Tirzah made a head signal for me to reply, and I said, “Oh, me? It’s María Emilia Soler. So-LER.”
I don’t know why the rest of the kids laughed. I hadn’t said anything funny, had I? Did my name have a secret meaning I didn’t know? Papi had warned me that some words had different meanings in other languages.
I felt the heat rising all the way to the top of my head.
The teacher had put a mark on the paper and moved on. I hoped it wasn’t a sign that meant I was a troublemaker. I’d never had any behavioral issues in my life before.
But to make matters worse, she announced a quiz, and my hands prickled with sweat even though the room was freezing. In Mrs. Prescott’s class, a quiz had been a big deal, a test. I took a notebook and a pencil out of my backpack and waited for instructions. But when everyone went to the back of the class to grab a tablet, I wondered if I was in the wrong class. Tablets in math?
I stayed in my seat, the only student to do so, and the teacher looked at me with a question in her eyes.
She said something, and when I didn’t reply, she repeated it louder. Everything in my brain shut down. She could’ve asked me my name, and I wouldn’t have been able to answer.
Tirzah was walking back in my direction with a tablet in each hand, and before my tongue got unstuck, she placed one on my desk.
I’d played with Mami’s iPad sometimes, but I’d never seen this kind of tablet before. I didn’t even know how to turn it on.
Around me, the rest of the class knew what to do and got to work right away.
The teacher stared at me until her eyes widened, and she said, “Oh, you’re the new student from Argentina.” She looked around the room, and when she saw Tirzah, she asked, “Tirzah, please can you help her?”
Tirzah looked back at her tablet, and after a second, she put it down and headed toward me.
Quietly, she sat next to me and showed me how to get to the math app. “Enter your student number and passcode,” she said. “Then you’ll be able to access your test.”
I nodded, and she went back to her seat before I realized she’d spoken in Spanish.
My heart overflowed with gratitude for her. She had lost precious time working on her test to help me. True, the teacher had asked her to, but she did it without complaint. I wanted to dive into my math problems. Instead, in my mind I paddled in an ocean of confusion, trying to figure out what my student number or passcode was. There was no way I’d interrupt Tirzah again. Just before I gave in and drowned in desperation, a little light went on in my mind.
Would those numbers be on the schedule the school secretary had given me? I took the paper out of my pocket, and I scanned the form as fast as I could. And there, in the upper-left corner, was all my information. I entered the numbers as quickly as I could, but there was no passcode.
I sighed, crushed that I’d have to tell the teacher I needed help after all. But Tirzah, who was looking at me from her seat next to the window, whispered loud enough for me to catch her words: “Last four digits of your student number.”
My fingers typed the number in, and finally, I was logged on.
The clock had swept forward without mercy. By the time I went through the first five problems, the bell rang.
A part of my brain kept working feverishly while my fingers typed, and the other was aware of the teacher pointing at the back of the room and saying, “Log off your tablets and place them back on the shelves. I’ll hand out reports next time we meet.”
Sweat exploded in my armpits. I didn’t even know how many questions there were on the test! I couldn’t make a basic calculation to estimate how bad my grade would be. But one thing was certain: It would definitely be bad.
Kids were leaving, and others were coming. I wanted to catch up to Tirzah and thank her for her help, but first, I had to fix this.
The chair made a horrible scraping sound when I got up to talk to the teacher. It was one thing to be shy and self-conscious about my accent, but quite another to let my first day of school be a disaster because I wasn’t willing to speak up.
“Excuse me,” I said, folding my arms to hide that my hands were shaking.
The teacher’s eyes were a cloudy green when she looked at me, waiting for me to speak.
“Professor, I’ve never used a tablet at school before, and I didn’t know my sign-in information. My report won’t be good—” My voice started quavering, and before I embarrassed myself by bursting into tears, I swallowed my words.
She must have taken pity on me because her expression softened. “Listen, María.” I must have made a face because she added, “It’s María, right?”
I shook my head. “María Emilia.”
She chuckled. “That’s too long!”
I’d never thought about my name being long. Ashley Jane was the same length as mine, and other than her friend calling her AJ, no one else seemed to have a problem with it.
The teacher was talking, and I yanked myself back to the present. I had to look at her lips to make sense of what she was saying. She spoke too fast.
“… an assessment. A way to see how quickly students find their legs coming back to school after a long summer recess.”
“But I didn’t have a recess,” I said. “I was at school two weeks ago.”
She chuckled again as if I’d told a joke, but I was dead serious.
Students were coming in for the next class.
The teacher looked over my shoulder. “Don’t worry too much about it. Now you know for the next time.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected. I wanted to do the test over, but the bell rang again, and when I looked back, all the seats were filled. It was too late to ask.
“You should be in your next class,” she said, making a shooing gesture with her hand. “Now run along. We can talk about it next time.”
I hoisted my backpack on my shoulder and left the classroom, aware that everyone was looking at me.
