Free Skating with the Statue of Liberty by Susan Lynn Meyer

looked over his shoulder. Martha and a group of girls crowded behind him, giggling.
    “Is there room here for me?” Martha asked loudly, wiggling into the spot next to Gustave and bumping her hip up against him. “So, whatcha eating, Gus?”
    She reached over, picked up his apple, and took a bite. Her big hazel eyes locked on Gustave’s. Where she had bitten, he saw a smear of red. A girl his age was wearing lipstick? He felt hot, and his skin prickled, but he couldn’t seem to look away.
    Leo cleared his throat. “Gus has something to tell you, Martha,” he said.
    Martha stopped chewing and smiled at Gustave. “What do you want to tell me, Gus?” she crooned, as if the two of them were alone.
    “Hey, Gus,” Leo demanded loudly, “how about that Rita Hayworth?”
    Gustave whistled feebly, trying to sound suave like Leo, and curved his hands in and out. Martha’s cheeks went pink.
    “Yeah, Gus!” one of the boys snickered. The others were silent, grinning and waiting.
    Leo leaned forward. “And Gus, how about Martha?”
    Martha was gazing at Gustave intently now, her eyes sparkling.
    “Come on, Frenchie!” Leo coaxed. “Did you forget your English lesson already? How about Martha?”
    There was something wrong with what Leo had told him to say. Gustave was quite sure of that. But no other English words were coming into his head. “Martha?” Gustave said slowly, playing for time. And then he knew what to say.
    “Chic!”
he said loudly, smiling at her. “Cat’s meow!”
    Just as he said it, Leo whistled a short, sharp note, dropping his hands through the air in two parallel lines. He looked confused when he realized Martha was smiling.
    “Hey, wait—you didn’t say what we practiced!”
    “He said I was the cat’s meow!” Martha said haughtily, tossing her head. “And
chic
! That’s French for ‘stylish’! And the French know style!”
    Gustave grinned. Miles had appeared a minute ago and was standing at the end of the table holding a bowl of pudding. He slapped Gustave on the shoulder as he went by. “Good one, Gus!”

13
    A fter that, school got a little bit better. In the second week, Gustave had started going to a special language class, once a day, while the others had art or physical education. Three other students who didn’t speak good English were also in the class. The two girls were identical twin sisters from Spain, and the other boy, who was older, was from Austria. They had all been in school in America longer than Gustave had. None of them spoke French, not even the teacher, but the class helped.
    After a couple of weeks, Gustave discovered that if he didn’t fight so hard to understand every word, if he relaxed and kind of let himself float on the surface of the language, like a cork on a bobbing ocean, after a moment his brain often made sense of what he was hearing. And he was starting to feel more confident about speaking in front of several people at once. He never said anything in class, though, except a very few words when he absolutely had to.
    Leo started eating lunch with another crowd most days. Gustave usually ate with Frank and Miles. The two of them often played chess at lunch with a pocket-sized chess set, and sometimes they played a pencil game with dots and squares that three people could play. Most of the time Gustave couldn’t understand the conversation in the noisy cafeteria unless someone spoke to him directly, but at least nobody bothered him. Even Martha, to Gustave’s relief, seemed to have lost interest in him. Lately she had started going with her group of friends to flirt with Leo at lunch. Once she perched on Leo’s lap and ate a bite of his sandwich.
    Gustave noticed that a lot of kids brought ripe bananas to eat for lunch. But the two green bananas on his apartment windowsill had never turned yellow. When the peel was still greenish gray but had started going dark in spots, Gustave had decided it was time to try them. He’d peeled the bananas