story, short

By her second month of ESL, Carlin’s English was already markedly better than her blonde and red haired classmates. Her first grade teacher adorned her spelling tests with golden stars and fuzzy cats and dogs while she chattered away about pebbles in her sneakers and chicken nuggets for lunch. It’s amazing how quickly children adapt, marveled her parents, and also how easily they forget.

Carlin’s school was an old, cheerful set of brick buildings, joined together with a haphazard-looking skyway. Every afternoon, the Chinese neighborhood mothers would alternate duties in picking up a gaggle of loud, energetic boys and girls toting oversized backpacks and multicolored lunchboxes. The walk back to the brownstone where a number of Chinese families lived was a little under a mile, and cut through one of the wealthiest areas in Montgomery Heights. The sprawling estates with catalogue green lawns and century-old oak trees provided for Carlin and her friends no more than a supply of helicopter seedlings that flew when dropped, and apple green silk worms that hung over their paths. It never occurred to any of them, as they finally arrived at home, that life could possibly be any better or worse then their own. Carlin never thought twice about the bed that she slept on, the mismatched pillowcase and comforter, the mattress, couches, chairs, and lampshades that her father had found and retrieved from the sidewalk in front of their apartment. She never questioned the wax paper in lieu of a tablecloth or the plastic bookcase instead of mahogany. None of it mattered, as long as she got to chase down the fireflies with her friends after dinner.

Everything changed the day Melissa commented on her beige turtleneck, complete with a furry toffee-colored bunny, at recess one day in fifth grade. “Does your sweater hop too?” She had yelled across the monkey bars, before prancing off with her group of Limited-Too attired friends to terrorize the fourth graders at the tire swing. Carlin could see nothing wrong with the clothes she wore, except that they didn’t resemble the pastel colored polos and the same pair of bell bottomed jeans sported by the perky group of best friends who always sat at the front of the class. Her own jeans were brand new, but rolled up at the ankle because her mother fully believed in the concept of growing into your clothing. The bunny sweater was a gift from her aunt in China, where apparently life-like animal clothing designs were all the rage. Even her footgear was subject to persecution. It was almost June, but her mother had insisted that she wear socks with her new sandals in case it got too cold. But as Carlin bounced her ball back into the overflowing metal crate at the end of recess, she heard the same group of girls giggling behind her. “I wonder if she has hideous feet. Why else would someone wear socks with her sandals?”