“That’s what they do here,” she explained. “If you’re Japanese and want to go back to Japan, they’ll send you. If you’re German, they’ll send you back to Germany. They’ll send you back even if you don’t want to go, if they don’t want you in America anymore. If you’re a Nazi, they’ll send you back for sure.”
I needed a second to absorb this information. I immediately thought of the little white button with the tiny rosebuds painted on it and how my father had said the family who’d lived in our quarters before us had been allowed to go back home, and how strange the tone of his voice had been.
“I’m not a Nazi,” I had finally said, as syrupy melted ice peeked out of the bottom of my paper cone and dribbled down my curled fingers.
“Well, I’m not, either. But they don’t care what we are. It’s what our fathers are that matters to them.”
“My father isn’t a Nazi, either!” I couldn’t believe I was having to say these words again. I thought I was done saying them after we left Iowa.
Nell drank some of the liquefied ice from her cone and licked her lips, now tinged blue. “Mine’s not, either, but he’s got friends who are. They’re going to end up doing what they want with us anyhow. My father says they always do.”
“Who? Who are they?”
Nell smirked at me as though I were an ignorant child. “The government.”
She’d abruptly changed the subject then, telling me she was going to try to sit by a boy she liked named Kurt at the movie that night and would I sit with her instead of my own family? The camp was playing Penny Serenade with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I had seen it two years ago when it came out, but I told her I would. When it was movie night, you went, no matter what the movie was. We didn’t talk more about families being sent back to where their parents had come from, but the thought of it needled me the rest of the day.
That night after Max was asleep, I crept out of bed and stepped into the main room. Papa was sitting at the kitchen table that had been provided us, looking over his notes for his first day of class at the German school. There was no glow from a lamp on the other side of the blanket where his and Mommi’s bed was. She had gone to bed already. The room was warm and still. He looked up from his papers when he saw me.
“What is it, Elise? Can’t sleep?”
I moved toward him as I shook my head.
“You nervous about school starting up tomorrow?” he asked.
“No. Maybe a little. Are you?”
He smiled. “Maybe a little.”
I sat down in my usual chair. “The family that was here before us, they got sent back to Germany, didn’t they?”
Papa’s eyes widened a bit. “Did someone tell you that?”
“No. I just . . . I just figured it out,” I said. “No one really goes home from here, do they? They leave, but they don’t go home. They go to Japan or Germany.”
Papa paused a second before answering. “Some do get paroled and leave here for home.”
“But most who leave go to Germany or Japan. Right? That’s where they go.”
He put his pencil down. “I’m not worried about that happening to us, Elise. Some of those people wanted to go back to Germany. Mommi and I don’t. America is our home now. When the war is over, everything will go back to the way it was.”
Papa had said something to this effect before in his letters from North Dakota, on the train, and as we settled in to our new existence at Crystal City. Each time he did, I wanted to believe him. That’s really all it takes to believe something. You live each day as if it’s true because you want to.
“Okay,” I said, and he wished me sweet dreams and I returned to my room.
I got back into bed, choosing to believe that he was right about where we would be when the war ended and that school here at the camp would be no different than it had been in Iowa. There were cliques in Davenport. Plenty of them, in fact. Far more than two. There were the popular kids, the smart ones, the rebels, the girls who slept around and the boys who slept with them, the rich kids, the other-side-of-the-tracks kids, the bullies, the misfits, and all those like me who just didn’t want to be alone. Perhaps it was going to be easy, just like Nell said, because there were just the two kinds of people: the children of German parents and the children of Japanese parents. It couldn’t be simpler than that.
When morning came and all of us—except for Mommi—got ready for the first day of school, I found I was looking forward to going. I had liked school before Papa’s arrest. I got decent grades; I liked learning; I had a group of friends to eat lunch and gossip with. I never got sent to the principal’s office, never cheated on tests, never faked a stomachache so that I didn’t have to go. I liked going to pep rallies and singing in the choir and passing notes in class. School at the camp was perhaps the only thing that was going to be normal. There would be classrooms and a cafeteria and a gymnasium and teachers and cute boys and math tests to study for. Just like how things used to be.
It was that, and yet it wasn’t. The camp’s American high school had a population of about 150 students that fall, and well over two-thirds were Japanese. In Davenport, there had been three times that many students and I don’t think anyone had been Japanese. I had never seen so many Asian teenagers in one place. When I stepped inside the building with Nell at my side I felt transported to another continent. She had met me at the corner of Arizona Street—she lived one street over on Lincoln—and walked with me the four tiny blocks to the school on the corner of Meridian Road and Franklin Avenue.
The building wasn’t brick and mortar like the schools in Davenport had been, like all the schools in Iowa had been. This one was what my father called a manufactured structure. It hadn’t been built on-site; it had been fabricated elsewhere and brought over in pieces on big flatbed trucks. The school’s furnishings had come from a surplus of used equipment other schools in Texas didn’t want. The high school in Davenport, which I had been inside for plays and concerts and basketball games, had echoed with the beat of its past: in the trophy cases outside the gym and the scuff marks on the polished wood floors, on the shelves of books in the school library that smelled uncannily of sage and other savory spices, and on the plaque on the wall by the front doors that memorialized the alumni who had given their lives in service to their country in the Great War. But this building seemed like a cobbled-together mishmash of old and new, and nothing spoke to me of a proud past or a promising future.
Nell sensed my unease as we made our way down a main hallway no wider than our old one in our house back in Davenport. “It’s not that bad,” she said. “Just try not to compare it to your school back home.”
We gathered in its auditorium—which served as a multifaith chapel on weekends—for a welcome-to-the-school-year announcement from a Mr. Tate, who was called the superintendent, not the principal. The German Americans sat on the left side, outnumbered by the Japanese Americans, who sat on the right. There were some conversations taking place, but it was not like the back-to-school assemblies I had been to in Davenport, where the student body, who’d all gone to school with one another since kindergarten, was a hive of dialogue and had to be quieted with repeated admonitions from whoever on the staff had been appointed to bring the room to order. As I looked about the largely Japanese crowd, I could see some of the students were clearly already friends with one another, but at least half looked around in subdued apprehension; they were new, like me, and still grappling with how life had changed in such a short amount of time. Everyone who was chatting spoke English, except a few times when a student would turn to another to make a hushed comment in Japanese. A couple of the German students did this, too. Nell and I sat next to a German American girl named Nathalie, whom I had met over the summer, and who was Nell’s closest friend at the camp. Nathalie, a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl from New Jersey, was cool toward me as I took my seat. She’d already made it clear without saying a word that she wasn’t thrilled about my moving in on her tight camaraderie with Nell.
After Mr. Tate welcomed us, the teachers each walked up to the podium to introduce themselves. The faculty, borrowed from the state of Texas and paid well by the INS, all spoke with South Texas accents that made their words sound like they’d been swirled out of their mouths with honey spoons.
We were handed our class schedules, and then a sorry excuse for a bell clanged, signaling that we were to report to our first-period class, which for the ninth-grade population was English.
“Let’s hurry or we won’t get a good seat,” Nathalie said, popping up from her chair, grabbing Nell’s arm, and hauling her to her feet.
Nell laughed and looked down at me. “Come on!”