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FIVE
In our apartment upstairs, I explained to Ma what Mr. Al had told me.
“This proves Aunt Paula will let us move when a good apartment opens up,” Ma said, smiling. “We can’t stay here forever.”
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“But that can take a long time, Ma. And she knew the area would be broken down. Why didn’t she tell us?”
“Maybe she didn’t want to alarm us.”
I was thinking hard. “What this really means is that Mr. N. will never fix the heat or anything else. Ma, we need to find a new place to live.”
She breathed in sharply. “We can’t afford it.”
“Other people from the factory live in apartments too.”
“Don’t forget, the rent is only a part of what we pay to Aunt Paula every month. Our debt is so great. And this apartment isn’t as expensive.”
“Even in Chinatown? They can’t cost too much there.”
“The really cheap apartments go from family member to family member. Nothing opens up. I’ve asked around at the factory.”
My mind was still turning everything over. “I think it’s not even law-following for us to be living here, the building is in such bad shape. That’s probably the real reason Aunt Paula had me use a fake address for school.” I was getting reckless. “Ma, let’s run away. We can find a new job at another factory. Aunt Paula doesn’t have to know.” Back in Hong Kong, I would never have dared to talk to Ma like this, to openly argue with her about such grown-up topics, but I had never had the responsibilities there that I now did. I had never been so desperate to change our living situation.
Ma’s eyes were intense. “And our debt to her, then? She brought us here, ah-Kim. She spent the money to cure me, for our green cards and tickets. It’s not a question of what we can get away with, it’s a question of honor.”
“To her?” I tugged at a lock of my hair, frustrated by Ma and her integrity.
“She’s given us housing and a job. She’s my sister and your aunt. And no matter how flawed someone else may be, that doesn’t give us the right to be less than we are, does it? We are decent people and we repay our debts.”
Some of my anger ebbed away. I hated being tied to Aunt Paula but I could see that Ma would have to be a different person before she could renege on something she owed. “Was Aunt Paula always like this, even when you were younger?”
Ma hesitated. I knew she disliked speaking ill of anyone, especially family. “When we were teenagers alone in Hong Kong, Aunt Paula took care of everything. She was smart and resourceful. She trained as a gold-beater so I could finish high school.” A jeweler who works with gold. “I was supposed to be the one to marry an American Chinese, since I wasn’t good at much except for music, and some people thought I was pretty. But then I started giving music lessons and your pa gave me a job at the school. Soon after that, we were married.”
“Was Aunt Paula angry?”
“Well, yes she was. But she’s always been very practical, and when Uncle Bob arrived, she just married him herself.”
“You were supposed to marry Uncle Bob?” I wasn’t sure I could take all these surprises today.
“He went to Hong Kong to meet a number of people,” Ma said. I knew that meant he could choose from several different girls. “But an acquaintance of ours had given him my picture. In any case, Aunt Paula has been through some hard times herself.”
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The next day at the factory, Ma and I spoke to Aunt Paula in the office again.
“Why didn’t you tell us that our entire block will be torn down?” Ma asked gently.
Aunt Paula raised her thin eyebrows, surprised that we knew. “Because it wasn’t important. I told you it was only temporary that you would be living there. You see that you didn’t have to worry? You can’t stay there too long even if you wanted to.”
“How much longer will it be?” Ma asked.
“Not much,” Aunt Paula said. She scratched her cheek absentmindedly. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have any news. Now, we’d all better get back to work.” She tightened her lips. “You came close to missing the deadline on that last shipment.”
“I know,” Ma said. “I’ll work harder.”
“We are family, but I can’t have people saying I’m being unfair.”
Her threat was clear and we left quickly.
As we went past the thread-cutters’ station on the way to our workplace, I was surprised to see Matt there working alone, without either Park or his mother.
“Where is your ma?” I asked.
“She doesn’t feel too well sometimes,” Matt said, not slowing down. He had to cover his mother’s workload. “She kept Park home with her today so I could really get some work done.” He seemed proud. “Park isn’t a big helping hand sometimes.”
“Can I get anything for your mother?” Ma asked. “If it’s her lungs, crushed bumblebees in salt are very effective.”
“It’s her heart,” Matt said. His eyes were warm as he glanced up at the both of us. “And she has her own medicine, but thank you very much, Mrs. Chang.”
Ma smiled at me as we walked on. “He’s a nicer boy than I thought.”
