But apparently that was the wrong answer because the woman grinned and shook her head. “You sit here. I bring student over. You teach English.” She left and came back moments later with three smiling pigtailed girls and a stack of picture books. She said something to the girls about Claude in some language that didn’t sound like Thai but was just as incomprehensible, and the girls looked at him and giggled. Even in Thailand, everyone laughed at him. He understood why they did though because he knew he looked completely absurd. His lumpy head was ugly. His lumpy clothes were even uglier. And every time he walked or sat down or crossed his legs or stood back up, he had to think about how to do it because whatever natural movements he used to just have seemed to have gotten lost in transit. He would laugh at him too. At least they had that in common.
“Okay?” The painted-cheeks woman smiled at him. It was a question that seemed to encompass many things. Did he have everything he needed? Did he understand what he was supposed to do? Did he need water? Supplies of some kind? A snack? A lesson plan? An anything plan?
“Okay” did not seem like the truthful response to any of these questions—like hungry, okay was something Claude didn’t think he’d ever be again—but it was what he answered anyway.
“You fine.” The woman winked. “Begin read. You know what do next.”
But Claude did not know what to do next.
“Where your robe?” one of the little pigtailed girls demanded before Claude could even sort out the books on his lap. Her name was Mya, and Claude was relieved because apparently she spoke English already. Not that he knew what she was talking about.
“My robe?”
“You monk, right?”
“A monk?”
“Nen? You call, I think, ‘novice’?”
“I’m not a monk. I’m a gi … kid.” He felt himself flush. If Marnie Alison and Jake Irving ruining his life weren’t reminder enough of who he was now, what had to happen to make Claude remember? The little girls seemed not to notice though.
“But your head is”—Dao, whose pigtails were tied with red ribbons, searched for the right word—“naked,” and Claude wondered who had come before him, who had taught these girls some English and how and why “naked” was part of their vocabulary. He didn’t think it was probably from the picture books.
“I used to have long, dark hair just like you.” He spoke slowly so they would understand him. “But I shaved it before I came here.”
“To become monk?”
“No…”
“To be not hot?”
“Not that either.”
“You want hide?” said the third little girl, Zeya.
And that was it exactly. “Yes. I wanted to hide.”
“But why? You so pretty.”
At home, you did not call boys pretty. Pretty meant girl. But probably it was a foreign-language problem because there was no way these little girls thought he was one. Was there?
“I was … angry,” Claude half explained, but the girls’ faces lit with comprehension.
“Oh angry,” they agreed all around with huge smiles and much clasping of Claude’s and one another’s hands. “Angry very good reason.”
Interrogating him was probably a pretty good way to learn English, and Claude didn’t have a better idea, but he put a stop to it anyway. They couldn’t ask very many questions before they were ones Claude wouldn’t answer, answers they wouldn’t understand even if he were willing to give them, even if he knew the answers, which he did not. He didn’t want to think about those answers, or even those questions, anyway.
Then he remembered the origami fortune-tellers PANK had been obsessed with in third grade. Aggie’s uncle had shown them how to make them one rainy Saturday afternoon, and soon every worksheet, homework assignment, and notice home got folded into a square that got smaller and smaller until each plane revealed a color or letter or secret symbol to choose from and each corner untucked a final question. With the paper folded into bird beaks over your first fingers and thumbs, you opened the bird’s mouth, closed, and spread, closed, opened, closed, and spread, as many times as the fortune-teller directed, and at the end, you had to answer the question thus revealed by the origami gods.
Claude got a precious sheet of paper—the school seemed to have so little of anything to spare—and wrote four questions in the heart of the heart of it. He let Zeya be the first fortune-teller. He was going to do it, but they were all bouncing-while-trying-to-sit-still excited, and Claude remembered being an eight-year-old girl.
The first question went to Mya: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Next life?” said Mya.
It took Claude a minute to understand what she was asking. “This life,” he assured her, then tried again: “What job do you want to have when you become an adult? If you could have any job in the world?”
Mya looked like she had never considered this question before. “What my choice?”
“Anything.” Claude opened his hands wide to hold all the options. “Whatever you want.”
Mya trolled for ideas. “What you want when you grow up?”
Poppy. This answer burst into Claude’s brain uninvited. He wanted to be Poppy when he grew up. He knew if Jake Irving heard this answer, baseball announcer would sound much more plausible by comparison. If Claude wouldn’t grow up to be Poppy, he couldn’t imagine growing up at all. This was another thing he and the pigtailed little girls had in common: none of them could imagine growing up.
Since no one—not the pupils, not the teacher—could think of any answers, the second question went to Dao. “What is your favorite subject in school?” That had been the kind of question PANK had asked one another even though they all knew each other’s favorite subject in school as well as they knew their own.
“What is subject?”