Mudo

"Shift" Mr. Warner repeated, over and over.
"Shift to the left."
I watched my student carefully write "shit" on her spelling test.
"Oh man, you should have seen what Ja'quon put as his name on Kahoot...."  he said lowly, after seeing me look at her quiz.
"LOIN KING" he wrote on the board, before quickly erasing it with his hand.

I sat in the Media Center, my morning duty post, monitoring the kids in the lower grades that don't eat breakfast at school.
"A minute is sixty seconds.  An hour is sixty minutes.  A week is seven days...." a little boy prattled off.
"You really know your time segments." I responded.
"Yeah, but he can't make the errr sound." his fellow Speech classmate said dismissively, her own stutter surprisingly absent for a second.

"Both of my parents' birthdays are on January 1st."  Aazim mentioned randomly, as he worked on his math problems.
"My mom's birthday is on January 1st too!"  Habiba commented.
I've heard that refugees are often assigned January 1st as their birthday if there is ambiguity about their actual birth date when they arrive in the United States.  I've had a number of refugee students with the tell tale birthday.  I was surprised they didn't know this but didn't say anything, just marveled at the coincidence.

"I'm taking it!" I heard an unfamiliar voice utter, before Helina grabbed crayons from another child.
"She talked...." Ana said quietly, eyes wide.
"I think she just did...."
She has never done that before.
We all stared at Helina.
She looked back at us, a mischievous look in her eyes, before climbing on the table and drawing on it.