Free Under the Bridge by Rebecca Godfrey, Ellen R. Sasahara, Felicity Don Page A

America for what they called “higher education.” He would sometimes sit near them while they studied on the long tier of deck. He had brought his own book, and he would sit by the students and feel slightly kindred. He wrote on the cover, “My Trip to Canada,” and inside he kept notes.
    2 Feb—Singapore
    7 Feb—Hong Kong
    9 Feb—Shanghai/ Yokohama
    22—Honolulu
    He would want to write more, in English, and so he returned to the proverbs, which he had memorized nine years ago. They came back to him now, on the passage to a new country.
    He wrote them as neatly as possible. There was not a letter that dangled or an ink spot or a forgotten word:
    A burnt child fears fire.
    A constant quest is never welcome.
    As you sow you shall reap.
    He knew now, at eighteen, the meaning of the proverbs, and believed intheir wisdom and warnings. Fire and sin and quarrels were never welcome. They brought only sinking and fear.
    On March 2, 1947, he arrived in Canada, and in his notebook, he wrote: “We were very thankful to God that we came to Victoria and that’s what we had in our mind when we saw relatives and friends who we were longing to see.”
    All through his boyhood, he’d imagined Canada as white—the white skin of people, the white snow on the ground—and yet on the March day, there was so much green, the dark, heady green of the evergreens, the clean green of the careful lawns. The phrases left his head. “I was not aware of this danger.” “It is a result of your carelessness.” He forgot them, though they remained in his notebook, which he kept next to his bed.
    And he would keep this notebook forever, even when he was a grandfather to eight, when he had retired and spent his days playing cards, at the temple. Sometimes he needed a respite from the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came for coffee and his granddaughter with her blue nail polish and troubled heart. This notebook—he never chose to discard it, never dismissed it as juvenilia or nostalgia. It recalled both his childhood and his journey across the sea. “My Trip to Canada” would remain on the outside, and on the lined pages of the Haria Singh and Brothers notebook, were the English proverbs Mukand had memorized because as he recalls, “I just liked them.”
    A constant quest is never welcome.
    A single sinner sinks the boat.
    It takes two to make a quarrel.

The Goddess of Victory
    A LL AROUND Principal Olsen was Nike. Not the goddess of victory, but the emblem of the sports corporation. Who knows why certain symbols become status symbols? Ten years ago, the Lacoste alligator on shirts with collars turned up, then the little Ralph Lauren polo player, and now this Nike swoosh. Mrs. Olsen could look into a classroom and see four swooshes. The swoosh abounded on the chests of her young charges. The swoosh on sweatshirts, on caps, on shoes. Alicia Clarkson today even wore a white Nike band around her forehead, like tennis players used to wear, and so the swoosh was on her forehead, as if a sacred object, like the bindi above the eyes.
    A basketball player named Jen, unaware of the forthcoming murder, waved to Mrs. Olsen, and walked down the hall toward the foyer. In the foyer, Marissa was teasing Warren.
Speedy Gonzales.
Warren bounded from the bench in imitation of the fastest little Mexican mouse who could always dash from his pursuers and save the starving and the tiny. Warren with his white baggy pants and recently permed and dyed hair, now like a mushroom cloud of blonde curls, ran around the foyer. “Arriba! Arriba!” he cried. “Yeehah!”
    Erik Cash, school heartthrob, sat on the floor in front of his locker, just being cool. He too was unaware of the murder soon to be. Instead, he wondered about Friday night. Should he go to Brandon’s birthday party? Or should he spend the night with his girlfriend? Erik wore his baseball cap like this: flap to the right,