It’s hard to come to school in worn-out shoes with ill-fitting clothes and dirty hair. It’s hard when you don’t have a backpack, when your homework isn’t done, when you can barely read or write. It’s hard to be homeless in the fifth grade.
It’s easier not to talk in class. Your English is tinged by a Southern drawl and your Spanish is more appropriate for a street fight than a classroom. It’s better to keep quiet and earn respect on the soccer field, where no one cares if you can read and no one asks where you live.
It’s easier to keep your eyes down at all times. You can’t see how people look at you. You guess that people make faces at your clothes, the same ones you’ve worn all week, but it’s easier not to look at their sneering faces.
It’s easier to crop your hair short than to be the only blond kid in a school full of Latinos. Sometimes you hear people talking about your blue eyes, but you can’t tell if it’s admiration or laughter.
It’s easier to say you lost your homework than to admit you didn’t do it because you don’t understand it, or because you’re sleeping in an abandoned house at night and it got dark before you could finish your work.
It’s easier to pretend that you didn’t see your teacher slip your mom a few twenties. You know the money is needed — you’d like dinner tonight — but it’s easier to pretend you didn’t see.
It’s easier to scribble on your paper than to write. You want to write about your life before, when you lived in a four-bedroom house, played on a soccer team, went to first grade in a town where everyone had the same soft Tennessee drawl you do.
You want to write about your dad, stopped for a traffic ticket and then deported. You wish you could write about moving to Tlaxcala, about how you only went to school for two weeks before they kicked you out because you didn’t speak Spanish and you cried every day.
You want to write about how you liked the Monarch School for homeless children because no one ever looked at you funny and teachers didn’t give homework. But you can’t find the words, and even if you could, you can’t spell them.
It’s hard to watch your teacher help your mom fill out immigration papers. You hate to watch your mom hope for a miracle, that your father will be allowed to join the family in the U.S. It’s hard to dream of living together again in a real house. It’s hard to receive the letter denying your dad a visa.
It’s hard to flunk fifth grade. You hate your teacher for a while for holding you back. One day you realize that math is a little easier the second time around. You’re the fastest in your class to finish the multiplication tables. You read a book, cover to cover, for the first time, and take a test on it and pass. You hate your teacher a little less then.
It’s hard to stay after school every day trying to catch up, but little by little you learn to write, and you understand phonics enough that your sentences no longer read like a mouthful of Tennessee drawl: “The house was burnt in the far.”
It’s a little easier when you are sitting at a table and another kid says, “Teacher, my dad was deported. He lives in TJ,” and another child chimes in, “Mine too,” and suddenly you hear yourself saying, softly, “Mine too.”
It’s hard the first time you ask the teacher for help. You shrug, and stare at your shoes and mumble. She answers you quietly and kindly, and you decide that maybe asking for help isn’t so hard after all. If you can do it in fifth grade, you can do it in sixth and seventh and eighth.
Then you realize it’s not as hard as you thought it would be to finish high school. You miss a lot of school, but your counselors are kind and let you make up missed credits.
Before you know it you’re about to graduate. You’re not the oldest of your siblings, but you will be the first to graduate high school. You want to walk across that stage and receive that diploma, even though you’ll be terrified to have all of those eyes on you. You’ll hear your mom’s cheers and see your teachers’ smiles and know that, as hard as it was, you made it.
