eventually landing at a table where a group of teenagers eat their lunch. She returns to Nassim with two boys from the table.

  “Nassim, show these guys what you showed me earlier.”

  The boy shakes his head sheepishly. He’s embarrassed to repeat the gesture. She encourages him again. Nassim relents and lifts his hand, showing what looks like a shadow puppet of a bull. The boys shake their heads, demonstrably signaling how wrong Nassim is to experiment with such fire.

  “Okay,” one boy begins gently, “you are throwing up signs and it’s not your sign. You’re in Rogers Park and you are going to get into it with everybody if you don’t stop.”

  “Will you please explain to him why he cannot do this?” Sarah pushes. “We’re not making fun of him. We’re not bullying him. We’re just going to explain why he cannot do that anymore because he doesn’t understand.”

  The second boy joins in. “I mean, yeah, you’ll get beat up. Killed. There will be all kinds of problems for you. That’s not your gang sign and when you do that you could end up in the hospital or worse. You could lose your parents. I’ve lost a lot of people: parents, cousins, friends, siblings. I’m trying to turn my life around so I don’t lose any more.”

  “This is the wrong neighborhood for that,” the first adds on. “This is life or death.”

  “It’s not funny,” adds Sarah looking at Nassim. “This is not a joke. Just listen to what these guys said.”

  “We’re all family here,” one boy adds. “We got your back in here. If y’all have problems, come to me. I got y’all. We’re cool in here, but outside if you do that shit? Bye.”

  “Now shake hands because we’re friends,” Sarah instructs. The three follow Sarah’s direction. She thanks the boys and tells them they can return to their lunch table. Before she delivers Nassim back to class she turns to him.

  “I don’t want to see you doing those hand signs again, okay? It’s not a joke.” Nassim nods and speeds inside the classroom. Sarah pivots toward the library and yells, “Love you!”

  7

  FEBRUARY

  Mariah

  Mariah walks into class looking fierce. She marches to her seat, but cannot settle down. She fidgets and chews at her already short fingernails. She plants her hands firmly and flatly on her thighs, trying to keep them still. It does not work. Her hands raise to push her thick, shiny black hair from one side of her head to the other, almost as if she were posing for a camera. A boy across the room tries to catch her eye. He tilts his head. A comb jutting from his hair nearly falls out. She sends him a withering stare, eyebrow arched, a playful grin on her face. Mariah knows what she wants: the boy’s phone.

  Mariah doesn’t have a phone of her own, but manages a strong social media diet with small doses of screen time on other students’ devices. She’s starved for one now. She’s missed several classes—and time on the others’ phones—due to the ACCESS test, the onerous yearly ritual she, and nearly every other student in the state who is not a native English speaker, must take. The test’s cumbersome full name—Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners—was almost certainly coined with the acronym in mind, but its length does at least reflect the duration of the exam, which lasts several hours and is administered every winter in the public schools. Mariah loathes the ACCESS test. After five years in the United States, she’s fluent in spoken English and she’s recently started reading young adult English-language books on her own, too. Her current favorite is The Hate U Give, about a teenage girl struggling to balance her life growing up in a mostly Black neighborhood while attending a school where the other students are mostly affluent and white. Mariah relates to the heroine’s efforts to navigate two contrasting worlds
.

  The boy hands over his phone. Mariah logs into Snapchat. The app has been taken over by Valentine’s Day buzz. The screen fills with pictures of roses, of stuffed bears holding boxes of chocolates and other sweet things in pink and white. And, of course, there’s Cupid. Newer refugee students, most of whom Mariah doesn’t talk to, but whose posts she sees, are particularly cupid crazed. They fill their Snapchat stories with lovesick messages such as If you got the moon, don’t lose the stars. Never ignore a person who loves you because one day you might wake up and realize you lose the moon while counting the stars.

  Holding up the camera, Mariah tilts her chin upward and chooses one Snapchat filter that lays an assortment of pulsing hearts above her head. She may not have a phone, but Mariah still knows her best angles.

  “Alright,” says Jocelyn Vale, Mariah’s American history teacher. “I want everyone thinking about their ideas on how to make the school better. You are going to create a thoughtful bill that will improve the productivity or environment of the classroom or school.”

  The bill, she tells the room, needs to be something realistic. Not, for example, to turn every lesson into a SpongeBob SquarePants viewing. Mariah stares stonily at her teacher. Why would she want to watch a children’s cartoon? Jocelyn came to Sullivan this year as part of the class of new teachers whose positions are partially funded by the additional dollars that CPS gave to Sullivan to bolster the school’s ELL program. She hopes the activity in today’s lesson plan will motivate students to engage with school life and help them come to understand how passing bills in the U.S. legislature works.

  “If you want something to change, you have to do something about it,” Jocelyn continues. “So take this as your opportunity to practice that. And yes, every single one of you can have influence on our government, whether you’re eighteen or not. Whether you’re a citizen or not, you still live here.”