In the deserted hallway, there was no trace of Tirzah or any friendly face. As I peered at the printout of the map to find the science lab, I had the foolish impulse to run away. The clock on top of the lockers thundered in my ears, or maybe it was my galloping heart. Time in the Northern Hemisphere was running faster than below the equator, and I tried to race it to the other end of the building.
When I arrived at the lab, late, I was gasping for air. I’d never had a male teacher before in my life. I was instantly intimidated.
The teacher looked up at me and shook his head. “I’ll forgive you this time because it’s the first day, but there won’t be any more exceptions.”
“Oh,” I said, my face burning. “I thought this class started at half past eleven.”
He tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. “You mean eleven thirty?”
Some people laughed. Maybe I should’ve run away after all.
I found my seat and tried to guess what the class had been talking about. There was no trace of Tirzah here either. By the time I understood they were talking about forces of physics, the bell rang again.
Jerked out of orbit, I followed the jet stream of students until, somehow, I ended up in English. The ELL class.
Finally, I was on time, but my head was throbbing with the effort to understand what was going on around me. I’d never spoken only in English for so long in my life. Also, my stomach started growling loudly. Breakfast had been a long time ago, but how could I explain that to the boys next to me, who laughed when they looked in my direction? They’d been in my physics class.
I knew I had to ignore them. Once this bout of shyness left me, I’d be back to my assertive self.
But if first impressions make a mark, I was worried this nightmarish first day of school in the United States would leave me friendless.
While we were supposed to read, my mind drifted far, far away. I wondered what Violeta and our friends were doing at school. They had English today. Would Nahuel ask if she had any news from me?
Wha
t did Lela do all day long now that we were gone? Did she miss us? I didn’t have to wonder about that. I knew she did.
Finally, the bell rang again, and I followed my classmates down to the cafeteria. Today had been nothing like I had imagined. I never saw a single person twice. I’d never caught another glimpse of Tirzah. How many students were in this school, and how would I ever make a friend?
Although I was hungry, I didn’t think I could eat the pasta and meatballs, or the snacks available in the buffet. I grabbed a sandwich from the line and an apple. I found an empty seat at the biggest round table I’d ever seen. It was so big, it was impossible to talk to anyone that wasn’t on my left or right, so I didn’t even try. I was exhausted. I took a bite of my sandwich, and I almost gagged. The bread was soggy, and the cheese had a plasticky taste. My appetite died.
A knot in my throat choked me. Would everything I ate here be disgusting? Why was every word that came out of my mouth somehow wrong? I was so sad, my eyes had filled with tears.
“Are you okay?” a soft voice said next to me. The voices and sounds from the cafeteria had blurred into a drone and I hadn’t been able to distinguish a single voice, but this one spoke Spanish.
I looked up so fast one of the tears escaped and ran down my cheek before I could stop it. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Tirzah looked at me with a worried expression.
She was with the same two boys from the elementary school. The accent policer and the boy with headphones both wore the school mascot shirt. But theirs also had the dog astronaut sticker added near the flaming meteor. The boys didn’t look at me, as if they couldn’t wait to leave for whatever else was more interesting than a lonely girl crying in the school cafeteria on the first day of school.
How had my life come to this? I hadn’t even cried on my first day of three-year-old preschool! But I’d never been so lonely before. So out of place.
I remembered Celestina’s name for this feeling: being “a toad from another pond.” I identified so much with her—a girl who’d been born almost a hundred years before me.
“Do you need help finding your next class?” Tirzah asked. “I tried to wait for you after math, but a hallway monitor almost wrote me off.”
The kindness of her gesture melted the stress that had weighed me down the last few days.
I hadn’t complained—that much—when my parents announced the move. Or when the airline lost my suitcase or I found out I’d be repeating seventh grade. I had held my temper when I didn’t know the information to log on to the tablet and had done so badly on the math test. Even when the teacher told me off for being late, I had only tried to explain myself.
Yes, I’d cried at how disgusting the sandwich was, but in my defense, I was hungry and tired. My school in Mendoza was only from one to five thirty. I’d been at this horrible school forever, and I was hungry.
I took out the schedule from my pocket. “Do you know where PE Dance is?”
“It’s at the end of the hallway,” she said, pointing ahead.
“Come on, T!” Donovan said in English, as if I couldn’t understand him. “You don’t have to babysit her. She can find her own way, like we all did when we first arrived.”
“Did your grandma assign you to help a newbie again?” Beto asked.
Tirzah blushed and shrugged. “No, not really.”
Assigned? So she’d been helping me because she’d been asked? I felt so bad I couldn’t even look her in the eye.
“Just because she speaks Spanish, the teachers are always asking her to translate and help out the newcomers,” Donovan told me, that infuriating smirk back on his face.
“Is that how she met you?” I asked in English.
He scoffed, but I could tell he was surprised I had understood what he’d said.
The bell rang.
“Let’s go,” Beto said. “We’re going to be late.”
They went their way, and I went mine, vowing not to talk to any of them again.
But before I went into the dance studio, I looked back and envied them for having each other. Would the boys convince Tirzah not to be friends with me?
