CHAPTER 5

They’d never been on a plane before. As the wheels lifted off the tarmac, the Flores twins gripped their armrests and held their breath. The shelter staff member accompanying them took these trips often, it seemed, and wasn’t impressed by the airplane, the free snacks and drinks, the rush of taking off. But for the twins, the flight was miraculous. The woman from the shelter hardly spoke a word to them or to the other California-bound boy the entire trip. The brothers whispered to one another, drank soda, and stared out the window.

Wilber was waiting for them when they landed at San Francisco International Airport. At first the twins didn’t recognize him. They exchanged stiff hugs and laughed uneasily. After Wilber signed some papers, the shelter staff released them officially into his care.

Wilber had a girl with him. “This is Gabby,” he said. She was shorter than he was, sturdy and baby-faced with a red rinse in her hair and thick black glasses.

“Hi,” said Ernesto.

“Nice to meet you,” said Raúl.

Wilber was like an entirely new person: new clothes, newfound swagger. Even his face looked different. A lot changes in seven years. They said little to one another as they walked out of the airport.

Wilber didn’t look much like his twin brothers. His face was more drawn, less wide-eyed—the product, perhaps, of years on his own up North. He resembled them most in stature: at five foot six, he was only slightly taller, simultaneously brawny and trim. He walked with an adapted, tidy confidence, and his front teeth were ringed by gold caps that gave his smile, offered timidly and with a nod of his head, an actual glint.

Wilber had taken the day off work to fetch the twins in San Francisco, about an hour north from where he lived in San Jose. The past two months he’d taken on all the Sunday shifts he could at the landscaping company where he worked in order to pay for their tickets—this was his first break in weeks. He noted how skinny his brothers looked—this upset him and was now his responsibility.

They rode the train to San Jose; then at the station they hopped into his car and, at his request, buckled their seat belts. The car, a Toyota 4Runner, rode high off the ground and had leather seats that were slick to the touch. The Flores family had never owned a car. Wilber pulled into a parking lot and left the twins inside. He and Gabby came back a few minutes later, paper bags in hand. “Burgers,” Wilber said. Delicious.

Wilber’s working-class San Jose apartment—their new home—was nicer and more modern than any house they’d ever been in. He showed them around: it had two bedrooms, one for him and one for his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend. The twins would sleep on the couch.

They all spent that first afternoon watching TV, a convenient mask for the lack of things they had to say to one another. Wilber could see in their faces that they’d been through the wringer. He knew how bad the journey could be, but he didn’t ask any questions—they’d survived, and to keep pushing forward, these things were best left undiscussed.

Maricela had recounted what had gone down with Uncle Agustín. And Wilber had followed the El Salvador news since he left, seeing the pictures of dead bodies, the statistics, the way the police covered their faces now, so the gangs wouldn’t know who they were. Little by little, ragtag groups of kids with guns had taken over his country. He read stories on Facebook by Salvadoran friends and co-workers. Gabby was Salvadoran, too, though she’d been born in the United States and had only visited once, when she was little. He had two friends who had gone back to El Salvador from the United States and been killed. Two. If you returned to El Salvador, you were an unknown, a desconocido. The gangs knew who belonged and who didn’t, and a new guy rolling into town with nice clothes was assumed either to have money, or to be a part of a rival gang, or both. Another friend had to start paying renta every two weeks, extortion money, to keep his family safe. Wilber wasn’t surprised that this plague of violence had made its way to his family. His country, as far as he could tell from this distance, was falling apart.

Still, seeing his little brothers grown up, no longer scrawny little boys, made him miss home: the wet smell of the hillsides, the sweet burn of brushfires, his mother at the stove. When he left home seven years ago, he had been so preoccupied with the dream of what awaited him in the United States that he hadn’t really considered that he would very possibly never return. Forever is an obscure prospect, especially for a kid, even more for a kid hell-bent on the horizon.

