I quickly switch back to the sheet that Betsy gave me. Introduction Games, it says. I skim the instructions and realize it’s an activity for a large group. I flip to the next one. It’s called Name Game. It’s also for a group, but I think Florencio and I can pull this off. I explain the rules to him. I cheat and explain them in Spanish, but insist we do the game in English.
“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.