Invitation to a Bonfire Read Online Free Page B

my classes. It had been expected that I would enter school a bit behind, with the limited English skills and (sadly temporary) refugee sheen I imported from abroad, which earned me some pity in those early days. But more than the language, I found it difficult to mimic the bravado of my classmates as they wentabout their work, offering answers—in front of the teacher!—which were not only wrong but impertinent, while I crossed and recrossed my legs at the back of the room, trying to memorize my textbooks.
    It wasn’t that I didn’t try, but it was all strange to me. The Donne School lecture halls were full of unfamiliar cheer, with paper murals and stacks of books you were welcome to pick up, flip through, argue with. The matching desks and chairs arranged throughout the rooms stayed somehow neat and refinished all year, despite the girls who put their feet up, leaking winter salt and ice onto the wood, and the girls who scraped at the varnish with their fingernails, peeling away long, almost weightless threads. Sometimes they picked out hairpins and used them to carve their initials, but even these small marks seemed to disappear within a few days or even hours, a handyman bustling in with a pocket full of sandpaper. Back home I would’ve considered these girls feral, scribbling their indecipherable notes and wearing stockings with the seams all twisted, full of runs. But here, the messier they were, the more abominably casual, the richer their families tended to be. And though I didn’t understand it, I liked it. I liked them, from afar. They had pink book bags and they threw away half-eaten chocolate bars, which I had to stop myself from picking out of the trash. One or two of them chewed on their hair, calling up the memory of deep, inerasable hungers that I knew none of them had ever felt. I liked knowing that they hadn’t. They flowed together through the halls, giggling and holding hands, studied in the library carrels with heads pressed together in dim lamplight, and I watched them, wanting to swim in that same easy water. We were often asked to give presentations or make speeches in class, and under this attention the other girls preened every bit as much as I recoiled. Because something unimaginable happened: when they finished, people applauded. Every day, every time. And I applauded too, as vigorously as anyone else.
    Expressing a firm or independent opinion felt unnatural to me, and this made composition papers a struggle. I also didn’t care to write about my family history, to the consternation of teachers and counselors alike. “Wouldn’t it make you feel better to talk about what you’ve been through?” they asked me, and I always answered with a firm “No.” It’s interestinghow time changes a person. I never would have relented to keeping a diary back then.
    Between the bodies that eventually filed in and the radiator steam, Marie’s caf é was endemically overheated, and I have many fond memories of sitting at a round table by the fogged-up window, sipping from my bottomless coffee cup. I remember that the room always smelled of the rosemary Marie baked into her scones, though I never had the money to buy one, and that the bathroom had the familiar, bouillon scent of a home whose inhabitants eat a great deal of cabbage. I often wondered if Marie, too, was in exile from some former life, but her nasal American speech made it hard to imagine what that life might be. (A limitation of inventiveness that I have since overcome.) We sat in companionable silence: me turning pages and slurping with unmannered indifference, she ringing up change and wiping crumbs off of tabletops, occasionally humming a jaunty tune that, despite being stuck in my memory, I have never been able to identify.
    I was at Marie’s when I made the discovery that turned school—or, at least, schoolwork—tolerable. The winter sun was halfway down, streetlights