Lisa Ko: The Leavers

“I don’t know who you are,” he’d respond in Fuzhounese.

When he spoke Chinese, Peter’s leg would bounce and Kay’s lips would press even thinner, as if they were being sucked into her body, her mouth consuming itself. “English,” Peter would warn, concerned that Deming wouldn’t be fluent enough for school, as if the English he spoke was tainted. His mother used to swat at his shoulders in a way that looked playful but felt serious when he spoke too much English and not enough Chinese; his weapon of choice had been the language that made her dependent on him. Whoever she was with now would have to translate.

The giant windows. The yard outside with its large, gnarled trees. No sidewalks on Oak Street. Hours could pass without a car going by, the absence of overt sound a trickle of gauzy peach. Deming would stand at the window and listen to the languid chirp of birds, the dim roar of a distant lawnmower. The air maintained a steady, nearly indiscernible buzz. Peach-brown gauze swept over his eyelashes.

In a corner of his new room was a pile-up of plastic games, action figures of muscular men with swords, sturdy fire trucks and police cars with miniature sirens, toys Peter and Kay said were his. (Playing cops didn’t interest him. There was nothing fun about screeching sirens.) On a shelf by his bed was a row of books, Condensed Classics for Children, paperback versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, and Oliver Twist . The word condensed reminded him of the cans of milk his mother had bought as a treat, a drizzle of sugared glue atop his breakfast oatmeal. Like him, she had a sweet tooth, but didn’t give in to it often. Eduardo would offer her damp muffins encased in plastic wrap, the blueberries reminiscent of pigeon poop, but she would buy bananas instead. Occasionally there had been condensed milk, Tootsie Rolls, a package of Twizzlers.

Full of omelet, Deming fidgeted in the pews of St. Ann’s. The collared striped shirt, a hand-me-down from a nephew of Kay’s, made his neck itch. Stand, sit, pray. The priest droned on and Deming gripped the blue button from his mother’s box. He had found it inside a pair of shorts Vivian had packed. Now he slept with it under his pillow.

He rubbed the button’s hard upper lip, the rounded center, and remembered the subway as it shot out of the underground at 125th Street and his mother with her arms around him, saying “Look!” He dreamt of dashing up University with Michael, where the street curved and the buildings slapped hands with the sky, legs swinging, backpacks bouncing, sharing a bag of Funyuns with Elroy and Hung, shoving Sopheap around in the park. The pizzeria, the donut spot, the Chinese takeout, the shop selling rows of stiff blue jeans and dresses for $4.99. In the city, far, far away from St. Ann’s Church and the town so small you could spit on a map and rub it away, there had always been the warm press of bodies, Vivian ladling bowls of soup, the chatter of the television, chugging soda, burping contests with Michael, his mother talking on her cell phone. Sharing a bed, it had been warm enough to not need flannel blankets or wool socks.

He tried to tuck away the Bronx in scraps and shards. Once he had read in a book, an ancient science textbook still being passed off as useable at P.S. 33—one day, man will walk on the moon, it said, more than a quarter century after the fact — that people could have tumors inside them for years, harmless cysts, and these cysts could grow teeth and hair, even fingernails. A person could carry this alien being and never know. A monster twin. A hairball double. So many things could be growing inside him, inside every person. He carried Mama and Leon, Michael and Vivian, the city. Reduced to a series of hairs, a ball of fingernail clippings and one stray tooth. A collection of secret tumors.

Deming kicked the pew. A little girl in the next row turned around and looked at his face until her mother elbowed her.

The minister mumbled a prayer. Deming had never been to church before, so he did what everyone else was doing. He stood. He sat. He recited lines from the heavy book and stifled a yawn. Thank you God, amen. He tried to ignore the people around him as he walked with the Wilkinsons to their car.

RIDGEBOROUGH MIDDLE SCHOOL WAS two blocks from downtown Ridgeborough, which consisted of one main street and a park with a big American flag. Deming sat in the front seat of Kay’s silver Prius on the drive down Oak Street, then Hillside Road, across the railroad tracks and into the west side of town, where the houses were closer together and the yards were smaller.

“Daniel might be better served if he does the fifth grade over again instead of going into the sixth. Across the board, his grades were very poor.” Principal Chester, a man with tufts of white nose hairs that protruded from his nostrils like grassy tusks, pointed to papers on his desk. “It seems that this school, this Bronx school, also recommended him for special study.”

“I did summer school,” Deming said.

“We’ll need the records for that, then.” Principal Chester looked through the papers. “They didn’t have the same classes we do here. What kind of math and science did you take at your old school, young man?”

He wondered how Principal Chester could breathe through the nose hairs, and wished Michael and his friends were here so they could joke about them. “Just math.”

“Geometry? And what about language arts, what did you study at your old school?” He looked at Kay. “Where is he from? Originally?”

“I already told you,” Kay said. “New York City.”

“But originally?”

“His mother, I guess, was Chinese.”

“China. Interesting. And you and your husband are his adoptive parents?”

“Foster,” Kay said.

Principal Chester shuffled papers. “His English may need a little brushing up on, but I’m afraid we don’t have enough foreign students in this school district to warrant an English as a Second Language class.”

“His English is perfectly fine. He was born here.”

“It would be beneficial to let him be with the fifth graders. Kids can get discouraged easily. We don’t want to get him started off in his new country on the wrong foot.”

“As I mentioned, he was born in the United States,” Kay said. “And you can hear him talk, he’s fluent. I don’t agree with holding him back. It will only impart low expectations. Kids are adaptable, they learn fast. He belongs with the other kids his age, in the sixth grade.”

“And your husband? Does he agree with all this?”

“Excuse me?”

“Certainly your husband has an opinion as well,” Principal Chester said.

“Developmentally, Daniel is academically above grade level. If you can recall Vygotsky, as an educator like yourself surely can, then you are aware that social interaction is fundamentally tied to a child’s cognitive development processes. Even if your school employs a transmissionist model, we can take into account that scaffolding teaching strategies among Daniel’s peer group will ensure that he can, and will, thrive in the appropriate sociocultural context. In other words, in the sixth grade.”

Principal Chester looked at the papers again. “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He chuckled. “All that talk about models. I’m not sure I’m as well-versed in models as you are, Mrs. Wilkinson.”

“Dr. Wilkinson. I teach at Carlough.”

In the end, Principal Chester put Deming in sixth grade.

“That man’s a complete idiot,” Kay said, as they left the school.

DEMING’S FIRST WEEKS IN Ridgeborough were like sleepwalking, murky and addled, as if he’d wake up and be back in the Bronx with a finger snap. The bag of clothing Vivian had packed was the only thing he had left from the city, clothes Kay had washed and folded and placed in the dresser in his room. She took him to the mall to buy what she called a proper back-to-school wardrobe, the parking lot a wide expanse of blacktop bigger than any lot he had ever seen, its size more apparent because of its emptiness, only a few cars parked in the myriad spaces. They walked past stores as soprano saxophone trilled over the loudspeakers, and like at church, like the few people he’d seen on Oak Street, everyone else was white.