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I had to perfect my English. Not only did I write down and look up the words I didn’t know in my textbooks, I started with the A’ s in my dictionary and tried to memorize all the words. I made a copy of the list and stuck it to the inside of the bathroom door. I had learned the phonetic alphabet in Hong Kong and that made it easier for me to figure out how the words were pronounced, even though I still often made mistakes. Our class went to the public library once a week and I always took out a stack of books, starting with the embarrassingly thin ones for little kids. I slowly worked my way up in age. I took these books with me to the factory and read them on the subway. Almost all of my homework was done either on the subway or at the factory. For the bigger projects, I caught up on Sundays.
By the time report cards were given out at the beginning of February, I wasn’t doing well but I was passing most subjects. I’d taken the national reading and math tests with the other kids but I didn’t know what the results were yet. On my report card, I got a few Satisfactories for Science and Math, a few Unsatisfactories, and the rest were all Fairs. In the comments section, Mr. Bogart wrote, “Kimberly must learn to apply herself with more effort. Please come see me at the PTA meeting. Submit dental note!” How were we supposed to pay for a dentist? I didn’t know what a PTA meeting was, but I wasn’t about to let Ma see any of this. I let her believe that we got report cards only once a year, at the end. I forged her signature, which was easy since I’d been signing her name since the beginning.
The ice across the inside of the windowpanes in our apartment slowly dissolved and I could see through to the outside world again.
At the end of February, the class bully started staring at me in class. His name was Luke and he’d been left back a few times so he was a head taller than the rest of us. He had a barrel of a chest covered loosely by the same stained gray top that he wore every day. His nostrils were flared like a bull’s, and even Mr. Bogart seemed to have given up on him, leaving him alone most of the time. I saw Luke shove the other kids around. If a kid dared to fight back, Luke became doubly vicious. His main weapon was his legs and he liked knocking people to the ground and kicking them. There was a rumor that once a kid had rammed him in the stomach with his head and Luke had pulled a knife and cut him. He also used a lot of words I didn’t know, like cock and mother finger.
I asked Annette if she knew what cock meant.
“Everyone knows that.” Her smile was confident. “It means poop.”
Annette had recently told me that she was going to a private school called Harrison Prep next year. I would go to a public junior high school, of course. How would I manage without her?
We said good-bye to Mr. Al. A large moving van had taken away most of his inventory, although he’d saved a few folding chairs and a single mattress for us.
“Thank you, Mr. Al,” I said. I was thrilled to have my own place to sleep again.
“Mmm sai,” he said, trying to say “You’re welcome” in Cantonese.
“Your Chinese is very good,” I lied. Luckily, I knew exactly what I’d taught him, so I could usually guess what he was trying to say.
“You beautiful ladies take care of yourselves,” he said, and he gave us each in turn a big hug. He smelled like tobacco.
“May you have the strength and health of a dragon,” Ma said softly in Chinese. She looked in her shopping bag and pulled out a short wooden sword she’d bought from the kung fu store in Chinatown. She gave it to him.
His broad face shone with pleasure as he ran his finger over the carvings on the handle.
“She say, ‘Good health,’” I said, not knowing how to translate it further. “You supposed to lay that under pillow.”
“What? And waste a good weapon?”
“It takes away worry and bad dream.”
“All right, then. If you say so.” He grinned at us as he walked away to the subway, waving his sword like a ninja.
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I felt sad when I saw Mr. Al’s empty store downstairs. Up in our apartment, I took a look at his building, pulling up the garbage bags over the kitchen window.
I wanted to see the sleeping black woman and baby in the apartment above his store. The mother wasn’t there but I could make out the baby, bigger now, alone in an old mesh playpen. He was hanging on to the sides. He had his mouth wide open, crying, but no one came.
I had always liked toy cars more than dolls and I had no interest in real babies at all, but I wished I could pick him up and comfort him.
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Through all of March and into April, I continued to feel the bully Luke’s eyes on me but I pretended I didn’t notice anything. He had started grabbing girls by their hair and kissing them whenever Mr. Bogart wasn’t looking. Finally, one lunch period I was crossing the cafeteria, holding my tray, and passed the table where he was sitting with some other boys. He stuck out his foot. I stepped over it and kept going. The rubber legs of his chair screeched against the floor as he pushed himself away from the table and stood up.
“Hey, Chinese girl.”
