“Oh… no, thank you,” I said, immediately clicking on the x in the corner of the screen. Oh God. Now she probably thought I’d been looking up porn or something.
“I see that you were reading up on Guatemala.” Again with the tone! She sounded like I had been looking up porn.
I legit didn’t know what to say.
“Are you writing a report?”
“Sort of… I mean, it’s… extra credit.” Good save!
“It’s nice to see students take advantage of extra credit,” she enthused. “But—” She glanced at the clock. “This period is almost over. I can leave some books and resources on reserve, and you can pick them up later if you’d like. Good for you. To learn more about these people.”
These people?
* * *
On my way out of the library, I headed to Mr. Phelps’s class, “these people” still running through my head. I was the first one there. Mr. Phelps sat on a stool, hunched over his laptop, his glasses about to fall off the tip of his nose. Mr. Phelps was kinda growing on me (even though he still went overkill on asking if I understood the material and all).
He was really ramping up the immigration unit. Like, he’d added all these books to our extra-credit reading list, and he’d been showing us parts of documentaries about immigration but from different points of view. One was about the women who leave their children in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador to come to the United States to work as maids and housekeepers and stuff, and send the money back. It was crazy sad to see how they were sometimes separated from their kids for their entire childhoods, missing their kids’ birthdays, graduations, everything. And here I complained when Mom made me call Tía Rosa on her birthday. And she was only in New York. Plus, I had both my parents with me—well, I used to—unlike the kids in the documentaries. I guess I’d always known why my parents had moved to the United States. I mean, in general: They wanted a better life. But I didn’t really understand what they’d had to go through to come here, leaving their own country, language, family, friends, everything. Everything. I’d been so clueless!
“Excuse me, Mr. Phelps?” I said.
He looked up. “Oh, hello, Lili.”
“If this is a bad time, I can ask you later,” I said quickly.
“No. Please. Sit.” He shut his laptop. “What can I help you with?”
“Well, remember how you were saying that we could get extra credit for reading a book on immigration?”
“Yes!” Dang, teachers got so excited when kids showed like a speck of interest in anything.
“Well, there was one book you mentioned, one about a boy who travels on top of a train from Mexico to the United States?”
“Guatemala.”
“Huh?” I froze. Guatemala?
Mr. Phelps shook his head. “No, not Guatemala, my bad. Honduras. The boy’s name is Enrique. The book is about his journey from Honduras to North Carolina.” His tone grew gentle. “He was searching for his mother.”
“Oh—”
Mr. Phelps was now practically sprinting for the bookshelf. He ran a finger along a few spines. “Here it is!” He handed me a paperback. The cover showed a boy—about my age—perched on top of a huge train. He could have been—my dad? As a teenager? I blinked hard.
“This the one you were thinking of?” Mr. Phelps prompted.
“Yeah. Thanks.” Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario. I shoved the book into my backpack. I didn’t want anyone else seeing it. I was born here, and I didn’t have to prove it to anyone, but it was just easier for me to slide the book into my bag and not make a big deal.
“Lili, I’m glad to see you’re interested.”
I stayed quiet, balanced my weight on my heels.
“Honduras, I don’t know. But Guatemala is actually a beautiful country.”
“You’ve been there?”
“I have! When I was in my twenties, I traveled in Mexico and Guatemala and part of South America.” He pushed his glasses up, looked as if he wanted to say something else, or worse—ask me something. But he didn’t. Instead he told me, “Don’t forget. You only get extra credit if you write a response to the book. Minimum of two pages. There’s more information on the class website.”
The bell rang and other students began to trickle in.
“Right. Okay. Thanks.” I paused. “One more thing, Mr. Phelps?”
“Yup?”
“So, do people really make it? I mean, do the people who ride the tops of those trains or hire smugglers, do they really make it across the border?”
His brow furrowed. “Some do.”
“Ah, okay. Good to know. Thanks,” I said, keeping my voice chill. The rest of me? Not so much. Was he looking at me funny? What if he guessed why I was asking? I found a seat in the back row and took out my homework.
15
On my way to meet Holly at her locker after school—I gotta admit, I was excited to go to her house, be a normal kid—I peeked into Dustin’s last class, hoping to catch him. But no luck. I hate not having my phone! Then I stopped at the library. Sure enough, the librarian had set out three books for me on Guatemala. But they were nothing like the ones Mr. Phelps had in his class. These books were… basic. Mostly factual and showing photos of exotic birds. I checked out two just so the librarian wouldn’t feel bad, but I knew what I was reading first, for sure.
Not twenty minutes later, and faaaaar away from Guatemala, I was stepping through Holly’s front door. The smell reminded me of a dentist’s office. Well, a mix between a dentist’s office and pumpkin pie. Her house was massive. Like, it would take a hell of a lot of cardboard to make even a miniature replica of that house. Everything, and I mean everything, was a shade of tan—the paint on the actual house (three stories), the enormous front door, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the tiles in the kitchen. Even the towels in the downstairs bathroom were tan. A wooden-framed photograph of Holly and her little brother, Max, faced me when I sat on the toilet. In the photo they were laughing so hard, their eyes were nearly shut. I had to hit the bathroom as soon as we got there. Yeah, I was so worried that my pee would be loud that I ran the faucet. Even the bathroom had mad space. And no dog, thank God. Dogs basically freaked me out. Most of the ones I knew lived behind metal fences with beware of dog signs. No thank you.
Holly and her mother stopped talking the second I stepped back into the kitchen. The floor was so clean, it could have been in a Clorox commercial. Every detail competed for my attention—like when Holly’s mom kept calling us girls. I mean, obviously we’re girls. But she used it like this: “Would you girls like some snacks?” And she waved toward the island—yes, they had an island—in the center of the kitchen. Still, Mrs. Peterson seemed nice enough. Though—ha! She had beige hair! When we were driving here she had asked Holly about her day and then had let Holly play whatever playlist she had on her phone. When a rap song full of swears came on, Holly blasted the volume, and her mother didn’t even ask her to turn it down! My mom would have gone ballistic.
On the kitchen island were bowls and platters full of pistachios, chips (the expensive kind where every chip was a different shape), apple slices and cheddar cheese cubes, crackers with flecks of real wheat in them, a dark kind of peanut butter or something on the side, and two empty glasses.