He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it—the five-year-old Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy, inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire house.Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his classmates carried ID. But his classmatesdidhave Big Wheels, catcher’s mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents’ night and sent trays of cupcakes to class on birthdays—Alan’s birthday came during the summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn’t be an issue. So did his brothers’, when their time came to enroll.At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched spring moccasins—a tithe of the golems—were fit subject for a brief exposition.“Did your mom buy you any real shoes?” It was asked without malice or calculation, but Alan’s flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he’d figured out how to fit in, that he’d observed people to the point that he could be one, but he was so wrong.They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench, they cocked their heads quizzically at him, as if to say,Do I know you from somewhere?or, if he was feeling generous,I wonder where you live?The latter was scarier than the former.For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so clever as he’d fancied himself. There wasn’t much money around the mountain that season—the flakes he’d brought down to the assayer had been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and chocolate bars that he’d brought to fill Bradley’s little round belly.He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that lack that drove him to the town library. He’d walked past the squat brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its threshold. He had a sense that he wasn’t welcome there, that it was not intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the other patrons coming and going.It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in his hand before the librarian had turned back again.Credentialed.He’d read the word in a book of war stories.He liked the sound of it.
He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it—the five-year-old Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.
Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy, inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire house.
Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his classmates carried ID. But his classmatesdidhave Big Wheels, catcher’s mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents’ night and sent trays of cupcakes to class on birthdays—Alan’s birthday came during the summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn’t be an issue. So did his brothers’, when their time came to enroll.
At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched spring moccasins—a tithe of the golems—were fit subject for a brief exposition.
“Did your mom buy you any real shoes?” It was asked without malice or calculation, but Alan’s flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he’d figured out how to fit in, that he’d observed people to the point that he could be one, but he was so wrong.
They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench, they cocked their heads quizzically at him, as if to say,Do I know you from somewhere?or, if he was feeling generous,I wonder where you live?The latter was scarier than the former.
For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so clever as he’d fancied himself. There wasn’t much money around the mountain that season—the flakes he’d brought down to the assayer had been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and chocolate bars that he’d brought to fill Bradley’s little round belly.
He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that lack that drove him to the town library. He’d walked past the squat brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its threshold. He had a sense that he wasn’t welcome there, that it was not intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the other patrons coming and going.
It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in his hand before the librarian had turned back again.
Credentialed.
He’d read the word in a book of war stories.
He liked the sound of it.