"Chili cheese fry brain," I mumbled, looking sideways, undercutting my previous warning. They started giggling.
"Rat smell..." I continued.
I can't even remember where the ongoing, chili-cheese-fry-rat-smell inside joke started, but the last hour of the school day is a constant mix of sternness and delirium.
I looked over at Faba. The students had been instructed to wear their teacher's favorite color to school that day. His too-small, tight green t-shirt had obviously been dug from the bottom of a drawer, with care.
"Are you worried about something?' a little girl asked me. I smiled and asked her what she meant.
"You just like you're worried about something." she said and smiled, touching my hand.
Alec read over the New York Times article about humanitarians in various stages of legal trouble for trying to help migrants survive their trek across the southwestern United States.
"That's what you used to do..." he kind of asked-stated.
My mind's eye flashed backwards to the men in the back of my car, to the medical helicopter flying into the desert sky with one man while the Border Patrol handcuffed another, to the men splayed out on the dirt road, eyes red and Mexican ID cards laid in front of them.
"Yeah." I answered.
I walked through the cafeteria to the place where my desk is located. A hand extended, the little girl in the same sweater, the one that was worried that I was worried.
Gabriel swept the floor of the lab where I sit with the homeless kids, waiting for their special bus. He is on the school's Safety Patrol. I teach a number of his four siblings, they are pretty widely regarded as probably the most awesome family in the school: smart, respectful, sweet. All of them. Everyone even knows their parents, a rarity at my school, because they escort their children to and from our establishment everyday.
"Gabriel, were you ever in ESOL?" I asked in English, though I usually force him to practice Spanish with me.
"No, they gave me the test though when we moved to this school from Silver Hill."
Remarkable, I thought. Neither parent speaks English as a first language, yet they were able to raise their son to be bilingual enough to not qualify for English services.
"I didn't know that you had gone to another school before here." I responded.
"Well, my mom doesn't have a driver's license...."
I felt the hair on my arms stand up.
"So we needed to move closer so that she wouldn't have to drive far to bring us to school." he continued.
"My dad works all the time." he added, still sweeping the floor.
The dad, the same dad that still finds time to accompany his children to school every morning. They chase each other up the front sidewalk, all laughter and smiles. A man that truly enjoys his children.
"One day he got pulled over and he gave them his Mexican driver's license and they took him to jail. It took a long time to get him out."
I noticed an almost electrical smell, emanating from the sweat accumulating at the roots of my hair.
"So, he has a trial coming to decide if he will be sent back to Mexico. My mom is from a town called Honduras."
"I am so sorry, Gabriel. That must be so stressful for your family." I said, hunting for the right thing to say.
"It is. It is very stressful. We have to rely on our faith." he responded solemnly, like a person well beyond his eleven years.
"I still think you're worried," she told me again, one of the following mornings of many mornings.
"You need to think of happy things." she advised me, and walked away.
"Highs and lows?" I asked my Housing Authority group.
"HIGH...." Aazim answered, eyes aglow.
"My parents, both of them, left us, all of us, alone in the apartment on Saturday....."
"ALL of you? You, Mahja, Suleymann.....wait, who am I forgetting?"
"Jabez! Yes, all of us...." he said, sighing contently.
"Is the apartment still standing? Does it have walls still?"
"It does, it does," he answered.
"I drank soda until my heart was content."
*Title, Old Town Road, Lil Nas X
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