I didn’t look around. I had just set my tray down at my usual spot across the table from Annette when I felt his hand on my shoulder. On reflex, I lowered my shoulder and turned at the same time, so that his hand fell off.
“Wow, that’s kung fu,” one of Luke’s friends said.
“You know karate?” Luke asked, with real interest.
“No,” I said. That was the truth.
“She does,” his skinny friend said.
“I want to try out your moves. Let’s fight after school.” Luke said this as if he were inviting me to play at his house. Then he and his friends went back to their own table.
Annette was staring at me from across the table. I sat down, trembling.
“Are you crazy?” she asked, her voice pitched higher than normal. “He’ll kill you!”
“What must I do?”
“You gotta tell somebody. Tell Mr. Bogart.”
I just looked at her.
“Okay, forget that.” Annette wrinkled her forehead in thought. “My mom’s got to work today, so my housekeeper’s picking me up from school. We could tell her.”
I thought about her housekeeper, who had looked so dry and serious. She didn’t seem like someone I could trust. If only Mrs. Avery were going to pick Annette up that day instead. “No, I don’t want you tell her.”
“Why not?”
“She don’t help.” I knew it was true. “And I’m not a telly-tale.”
Annette lowered her voice to a hiss. “Look, Kimberly, I think Luke carries a knife. It’s okay to tell someone!”
I shook my head. I was afraid of Luke but I was more afraid of grown-ups. Maybe Annette’s housekeeper would try to talk to Ma or Mr. Bogart. Everything I had hidden from Ma could come out: the forged signatures, the failed tests, the dental note, the report cards, the PTA meeting.
Annette grabbed my wrist. “Okay, you just come home with me, then. We’ll get in the car and drive away. We can drop you off at your place.”
I wanted to agree. But how could I show them where I lived? And Ma was expecting me at the factory. Besides, Luke would just wait for me tomorrow, or the day after that. It would only get worse. He’d been staring at me for a while now.
“No,” I said. “I fight him.”
After school, I could taste the sour from my stomach in my mouth. I’d never been struck before. Even though I’d often seen fights in the school yard, I’d never been punched or kicked or spit upon. I had never hit anyone either. I’d done some tai chi in the park with Ma back home, but since most of the other students had been in their seventies, what we’d learned had hardly trained me for a street fight in Brooklyn.
Everyone had heard about the brawl, and a tight circle of kids reined us in. The words fight fight fight pulsed in the air like drumbeats. Annette disappeared into the ring of faces and I stood in the center alone, facing Luke. He was waiting: large, gray, a battleship. I came up to his chin and he weighed twice as much as I did. He came from one of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, where the mailman wouldn’t even go to deliver parcels, and had only recently moved to this area. I was so scared, I would have given anything never to have come here.
I did not run. There was no place to run to. I felt a great stubbornness rising from my core, even though my fingers were numb and cold. The calm of terror swept over me. I am born from a great line of fighters; my ancestor was one of the greatest warriors during the Tang dynasty, and I wouldn’t flee. Methodically, barely audible, I began to curse him in Chinese: You have a wolf’s heart and a dog’s lungs, your heart has been eaten by a dog.
“What the fuh you saying?” Luke said.
I didn’t answer. I continued under my breath as if I were praying. We circled each other, his shadow looming over me.
“You’re so weird,” he said. Suddenly, he took off his book bag and swung it, thwacking me in the side. The blow twisted me around, so that my back was to him, and I felt a thud on my book bag, from where he’d kicked me. I took off my bag and connected with his arm. Left, right, I beat him on either side of his fleshy body, the material of his jacket catching against my bag. To my surprise, he didn’t try to hit me back. Then I swung my right leg and connected with his calf.
“Shit!” he cried. For a second, something wild flared in his eyes but he still didn’t strike me again. Instead, he took my shoulder in one hand and gave a casual push, so that I stumbled back a few steps. Then he swung his bag over his shoulder and sauntered away.
Annette was hugging me. “I didn’t know you could fight!” she said. “You can do kung fu!”
I didn’t tell her otherwise, but I knew that I couldn’t fight, that I hadn’t fought. I walked home in a daze. He could have killed me. What had happened?
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The next day, Mrs. LaGuardia, the principal, opened our classroom door in the middle of Social Studies and said, “Mr. Bogart, I need to see Kimberly Chang.”
