Free Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa Page B

even when they were really against it.
    This time it was a private Catholic school in Littleton. I was outside the classroom with Aditi, waiting for her turn. Five kids arrived. An Asian boy and his friend, who wasn’t Asian, sat next to me. In front of me sat an Asian girl with the strangest body shape I had ever seen. She was wide. Not fat, but wide. With a wide face. She was wearing a dress. Next to her was a black girl wearing a metal necklace with a crucifix hanging from it. On the other side was a white girl wearing a metal necklace with a pendant that I couldn’t tell what it was.
    Suddenly the Asian girl said OK, I was late to the last round of the debate because I had to use the bathroom! and someone told me there was a bathroom over by the lockers.
    And the girl with the crucifix necklace said, there’s a closer one.
    And the Asian girl, shouting, said, I know! but they told me to go to the other one! so I went over to the lockers and it was a maze, and finally I found the bathroom! then, after I’d peed, I came out and saw two doors! there were two doors! the door I had come through and another one next to it! and the door I had come through didn’t have a door handle on the inside and the other one was locked! I couldn’t get out!
    I wanted to say something. I looked around. But the one who spoke was Aditi.
    I hate this school. It’s scary.
    Really? Why? We love it! Because we see Jesus everywhere and we’re Catholic.
    Well, to begin with, it looks like a kindergarten, and secondly, I keep thinking I’m going to hell, said Aditi.
    We don’t necessarily believe in hell.
    Look at our necklaces! I’ve got a cross.
    I’ve got the Holy Ghost.
    I never did get what the Holy Ghost is, said Aditi.
    Well, said the white girl. It’s pretty complicated. It’s like this: Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost are the same thing. That is, not even our most knowledgeable thinkers and philosophers can understand it properly.
    For example, said her friend. Imagine an elephant with green spots. The elephant is Jesus, the elephant’s soul is God, and the elephant’s spots are the Holy Ghost.
    The others laughed. That’s not exactly what we believe in.
    A week later I joined the ultimate frisbee team. I had never imagined such a sport even existed, but I discovered I had a surprising talent for it. It was played with one of those discs they used to call frisbees that we can’t call frisbees anymore because some manufacturer registered the name.
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    How did you end up here, I heard myself asking as Fernando was fixing the toilet.
    I had been putting off the question for a month. Four weeks, during which he made phone calls when he got back from work, looked up people he used to know whom he didn’t know anymore, asked questions, moonlighted as a detective. He had hunches, suspected, supposed. And he didn’t uncover anything worthy of note, not a smidgeon of a clue, no bread trail in the forest. Why do people have to cover up their former lives so well?
    During those weeks we didn’t speak much: about the past, about the present, about the future. When school started, in mid-August, I began to ask him for help with my homework. He was the available adult.
    He would look at the math problems and scratch his head and sigh, and he’d say, I studied math in Portuguese, Vanja.
    And I had to translate the problem; I had to help him first so that he could then help me.
    The bulky finger of his bulky hand would underline the numbers, and in that domestic setting, sitting next to me at the table with the dirty dishes still in the sink, wearing reading glasses, Fernando seemed like an insect shedding its exoskeleton and revealing a soft, almost fragile interior.
    I still didn’t know what subjects I could broach with him. Maybe all subjects. I had twelve hundred pages of questions about my mother, about him and my mother, about my father and my mother, about