by Adi Alsaid
“I’ll start,” I say. “My name is Luisa and I like to read books.”
He smiles. “Me name is Florencio,” he says, sounding each syllable out slowly. “I like me home.”
“That’s good,” I said. “But what do you like to do?”
“I like me home,” he repeats, his grin wide and earnest.
* * *
Tuesday nights become part of my routine. Fall progresses, and soon I can’t see the trees through the big, round window, because it’s dark even when we start. I shift from T-shirts and cut-up jeans to bulky sweaters and tights under my pants. Florencio comes every week with his sheet filled out, his homework done as if I have the power to fail him, or even grade him. I am humbled by the responsibility. I try to make the connection—if he’s trying so hard, maybe I should try too. One day he shows up with a black eye, but when I ask about it, he mutters something about a lawn mower and raps his knuckle on the handout to change the subject.
He learns quickly. He misses some classes, and when he does, I sit with another student. The following week he apologizes and explains that his work ran late, too late for English class. Although I teach others, none have Florencio’s ease with the language, the delight that sparkles in his eyes when he understands a hard-to-translate saying or makes a connection to something he learned before. He tells me stories about deciphering billboards and understanding an entire interview on the radio his boss was playing in the truck on the way to a job.
“Ahora tu,” he says, then catches himself. “You story.”
I let my mind wander over the events of my week. Amanda having a fight with Josh in the hall. Ms. Scofield calling me in for a progress meeting. It all feels impossibly small, not a thing worth his invitation.
Instead, I tell him the story of the curandero, how he knew we’d cross the border on a Tuesday. Florencio’s eyes get wide and serious. “Magic is real,” he says. Then he lets himself slip into Spanish to say, “Some people can touch it easier than others.”
In November, Ms. Scofield sits with me and picks out a list of colleges to which I should apply. My grades haven’t gotten better, but she says I can supplement my application with the volunteer work I’m doing, highlight my SAT scores and explain my extenuating circumstances. She lets that hang there, the only time she’s ever nodded at the elephant in the corner. I want to shake her, shake the optimism right out of her, the deeply American way she believes, in her marrow, that everything can work out. She doesn’t understand that it doesn’t always work out, not for people like me, not for the men at ESL, not for Florencio. She doesn’t get that grades don’t matter when you don’t have nine simple digits to write on your applications, when your passport is the wrong color, when you’re not eligible for in-state tuition or scholarships or loans, when your mother cleans hotel rooms for a living, which doesn’t leave a lot for books and board.
I don’t say any of these things. I take her printed list and fold it neatly before putting it in my pocket. I’ll throw it away in the hall when I’m out of sight.
* * *
Florencio gets bored with Betsy’s exercises. I tell him to bring a book he’d like to learn to read. The next week he shows up with a small black book with a black plastic cover. New American Bible. I want to tell him I meant that he should bring a story, but when he begins to read hesitantly from the tiny type on the onionskin paper, a peaceful glow comes over him, and I feel sheepish that I almost complained about his choice of reading. We work through several weeks of this until he says, “Next week, you bring book.”
The first snow has carpeted the streets the following Tuesday. I make my way to the public library slowly, enjoying the muffled stillness, the sparkles under the streetlights. The snow is showing off, reminding me of its arresting beauty. I look up and watch it glimmer on its way down. It sprinkles my cheeks and instantly melts into me, into every other time it’s drifted down to make me feel alive, like wonders still happen.
The library door opens with a whoosh, and inside all the crinkling magic dissipates in the recycled air. I’ve brought my school’s copy of The Alchemist’s Confession. The passage I want to read with Florencio, one of my favorites, is bookmarked with a piece of composition notebook paper.
I walk up to the second floor. The space is heavy, funereal. Have I come on the wrong day? All the volunteers are there. Betsy is crying, tears streaming down her face with no sound.
“Where is everyone?” I ask. They look at each other, and no one says anything.
Finally Betsy speaks up. “There was an ICE raid. They hit several companies in the area. Got a lot of our guys. A few are okay, but they’re afraid to come.”
“Florencio?” I ask, my hand tightening around the green cover of the book I’d brought to share with him.
Betsy’s face crumples. “I’m sorry, Luisa. I’m so sorry.”
* * *
I don’t go to school the next day, or the one after that. I’ve turned eighteen, and they can’t make me. My mother leaves for work too early to know.
I know it is only a matter of time before what happened to Florencio happens to me too. A cop will ask me for identification, maybe, or I’ll try to get a job under the table and, without the right papers, I’ll get found out. And if not me, then my mother. So instead I will melt into this bed, a creaky little cot my mother bought secondhand at the Salvation Army when we found our next place after the basement. It folds in half for easy storage, although we never store it. I imagine it has magical powers and I can fold it with me in it, and it will take me someplace better. Like the smoke from the old dream, maybe.
