Grades 10–11
NarrativeWritingMy teacher tells me the sweetest sound in the world is the sound of your own name. My name is like my handwriting, unapologetically thick-lined cursive bleeding into the next page; it’s curling and winding into its own thoughts. It’s like the rain beading down onto the ground, a light note that I can whisper barely hearing myself. Elle. Yet there’s still a heaviness to it, one syllable that finds itself into every conversation. I’ll never be able to forget my own name, even if it’s only a letter in the alphabet.
“What’s your name?” the man says again, staring at me like he understands. It’s 12:02, and I can still hear the rain falling outside the window. I try to remember that I’m here, in the shelter of the warm white walls you find only in one place in the school. Mr. Homes put a plastic toy in front of me the moment I sat down, made of little green and red boxes that lined up perfectly. I want to thank him, but instead of my own voice, all I hear is my best friend’s voice. We were slowly walking down the parking lot towards the bus that day last spring when she told me both her parents are immigrants, which shouldn’t have mattered but now suddenly did. “They said I’m the only reason they’re still here,” Ciara says, her voice trembling as she stares straight ahead. “They said without me they’d be deported.”
A few days before that was the first time I said, “alien,” the TV light illuminating the edges of the couch, not understanding what I was saying but wanting to repeat after the president. “But I heard him say—,” I started, and my aunt spoke to me as if I had slapped her in the face. “Don’t ever call people that.” I just want to pick up the plastic toy in front of me and laugh it off, but all I can think about is how scared Ciara was that day, how scared I was, the fear we still carry even if we won’t admit it.
It’s 12:03. Mr. Homes opens his mouth to say something, but stops like he doesn’t want to break the balance. I want to tell him that my name is really Esperanza, like my grandmother, but it just seems like too much at once.
***
This piece was originally published in 826 Valencia’s A Light From the Dark.
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