A number of kids whispered “Ooooooh” and clasped their hands against their mouths. Even though quite a number of jokes about La Guardia Airport were made behind her back, Mrs. LaGuardia was well respected and universally feared. I felt my chest freeze. I glanced over at Luke, who didn’t meet my eyes. Who had told on us?
Mr. Bogart nodded. “Do try to be good, Kimberly.”
I had to hurry to keep up with Mrs. LaGuardia’s smooth strides. When we reached her office, she shut the door behind us and took off her spectacles, letting them hang over her bosom on a silvery chain. I sat on the chair facing her desk and my feet barely brushed the floor. I knew what happened to students in the principal’s office: they were annihilated.
“The results of the national test scores have just arrived. Miss Kumar noty yours and asked me to take a look. Especially your math scores are very something. Of course, your reading scores are low.”
I stared at my fingernails and my blood thudded harder. I understood this meant that my English scores were not good enough, an embarrassment to the school. I was going to be suspended on the grounds of grades and fighting. Or perhaps they’d found out about my forgeries of Ma’s signature too.
“Tell me, what are you planning to do next year?”
So that was it. I was going to be kept back. Everyone else would graduate from the sixth grade except for me. How could I hide this from Ma? I was really going to be in trouble when I got home. I slunk down lower and tried to think of an answer that would appease her.
“Honey, look at me.”
I was so startled by the word “honey” that I obeyed. I had heard Mrs. Avery using it for Annette. This was not a word principals used back home. Mrs. LaGuardia’s face looked strangely naked without her glasses. Her lashes were short but her eyes were kind.
“You’re not in trouble,” she said.
I straightened a bit in my chair even though I knew better than to believe her.
“Unfortunately, there aren’t many good choices when it comes to public junior high schools in this area. I’ve been lobbing to change this fact because all of our children deserve to go someplace first-rate after graduation, but this is still the way it is. The closest public junior high school is still quite far from here and it’s not in the safest neighborhood. A child of your cola brr usually gets into one of the specialized public schools for bright children, but your English scores aren’t high enough yet. I also know you haven’t had the easiest time here so far.”
I was looking at the seat of my chair again: the upholstery was violently green. I felt vaguely sick.
She went on. “The truth is, Kimberly, I’m worried about what might happen to you if you get thrown into a school without the faciltees to help you nur chore your abilities. Off the record, I think you should consider a private school. Most of our students wouldn’t have a really stick chance of getting in or of being able to pay for it, but you might.”
Now I was alarmed for a different reason. Somehow, Mrs. LaGuardia had mistaken me for one of the white kids, the ones who had housekeepers waiting at home, ready with an afternoon snack. I had to play it cool until I could get out of that office, throw her off the scent and then bolt.
“Thank you, Mrs. LaGuardia,” I said.
“I know of several good schools, if you should need some names,” she said.
I stared at her blankly.
“Do you want some recordy shunts?” she repeated.
“No, thank you.” I was too quick to answer.
She looked at me. No one ever said Mrs. LaGuardia was dumb. “Don’t you want to go to private school, Kimberly?” She was beginning to sound annoyed. “Or if you can tell me how to reach your mother?”
I shook my head and stared at the floor.
She sighed. “It’s your decision.”
I could hear she’d given up and instead of feeling relieved, the unhappiness in me grew heavier.
“I want go,” I mumbled. I could feel her leaning forward across her polished desk to hear me better but she didn’t interrupt. “But we should pay.”
“I should have been clearer.” Her tone was brisk now. “No one would expect you and your mother to pay for it all yourselves. I meant that the private school would naturally have to offer you a scholarship. I can’t promise anything, but I believe there is a chance they would.”
“Really?” I had never imagined that I might get to go to a fancy school like Annette.
“But don’t get your hopes up too much, because this is very late to apply. The normal application process is already closed. Any school who accepts you, if they do, would have to squeeze you in and their budget may already be ex-sausaged.”
“Maybe Harrison?” I asked. That was where Annette was going.
Mrs. LaGuardia laughed. “Well, you do set your sights high. Why don’t you let me make some phone calls? I’ll get back to you, Kimberly. You may go now, but again, don’t hope for too much. It’s a long shot.”
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After I came back from Mrs. LaGuardia’s office without being expelled, Luke wanted to fight me every day. We had our exchange of backpack blows a few more times when another girl caught on to what was going on before I did. She was beginning to develop a woman’s body and she was much prettier than I, with her soft brown curls and creamy skin. She started challenging Luke as if she were defending me.