My mother comes home from work mad. The school has gotten through to her and reported my absences. I try to explain about the senselessness of all of it, but she doesn’t understand either. She’s hopeful too, not American every-problem-has-a-solution hopeful, but I’ve-seen-worse hopeful. “We came here to succeed, not to stay in bed. Work or study, but stay home? No,” she says. It is as stern as I’ve ever heard her.
* * *
The next time I can bring myself to go to ESL, I find out from Betsy how to get in to see Florencio in immigration detention. I don’t tell my mother I’m going, because she’d burst into flames if I told her I was going to a jail, a place where I have to show ID to be allowed in, a place where they could just as easily open the doors and put me in for the same exact reason Florencio is in there. But I need to see him, and so I go.
He looks even smaller behind the thick yellowing glass partition that separates inmates and visitors. A flare of anger bursts through me as I see him in the orange jumpsuit, hands shackled together. They have him in a jail with people who have hurt people, who are dangerous. This man—this boy—who glows when he reads Genesis and thrills when he deciphers a new billboard does not belong here.
I sit across from him. “This is some bad luck,” he says in Spanish, his face twisted into a half grin.
“That’s an understatement,” I say in English. He hasn’t heard the word, and I do my best to explain it to him.
“Ah, that’s a smart word. We don’t have that word in Spanish. Estos se las saben todas.” I laugh. It is a common immigrant’s saying, something close to Americans have it all figured out.
“I don’t know about that. They put you in here. They obviously don’t know everything.”
He waves his hand as best he can through his bindings. “Ah, don’t worry so much about me. Remember what I told you the first day we had class?”
“That you liked home.”
He nods. He continues in Spanish, “I came to earn money. My mother is getting old, and I wanted a better life for her. I didn’t do everything I wanted to do, but I did something. I will be happy to see her.”
I nod.
“You brought the book?” he asks.
I pull it out of the big inside pocket of my winter coat.
“This glass is d
irty. I won’t be able to read through it. You read it to me,” he says.
I draw in a long, stilling breath. I close my eyes and try to find the peace I felt on the walk to the library through the snow, the moment in which silence and magic seemed to suspend everything else, the moment Florencio was already gone but I didn’t yet know it. Maybe in that instant, things were good not just because I didn’t know, but because everything was possible. Or because it was in the loss of Florencio, in the negative space he left, that I saw that trying is worth it, even when you’re not quite sure why.
I begin reading from the marked page. “The alchemist said ‘It’s not magic, Hannah, not in the way you’re thinking, in the sleight of hand, hocus-pocus way. Alchemy is not that. It is creating something fine of a baser thing. The alchemist desires nothing more than to make something new and unexpected out of materials no one knows are precious.’
“‘I don’t understand,’ said Hannah, her lips a kiss between a ruby and a rose, ‘Things are what they are,’ she added, with more than a hint of petulance.”
I stopped to explain a few words Florencio didn’t know, like petulance. Then I resumed.
“Barnaby responded, ‘Spoken like someone who believes only what is put in front of her. Alchemists don’t look at what is, but what could be.’ As he spoke, the bud rose in the lapel of his perfectly pressed suit jacket seemed to nod in approval.
“Hannah was bored by talk she couldn’t understand. ‘Yes, that’s all well and good,’ she said. ‘But does that mean you’ll build me a theater where I can be the grandest lady on the stage?’ She shook her golden curls like little bells. She really could be quite winning.”
The reading is slow. I have to stop and translate more words for Florencio.
“Barnaby laughed. ‘We’ll start there,’ he said, the corners of his eyes creased with love. He wished he could explain that he wanted her to be a great lady because loving her would thus make him a great man. She looked about, smoothed a ruffle on her skirt. Her attention was already straying. He wouldn’t try to explain. That was only half the truth, anyway. He wanted to build her dream, because he hoped to live in a world where dreams come true.”
I put the book down. I look at Florencio, at the blocky letters stenciled on his prison uniform. His eyes are glowing much like they did when he read to me in the library. He looks down the line of others also pressing green old-timey phone receivers to their ears.
It takes him a long time, but he finally says something. “Luisa, no te preocupes por mi. You no worry. My dreams still coming. You build yours. Okay?”
I nod and tilt my head forward so that the tears can drop straight down into my lap.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
On the first day of community college, the professor asks us to write an essay on our intended major. I have no idea what I want mine to be. Just because I’ve bought myself this one little step, it doesn’t mean I have faith that I’ll weave this strand into something that will pass all the tests I’ll need to withstand. I still don’t have papers. I am still trying to build something new out of the old, experiment by experiment, smoke in a teacup, wishes and lies. And I want to live in a world where people like me can become what they want to be.