Finally, it was the end of the school day. Maybe it was my complete exhaustion, but to me, the buses all looked the same. The drivers all looked the same. All the people looked the same. I didn’t recognize a single marker that told me which bus I needed to take back home. But if I didn’t get on a bus in the next couple of minutes, I’d be stranded at school forever.
Although there were no sharks for hundreds of miles, ominous music started drumming in my brain.
Looking at the remaining kids on the sidewalk, I caught sight of my neighbor sitting by the window of one of the buses—right as the engine rumbled to life.
“Ashley Jane!” I called. This time, her name came out of my lips as Ach-lee Yane. She turned her back toward the window. And could I really blame her when I was slaughtering her name every single time?
I ran after the bus, waving my hand, but it drove away all the same.
I might as well have been invisible.
Bus after bus left the parking lot.
Breathless, I stood on the sidewalk, without a clue of what to do.
What if I had to stay at school for the rest of my life and my family forgot all about me? I’d be wearing the same outfit, eating the same gross cafeteria sandwiches, all alone for eternity.
“Do you need help?” a boy asked behind me.
I turned around and came face-to-face with the accent-police boy—Donovan.
“Did your bus just leave?” he asked in Spanish.
I nodded.
He sucked air in. “Ooh. That’s never fun. What’s your address?”
With horror, I realized I had no idea.
I wished I could dissolve into thin air so he couldn’t see my embarrassment.
Then I remembered the crumpled schedule in my pocket. There on the upper-left corner was all my information. But I couldn’t make sense of the numbers and letters.
Like a kindergartner, I handed Donovan the paper. He read in silence.
At least no one I knew and cared about was here to see my humiliation.
Donovan shook his head. “Your bus is the rabbit one. It’s already gone.”
“I know that. Thank you,” I said, my voice harsher than I intended. What I really had wanted to ask was: Rabbit?
Donovan must have read my mind because he said, “It has a picture of a rabbit on the windshield. One has a mermaid. Another a dog. Et cetera. Like I said though, yours is the rabbit.”
“Oh,” I said, angry at myself for not having noticed.
“Do you need a ride?” he asked. “My brother, Julián, can drive you.” He pointed at a silver car where a boy who looked like an older version of Donovan was waiting.
My mouth about fell open. “Is he old enough to drive?”
My face must have looked super funny because Donovan laughed. “Julián is eighteen, for your information.”
“Oh.” I cringed.
“Honestly, Julián’s a good driver.”
I considered my chances. Even if I called home, how was Papi going to come get me? Mami drove the car, and her workday didn’t end until much later.
I didn’t want to get in the car of a boy I didn’t know. But I couldn’t stay at school forever waiting to be rescued!
In Mendoza, we walked everywhere when our bus card didn’t have any credit. I had two strong legs, and I’d at least realized the streets in Red Ledges were in a grid.
“What’s the address here?” I asked, looking around for a marker that would tell me which way to go.
Donovan shrugged. “Why?” Before I could reply, he called out to his brother in English, “Yo, Jul. What’s the address here?”
Julián made the same skeptical expression as Donovan. “Why?”
“To see if I can walk home,” I said. “This paper says I live on 743 North, 400 West.”
Julián’s eyes went wide like flying saucers. “You ca
n’t walk that far.”
My feathers were ruffled, as Lela would say. “Of course, I can. It’s not that far.”
Julián shrugged. “The problem is you’d have to go under the overpass. I mean, it’s sunny and nice, but that’s a deserted area. I wouldn’t let Donovan go that way on his own. Either call your parents or let us drive you. I promise we’re responsible.”
Just then, Donovan finished chugging down a bottle of chocolate milk and burped. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “We are.”
The car wasn’t new, but it looked okay. If I accepted their offer, they could drop me off a block away from my house. My parents need never know I’d ridden home with two strangers. Boys at that. But then, I never lied to my parents. At least not like this, for something important.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking at the deserted parking lot as if a bus would magically materialize.
“Come on. I have something to do,” Donovan said, eyeing his brother. “I can’t be late.”
I imagined waiting until it got dark. My worried father finding me in the parking lot.
I needed a break from feeling like a hot mess.
“Okay,” I finally said, opening the door and sitting in the back seat and making a point of clicking my seat belt. “Please drive safely.”
“As you wish!” Julián said, and we took off.
My heart drummed loud in my ears. When nausea started rising, I wondered if it was because I was hungry or nervous or because the back of the car smelled like boys’ socks. Maybe all the above.
Julián turned around to look at me and said, “Where are you from?”
Donovan smacked him in the arm and said in English, “She just moved from Argentina. If you’re thinking her accent sounds funny, I’m warning you—”
“You know I can understand everything you say, right? I have an accent, but my ears work perfectly well.”
Donovan cringed, and his brother shook his head. “I know this guy from Argentina. Tell me what it’s like where you live.”
The rest of the way home I gave them a little overview of my country, and especially Mendoza. They had no idea Aconcagua, the largest peak in the Western and Southern Hemispheres, was in Argentina.
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