I didn’t answer. I was terrified of losing everything Ma and I had worked for. What if I couldn’t understand the English well enough, since it would all be spoken? What if I happened to make a few mistakes or just did less well than usual on her test? They could wrongly decide I’d been cheating and I would have to leave the school. I stared at her but her face no longer made sense to me. It had become a blur of shapes and light.

“I’m not out to get you, Kimberly. If you’re doing everything honestly, you have nothing to worry about.” And she turned back to her desk.

I walked slowly out of her office. Why couldn’t I just be like everyone else?

“You okay?” Curt was passing by, arm in arm with Sheryl.

Sheryl turned her head, her forehead furrowed. Perhaps she was as surprised as I was that he’d spoken to me. Maybe he also remembered the last time I’d been in that office.

“Sure,” I said. I blinked my eyes a few times. “Thanks.”

“See you,” he said, moving away.

I had a few casual friends, but at some point, we always hit an invisible barrier. There was Samantha, who was something of a snob. At the school cafeteria, I once asked the lady behind the counter for a cheese croissant in my careful English and Samantha corrected me with an exaggerated French accent, “Crois san. It’s so uncultured to pronounce the t.” And nowadays, Tammy spent her time pretending I didn’t exist.

Finally, there was boy-crazy Lucy, who said things like, “Hey, I know what. Let’s dress up in our shortest miniskirts and go shopping in the city! I went out last Friday and these guys were drooling all over me!”

In the end, Annette was my only true friend. In ninth grade, she became political, as she put it. She started wearing buttons and tried to get people to sign petitions. With being political came a new set of friends too. They were mostly the kids who worked on the anti-racism newsletter she set up: a few of the older scholarship students, a Swedish exchange student, some of the kids with punk hair. Now she wanted me to sign petitions fighting apartheid in South Africa, and I did; she wanted me to go to feminist marches with her, and I couldn’t. She became more extreme, using her newsletter to comment on the lack of students of color at Harrison. She started calling herself a Communist. With my family’s history, how could I believe in Communism? Even more than that, though, with all the time I spent trying to appear normal, I was too conscious of the dangers of sticking your neck out.

The younger Annette I’d known had been easily distracted, filled with different and contradictory passions that flew from one extreme to the other. That simpler Annette had been easier to handle, only really concerned with herself and her comfortable world. There was a more serious Annette emerging now, one that started asking difficult questions.

“So how come we’re so close,” she began once, “and I’ve never been to your house?”

“My apartment is small. You would not be very comfortable,” I said.

“But I don’t mind.”

“My mother care. Just wait, I will ask her if you can come, okay?” I was hoping that this would appease her until she forgot about the whole thing. It was not until several years later that Annette showed me I was wrong; she’d never forgotten.

What Annette didn’t understand was that silence could be a great protector. I couldn’t afford to cry when there was no escape. Talking about my problems would only illuminate the lines of my unhappiness in the cold light of day, showing me, as well as her, the things I had been able to bear only because they had been half hidden in the shadows. I couldn’t expose myself like that, not even for her.

In some ways, getting the phone had only made things worse. Once, when I was working in the library, Annette had come by to hang out and started talking about an assignment for Social Studies, a class we shared this year. She was working on a paper titled “Marx and Aristotle: The Nature of Morality.” I hadn’t had time to start mine. I didn’t even have the topic yet.

“I tried to call you yesterday afternoon.” She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Why aren’t you ever home after school?”

I tried to look innocent while I thought. “What do you mean?”

“You never answer until so late. Where do you go?”

“Nowhere. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get home.” Annette tightened her full lips. “Kimberly, are we or are we not best friends?”

Miserable, I met her eyes. “Of course.”

Her eyes were fierce. “I’m not stupid.”

“I know.” I hesitated. “The truth is, I help my mother at work.”

“In Chinatown? Are the stores open that late?” I’d once told Annette my mother worked there and allowed her to believe that Ma worked in a shop.

I decided to tell her a part of the truth. “Do you remember I told you once we worked in a factory?”

“Maybe, kind of.” Annette’s voice started to rise. “Do you really? Aren’t you too young? Isn’t that illegal?”

“Annette. Stop it.” I looked around the library. There was only one other student seated at the other end of the room. “This is not some abstract idea in your head. This is my life. If you do something to protest, we could lose our job.” I paused and looked down at my calloused hands, then up to her eyes again to say, “We need the work.”

“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. But are you okay?”

“Yes. Really. It’s not so bad,” I lied. “There is a soda machine.”

“Oh. Great.” She sounded sarcastic. “If there’s a soda machine, you’ve got to be in heaven.”

I started laughing. “You can even get iced tea in it.”

She giggled too. “Now I’m really convinced.” Then she sobered up. “Thanks for telling me. You can trust me.”

I paused and looked at her. Annette had grown taller and her freckles had faded, but she was still the girl who had been my loyal friend since our days in Mr. Bogart’s class. “There’s something else.” I hadn’t told her anything of the school suspecting me of cheating-mostly because I found the whole thing so horrible I couldn’t bear to speak of it. Now I told her the whole story, starting with what had happened last year with Tammy and ending with my approaching oral exam.

“Kimberly, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me any of this! And why didn’t you just say it was Tammy who was really cheating?”

“I’m actually not so smart.”

“No, you’re just not a telly-tale, that’s all. You remember you always used to say that?”

We both started to laugh again but I remembered where we were and shushed us.

“You’ll be all right,” Annette said. “You can take anything they throw at you.”

“I hope so.” I wasn’t so sure. “But they can make the test very hard.”

Whenever we got home from the factory, Ma would cook our dinner for the next day so that we could bring it with us to work. Afterward, if it wasn’t too cold, she’d play her violin for a little bit. That was always my favorite part of the day. And then, if she didn’t have work she needed to finish from the factory, she would fight exhaustion to study as much English as she could. Now she had also started practicing for the naturalization examination. As I did whenever I was doing schoolwork, she kept a roll of toilet paper by her to crush any roaches that tried to run across the pages of her book. While she studied, I finished my own homework and worked on some books I’d borrowed from the library for my upcoming exam.

At fourteen I couldn’t take the naturalization test myself, but I would automatically acquire U.S. citizenship if Ma passed. This was essential if I wanted to qualify for the financial aid programs at colleges. Ma had bought a cheap tape player and a study book with a cassette. After listening to the questions repeatedly, she memorized what she needed to answer by the sounds alone. I peeked in her notes and they were full of phonetic symbols like a musical score. I’m sure she had no idea what any of the sentences meant. When I tried to explain their grammar and meaning to her, she listened politely, but I never saw anything like understanding in her eyes.