I pull out a fresh sheet of loose leaf. Across the top I write, Curandera crossed with Alchemist. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make the professor understand why that’s what I want to be, what I already am. But I will try.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria E. Andreu crossed the Mexican border into the US undocumented at the age of eight. She “got her papers” at eighteen, and did her best to forget all about that. But as her pursuit of finding the right words in her inscrutable adopted language led to a dream of being a writer, she found that the stories that most clamored to be told were those of feeling excluded, of what it means to belong, of who gets to say “Come on in.” Her debut novel, The Secret Side of Empty, is the story of an undocumented teen girl. Maria’s work has also appeared in Teen Vogue, Newsweek and the Washington Post. Her forthcoming novel is about what it’s like to be new in the United States, and to ache to find the right words to say all that’s in your heart.
A BIGGER TENT
Maurene Goo
DEDICATION
To my family and our little tent.
There’s this really TMI Korean saying: if you laugh while crying, a hair will grow out of your butt.
I didn’t realize that talking about butt hair was kind of gross until I was older. Me, at some slumber party, probably: “What? Don’t all your families casually talk about butt hair?”
Sometimes it takes being away from your family to realize what a pack of weirdos they are.
I looked out the window as my plane descended into LA and felt a familiar knot of dread tighten in my chest. My body was bracing itself for seeing them.
After spending two months in London, viewing LA from high above was truly depressing. Thick, beige smog cloaked the city, which sprawled out between giant mountains and the ocean. Buildings dotted the landscape forever and ever. It never ended. No one in LA knew what was actually a part of LA. You just knew when you weren’t in it anymore.
When I left customs, I turned on my phone and was hit with a billion unread texts from my mom.
Text us when you land!
Okay looks like your flight is on time.
Maybe a little early. We’ll leave a little early, too,
just in case.
Dad says he’ll wait in the parking garage and then come out when you text him.
Nevermind we are all coming now.
I blew out an agitated breath. Of course they were.
We are here! No rush, just text when you are done.
No rush. Just texting you again to passive-aggressively remind you to rush!
We’re by baggage claim now.
I gripped my carry-on handle as I rolled it through a dingy corridor. Once, it had probably been really sleek and modern, but now it was just neglected and worn out. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead. LAX was such a pit. I thought back to the impeccably designed spaces of Heathrow. Why did anyone live in the US?
Two months had flown by. My summer academic program in London had been a dream. After winning an essay contest, I’d been invited to study engineering for free at some random fancy British high school. It was the best summer of my life. Everything but flights were covered, and my parents had let me stay an extra month.
“Aren’t you homesick?” my older brother Ron would ask from his dorm room at UC Irvine. Orange County was the farthest Ron would live. He drove the hour home most weekends so that my mom could do his laundry for him.
No, I hadn’t been homesick. In fact, the second I’d arrived in London, I had felt so grounded, so assured. I was able to be a version of myself that I’d known was in there—buried under sixteen years with my family.
“Nari-yah!”
Hearing my Korean name yelled out in public was always startling. But there was my mom, waving her arms frantically, like she was hoping for a helicopter rescue on a desert island. Ron and Dad were next to her.
A claustrophobic trio of good intentions.
My dad clapped me on the shoulder. “You look skinny.”
“Because bad British food, huh?” my mom said, looking at me with a furrowed brow. She was doing the Korean Mom Body Scan: skin too tan, hair unbrushed, approximately 3.25 pounds lost.
My brother grunted a hello. Right. This was my family. I thought of how I’d cried and hugged every single friend in my fellowship program my last day in London. Generous in my feelings.
“I love you guys,” I had said while weeping. It was so easy to say.
I missed them already.
When we got home, all I wanted to do was to crash in my bed and sleep for a week. But my parents had other plans.
“Everyone’s co
ming over tonight,” my dad said as he turned on the TV, the sound blaring through the house.
“Oh, my God,” I hollered over the noise. “Can we not? I’m so tired.”
“It’s okay, you can just eat and go to sleep,” my mom said.
But that was never going to happen. That evening, extended family members stuffed themselves into the one-story ranch house. I was happy to see my cousins, as close to me as siblings. Their noisy company kept my jet lag at bay.
“Nari Unni, were the guys in London cute?” My cousin Rachel slumped into a giant pillow in our family room and wagged her eyebrows at me. She was fourteen, obsessed with K-pop boys, and her horniness had no bounds.
I laughed. “So cute. They dress really nicely there.”
“Better than me?” Rachel’s twin brother Daniel kept his eyes on the video game he was playing.
“Better than a T-shirt with a dragon wearing sunglasses and the words Summer Is Coming underneath? Yeah, somehow they’ve surpassed your level.”
Ron held the other controller. They were in some medieval landscape filled with white-people elves and mossy ruins. “Nari thinks everything in London was better than here. She’s so worldly now.”
“Shut up.” I frowned. “When you guys leave here—if you ever leave here, Ronald—then you’ll know, too. The world is big.” And I was ready for it.
“It’s not like we live in some podunk town,” Ron said as his character shot an arrow into a troll thing. “You live in a place that other people dream of living in, too, you know.”
“Yeah, actors.”
Dinner was well-orchestrated chaos. After years of dining together, everyone knew when to reach for the banchan—the little side dishes—and when to dip their spoon into the communal bowls of soup.