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 dirty. 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.