“You better not pick on my friend,” she said, pushing her face close to his. She had never spoken a word to me before this, but I was still grateful.
It wasn’t long before Luke transferred his attention to her.
“You wanna fight?” he asked.
They had to fight only once before they started necking in the school yard. Finally, I understood. I hadn’t been involved in fights: it had been a courtship, the rules of which I’d violated by kicking him so hard the first time. I felt ashamed. In any case, the whole episode earned me a kind of respect from the rest of the class and I began to feel more at home.
There were several other notable events that spring: Easter, a holiday about rabbits and eggs, and the school photo. Ma and I couldn’t afford to buy the pictures, so I kept the print they gave me, which had the word PROOF stamped across my chest. The new PTA meeting came and went without Ma’s knowledge.
After Easter, I heard from Mrs. LaGuardia that Harrison Prep was indeed interested in me as a scholarship student, which I understood to mean they might be willing to pay for me as long as I got into a good college in the end. That seemed to be a reasonable bargain to me. What else could I offer?
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Mrs. LaGuardia made an appointment for me and Ma at the school, which was in a part of Brooklyn I had never seen.
Ma was breathless with excitement when I told her. “What a chance! I am so proud of you!” But her brow furrowed when she heard the date. “So soon? The shipment is going out that night.”
“It’s all right. I can go by myself.”
“Can we reschedule the appointment for another day?”
“Ma, I’d like it if you came with me but I don’t want you to get into trouble at the factory. You can’t miss any day there.”
Ma looked sad. “I wish you didn’t have to do it alone but I’ll light incense for you.”
I was allowed to miss my own classes that day and I had to take three subways to get to Harrison Prep. Then I walked for a while, following the map they’d given me, until I came to a huge wooded area. This was a part of Brooklyn I hadn’t dreamed existed. It didn’t look like anything else I’d seen, not even Annette’s neighborhood. It was so beautiful and peaceful it seemed like I was in the country.
I thought I was walking along a park but it later turned out that this was already a part of Harrison’s campus. The school was so old that it owned a great deal of property. The trees and shrubbery turned into a high wire fence and through it, in the distance, I could see high school kids playing a game on an enormous and immaculate lawn. They were wearing shorts that were so wide, they seemed to be square. These kids and their game were completely alien to me. At my current elementary school, at least I wasn’t the only nonwhite child and I certainly wasn’t the only poor one. No one I’d ever known had done things like what these students were doing, and if I stayed here, I would also have to run with a netted pole, be expected to catch balls and toss them to some figure waving in the distance. I would also have to run in square shorts. We could never afford square shorts.
I stopped walking for a moment and thought about turning back, going back to who I was. If they knew that Ma made even my underwear for me, that we slept under pieces of fabric we’d found in the trash, they would surely throw me out. I was a fraud, pretending to be one of the rich kids. What I didn’t know then was that I shouldn’t have worried about pulling any of this off; they weren’t fooled at all.
I finally reached a large brick building set in the same smooth lawn. The door was made of carved wood inset with pieces of colored glass. It was so heavy, I could hardly get it open. Through the lighter parts of the glass, I could already see a young woman at a desk in front of an enormous curving staircase. She was in a crisp white blouse and high heels, her light brown hair neatly pulled back in a bun.
I felt very small in that hall. A portrait of a bearded man holding a Bible watched me as I walked up to her. I looked at the crumpled slip of paper in my hand, even though I already knew it by heart. I’d thought a lot about how to get through this appointment.
“Do you know Dr. Weston?” I asked in a squeaky voice.
She looked faintly surprised, then took a breath and said, “Do you have an appointment with her?”
“Yes,” I said, relieved she’d understood me. She would take over from here.
“You must be Kimberly Chang.”
I nodded and handed her the stack of forms I’d had to fill out for my application.
She glanced behind me. “Is your mother parking the car?”
I looked down. “No,” I said. “She is ill today.”
“Someone else must have brought you, then?”
I should have thought of this and been ready with an answer. Lies flashed through my mind—someone brought me but they were waiting in the car, someone brought me and left.
She interrupted my thoughts. “Did you come alone?”
The engine of my mind stuttered to a halt. “Yes.”
She paused, then smiled at me. “You must be tired from all the traveling, then. Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll tell Dr. Weston you’re here.”
