Fresh Off the Boat Read Online Free Page B

Mel’s Diner with the gang, then he drove everyone home.
That is so great about you and Rufi! He sounds adorable. Are you guys officially a couple now? What about your parents? Are you scared they’ll find out?
Hey, we heard about the bomb on the Lovebus— nakakatakot ! My parents were so worried about everyone back home, but I was like, Mom, hello, nobody we know in Manila takes public transportation!
xxoo, V

3
Even in English Class, Everything is in French
    T HE NEXT MORNING , rooting through the mail on the kitchen counter for the newest Delia’s catalog, I found a thick, ivory-colored envelope. It looked expensive and special, and if you held it up to the light, you could spy a watermark with the Grosvernor crest. It had no place in our Formica kitchen, where the linoleum was peeling off in strips and there were so many cracks that no matter how hard my mother scrubbed, it always looked dirty.
    Ugh. I knew what it contained. I put it in the trash without opening it and left for school.
    I walked in late for my first class, and I’d even missed homeroom, since Brittany couldn’t find her Hello Kitty socks that morning and caused a terrific stink. Brit can be a real brat sometimes, and my parents don’t even mind. She gets away with everything because she’s the baby—it’s so unfair. I was especiallyannoyed because I hated walking in late, especially for English, which I dreaded even if it was my favorite subject. Unlike all the other classrooms, with normal individual desks and chairs, the English classroom only had a large round table in the middle. Everyone saved seats for their friends—but nobody ever saved me a seat, so I always had to sit in the dunce chair next to Dr. Avilla, who was nice enough, but what a loser move to actually have to sit next to the teacher .
    Saving seats was a big deal at Gros. If no one saved you a seat, it was the surest sign you were nobody. Whitney, Georgia, and Trish always made a big deal of sitting next to each other. Once, I made the mistake of taking Whitney’s seat (I didn’t notice Trish’s notebook on it), so Whitney had to sit in the very front, and she complained about it the whole time, saying she was allergic to blackboard chalk.
    But when I walked in, I found Isobel, the French girl, waving to me from the far side of the conference table. “Vicenza! Reposez-vous ici! ” She had taken the best seats in the house—next to the window. She shifted her books off the chair next to her so I could sit down.
    “Thanks,” I whispered, so happy that I couldn’t stop my cheeks from turning pink.
    She nodded. “Rien.”
    As Dr. Avilla droned on about The Old Man and the Sea , shescribbled notes to me in the margins of her notebook. I felt hesitant at first (this was definitely against the rules), but soon I found I was writing back as fast as I could.
    In this way I discovered Isobel was just like me: she had moved to the States that summer, adored Mexican food, liked to quote lines from Good Will Hunting (“so inspirational”), downloaded dance remixes of cheesy pop songs on Kazaa, and loathed Whitney Bertoccini upon meeting her for the first time.
    We were interrupted when Dr. Avilla asked Isobel to read from last night’s homework and she got a lecture on how atrocious her English was. He said it was absolutely criminal that a fourteen-year-old girl, bilingual as she was, had such a poor grasp of English grammar. Isobel argued that she was fluent in French, and since French was a Romance language, it was infinitely superior and truly the language of the civilized world, while English was derived from the bastard tongue of barbarians. Strangely enough, he didn’t take too kindly to her opinions.
    Avilla the Hun! she wrote in my notebook margin.
    I suppressed a giggle.
    To my surprise, Isobel didn’t seem to care that people snickered about her purple jacket. She walked around Gros totally oblivious to the fact that despite the school uniform she didn’t look