As Max pedaled down Rue Vergote, Ahmed told Max about the terrifying night with the smuggler, how Ermir had taken his phone and demanded his father’s watch, how he had barely escaped the van. Then he pointed out the house whose gate he had run through three months earlier. Max tried to imagine himself in Ahmed’s shoes, scrambling up the garden wall when the neighbor’s light switched on, drenched and stumbling through the tangle of weeds and bushes toward the basement door. It seemed like fate now that his father had forgotten to lock it.
But it wasn’t the gate that Ahmed wanted to see. A few seconds later, Max squeezed the brakes and they drifted to a stop in front of his school. From the outside, there wasn’t much to see: just the cement facade of the building and windows rising up, floor after floor. The lights were still on inside for the aftercare program, but the doors were locked, and when he and Ahmed pressed their faces up against the glass, all they could see was the brown tile foyer and the plastic bins of the Lost and Found. For the second time that day, Max felt as if he’d let Ahmed down.
But when Ahmed finally pulled away from the glass, his face was relaxed, even peaceful.
“I look at back of school for many weeks, now I can know how looks the front.”
Three months earlier, Max never would have understood such an urge. If he could have left school forever, if someone had told him he could stay home all day and hang out and play Minecraft, he would have done it in a heartbeat. But that had been before the long, dull days of the lockdown, when school was closed not for a vacation or a snow day but because it was no longer safe.
“How long has it been since you went to school?” he asked.
“Real school? Three years.”
Max stared at him, stunned. “When did you leave Syria?”
“A month after bomb. In refugee camp in Turkey, there is school but too many people, we no can stay. In Izmir, I help at bakery, father works construction building till we can pay for fake passport and smuggler to Europe. There is no time for school.”
Max pressed his face back against the glass, pretended to try the door again. But he was really trying to hide the tears that were welling up in his eyes. He had always taken school for granted. Now he realized that even being able to hate it was a luxury. Max stared bitterly at his own reflection as the old, angry protest rose to his lips: It’s not fair! Ahmed deserved to go to school.
It was at that very moment that the idea came to him. He spun around.
“What if you go to school again?”
Ahmed’s thick eyebrows knitted together in confusion. Then he seemed to decide Max was joking because he laughed.
“No, really,” Max said. “What if you start here, as a new student in January?”
Still smiling, Ahmed just shook his head. “With no document?”
“You said you had a forged passport,” Max said, thinking out loud. “It got you this far; what are the chances the school would be able to tell? And the Belgian identification card for foreign kids, it’s just paper with a photo. It’s not even electronic. We could make one ourselves.”
Max knew the idea was a fantasy, but it felt better to come up with a crazy plan than to do nothing. Ahmed must have felt the same way, because he played along.
“If I leave before dawn by back door, no one see me.”
Max nodded. “And I can make sure the coast is clear—I mean, no one is looking—so you can sneak back in after school.”
“But what about police officer?”
“Same plan as before. If he sees you, I’ll tell him you’re my best friend from school. It’s a lot less suspicious than being some kid I can’t explain sneaking around my garden.”
Ahmed grinned. “We will become very good friends.”
“Two foreign kids who don’t speak much French. It makes sense.”
Could they pull it off? Max was actually beginning to think they could. Going back to school would change Ahmed’s life in a way that really mattered. Max waved him onto the bike. “Come on. Let’s try to forge that ID.”