She led me to one of the wooden chairs set against the wall and left with my pile of paperwork. She hadn’t been unkind but I wasn’t reassured. Her heels echoed in the hall.
When she returned a few minutes later, she was accompanied by a compact older woman in a beige suit with a face like a bulldog, the jowls hanging below a pointy nose, and close-set bright eyes.
The older woman stopped before me. “Hi, I’m Dr. Weston,” she said.
“How do you do?” I said, glad that I had practiced this with Mrs. Avery. I extended my hand to her and she shook it without hesitation. Her hand was pale and soft except for the hardness of several square glittering rings.
When I was seated in her office, Dr. Weston leaned back. A silver stopwatch rested on the yellow legal pad on her table. My forms also lay on her desk. She gave me a smile that only moved the bottom half of her face. I knew this was supposed to put me at ease but it only made me more nervous.
“We normally do this in written form but because I’ve been told you’re a special case, I’m going to ask you a few questions myself, all right? Just answer them as best you can, and if you don’t know the answer, tell me.”
I braced myself: Where is your mother? Why didn’t she bring you here today? What do people wear for Easter? Which hand should you hold your knife in when you eat? I gripped the armrests of my chair.
“Would you please count from one to forty in threes? I’m going to time you. It begins one, four, seven . . . ?”
I blinked. This, I could handle. “Ten, thirteen, sixteen . . .”
“Good. Now, a boy is sixteen years old and his sister is twice as old. When the boy is twenty-four years old, what will be his sister’s age?”
She went on like this for about an hour. It was the strangest conversation I’d ever had with anyone but I liked it. I understood it was a test, of course, but all such conversations are tests and this, at least, was one for which I understood the rules. In a world of uncertainties, I was on concrete ground. When I didn’t know a word, she explained it to me. I had to skip a question only a few times and then she asked me something else. Finally, she stopped and looked up at me.
“Excellent,” she said. “Now, there is one last thing.”
She handed me a sheet of paper and a pencil. “Draw a picture for me. Anything you like. A house, a girl, whatever.”
I didn’t want to draw a picture of our house. For a girl, I imagined she meant a non-Chinese girl, and I drew the only kind of girl I knew about, the sort I’d read about in books: a princess. She had long blond hair with a crown on her head and a Cinderella ball gown with puff sleeves and an impossibly narrow waist.
When Dr. Weston took the sheet of paper and saw the drawing, she gave a short bark of laughter. She contained herself immediately and riffled through her papers, but I didn’t know why she had laughed. I must have looked hurt as I wondered if it was because of the incongruity between my clothes and the beautiful ones I’d drawn.
She glanced at my face. “Your results on the test were so impersee, I’d forgotten how young you were. Listen, why don’t you take a tour of the school and we’ll talk again afterwards, all right?”
I nodded. The first lady came in and took me around. First, she showed me their trophy showcase, which was in the main hall where I’d entered. I heard her talking about the awards the school had received, but I was looking at the pictures of the kids who had won them. They were all wearing blazers. No one wore blazers at my school. We made them sometimes at the factory, but these were different. I could tell they weren’t made of polyester. These blazers looked stiff, reining in the students’ shoulders, making sure that they didn’t take up any more space than they were allowed.
The students who were smiling showed even, white teeth to match their even, white skin. Was I going to be the only Chinese person in the whole school? Was that why they were interested in me? The framed pictures were arranged one above the other, with the older classes at the bottom. The older classes contained only boys, and then there were both boys and girls, but as the photos moved forward in time, one thing hardly seemed to change: a few darker faces appeared here and there, but those were rare exceptions.
Then, to my surprise, I was taken to several other buildings, all large and spacious, the walls paneled with wood. I had thought the first building was the entire school. Inside the other buildings, I tried not to stare at the statues of women with bare breasts, their whiteness glowing in the alcoves; they even had nipples. This too was something Western. As we passed some classrooms, I saw they were filled with students who looked just like the kids in the pictures.
We took a walk around the campus, and I gasped. I was completely dumbfounded. I had never imagined there could be such a place in New York. The woman pointed out the tennis courts and the football field, as if it were completely natural to have access to such things. Leaves were sprouting everywhere. I’d never seen so many trees, but what struck me the most was how open it was. Not the vacant lots where Ma and I lived, or the fenced-in patch of asphalt we had at school, or even Annette’s pretty little backyard had been like this. I didn’t know much, but I knew this place was special.
