“You know, like math or reading or art or whatever.”
They all looked at him blankly, so he tried a different way. “What is your favorite part about school?”
Dao brightened. “Oh, we love school.” She seemed to speak for all of them. “First time.”
“This is your first time in school?” They were eight. How could that be?
“My father sick so we come long way to clinic. Then he die and I am sad. But then I live here, go school, am happy.” She had taken the fortune-teller from Mya and was tapping her fingers together within its tiny walls.
Claude thought he felt wind on the damp back of his neck, but the air was still as stone. He had always heard adults say something took your breath away because it was beautiful or surprising in a good way or precious like a baby. But this really did take his breath away, and it was the opposite. This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn’t silver lining; it was a whole silver sky. Claude was totally over fifth grade, but even he could see that school was a miracle for Dao except she couldn’t have it without first becoming an orphan. It was the least fair thing he had ever heard in his life, which, considering the state of his life, was saying something. But Dao, Mya, and Zeya were all nodding and smiling as if Dao’s were as good an answer to “What’s your favorite subject in school?” as science or social studies would have been.
When he origamied that first paper fortune-teller that long ago rainy afternoon, Aggie’s uncle had wiggled his fingers over it and sung a bunch of nonsense words which, he promised, turned it actually magic so that now it would tell real fortunes, reveal real secrets. Poppy’s hands were shaking so hard on her first turn she could barely operate the bird beaks. She was terrified she’d count out her number and color and letter and symbol and untuck a panel that read: SECRET PENIS!! Of course, Aggie’s uncle was just teasing, and of course, even at eight, she had been pretty sure that was the case all along. But as awful as that would have been, it was still less upsetting than the answers untucked here.
*
Claude had nowhere else to go, so he stayed late at the school. The woman with the painted cheeks put him to work cleaning brooms, which seemed like a waste of time to him though he supposed you couldn’t get clean floors with dirty brooms. When he finally got back to their room at the guesthouse, it was empty. It felt late—it felt like tomorrow—but his mother was nowhere. As soon as he opened the computer though, it rang. Claude hoped his father wouldn’t be too disappointed to find yet another son instead of his wife.
From fifteen time zones away, Penn held his breath as electrons danced across oceans and connected and a window opened in Thailand to reveal his daughter. Her stubbled bare head, her baggy clothes, her swollen red eyes burned through his computer screen and made her look like a small, sad, tired version of his little girl, but his little girl nonetheless. She could go halfway around the world and transform herself utterly, but she was still right there before him. He remembered back when she first became Poppy, how his brain could not use pronouns anymore, and this felt the same. This strange new boy who called himself Claude was only pretend. Penn could still see Poppy right there, unmissable as Christmas.
“How was your first day at the clinic?” Penn could hear the inanity of this as if he were asking how was school or had she done all her homework. But he didn’t want to scare her or, worse, plant as yet seedless ideas, so he refrained from asking what he really wanted to know.
“Stupid,” Claude sulked.
Penn kept his voice upbeat. “What did you do?”
“They made me teach.”
His father’s face lit up. “Teach what?”
“English. To little kids.”
“How wonderful!” Penn launched brain waves of ecstatic thanks toward Southeast Asia. “Pop … Claude, what a gift to you and to these children. What a fine teacher you must be.”
“They think I’m a monk,” Claude said.
“They do? Why?”
“Because I’m bald.” Claude ran a miserable hand over his miserable hair. His miserable nonhair.
“They’re little,” said his father. “They’re just confused.”
“Can girls be monks?” Claude did not raise his eyes from the keyboard. “Or does that mean they can tell I’m a boy?”
“I don’t know,” Penn admitted. “I don’t know much about Buddhist monks.”
“I thought maybe…” Claude trailed off.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s stupid.”
“I bet it’s not.”
“I thought maybe it would be like when you do an experiment in science and you make it so the results are fair.”
Penn’s eyebrows reached for each other. “Blind?”