Things don’t always work out as planned. Right when he got to California, aged seventeen, he had enrolled in high school, which he’d assumed would just be a stepping-stone to college. (According to the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, anyone under eighteen, with proof of address, can enroll in a U.S. public school regardless of immigration status.) But without English, he found a second-rate U.S. high school harder than he’d thought it would be. Plus, though he had a place to stay—on the couch of friends of the family—financial pressures kicked in quickly. He wanted to pull his weight in the household, and he had his $6,000 debt to pay off. Feeling sure that he’d re-enroll once things stabilized, he quit school and got a job in landscaping, working on the yards and gardens of Silicon Valley’s wealthy homes and businesses. They paid him in cash every other week, more cash than he’d ever had. But life in the United States was a nonstop ticker tape of bills and charges, an endless invoice. He moved out and rented a room in a house—that was a monthly bill. He needed a car. A new pair of shoes, work gloves, gas for the car, insurance—he was always behind, never ahead. But he was diligent about sending money home to work off his debt: he paid it off a few hundred dollars at a time, finishing within two years, never letting the interest overtake him.

The twins would have to go to work as he had—he understood this before they even arrived. But shelter rules said otherwise. “They’ll have to go to school,” the woman from the shelter had explained in her Tex-Mex Spanish. “They can’t work.”

So who was going to pay their debt?

“How much do you owe?” he asked them over burgers.

“Fourteen thousand dollars,” Raúl said.

“When we left,” said Ernesto, shaking his head. The sum, they knew, had compounded in the three months since they’d left. They weren’t sure by how much.

Wilber took a bite, nodding silently. He loved them, and had missed them. Now their debt, it seemed, was his. “I’ll help you guys,” he’d told them over the phone. But now, hearing the impossible sum they owed, he didn’t repeat his offer. They’d figure out their own path forward, in time.

The notion that unauthorized immigration into the United States is spiraling ever higher is a myth. In fact, the number of undocumented people rose steadily from around 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.12 million in 2007, but it dropped (owing largely to the economy) to approximately 11.3 million in 2009 and has stayed relatively steady ever since. Of these immigrants, 2.3 million lived in California as of 2014, more than in any other state. But immigrant demographics have changed. In 1990 approximately 525,000 undocumented people living in the United States had come from Central America. By 2011, that number spiked to 1.7 million.

Another myth is that immigrants like Wilber do not pay taxes. Taxes are taken out of their paychecks; they pay sales tax on milk and soda and tortillas and cars, like the one Wilber purchased with post-tax cash. When undocumented immigrants use fake or borrowed Social Security cards, they are paying into the real Social Security benefit pool—benefits that they will never receive. Even those without a Social Security number often file tax returns using an individual tax identification number. Had Wilber owned a house, he’d pay property tax. In 2012, according to the left-leaning American Immigration Council, the undocumented paid $11.8 billion in state taxes alone.

Of course, undocumented immigrants also avail themselves of public services: schools, roads, and public hospitals. They do not, however, qualify for benefits like welfare (contrary to what is so often charged), or food stamps, or subsidized housing, or health insurance—even under the Affordable Care Act.

Wilber had learned to navigate the province of the paperless. He went to work, came home, paid his rent on time, paid his car payments on time, and stayed out of trouble. Except, that is, when it came to driving. Until 2013, the year the twins arrived, undocumented immigrants weren’t able to get a driver’s license in California. In 2010 he’d been ticketed for driving without a license, then two years later, charged with driving drunk—four beers at the club, his friend’s car with a dead battery stuck in a fifteen-minute zone, and Wilbur steering it in neutral across the parking lot. When the sirens flashed, he’d braked and tried to remain calm and deferential as the officer questioned him, though he thought the circumstances absurd. He was arrested, nonetheless.

He was slapped with a DUI, had to pay several thousand dollars in fines for both the DUI and driving without a license, and do over one hundred community service hours, picking up trash at city parks and freeways.

But it was better than what he’d feared. For a while, he waited for immigration to show up at his door. They never did, and eventually he stopped worrying. He also kept driving. He had to get to work. He stopped fully at every stop sign, never ran a yellow light, and stayed just under the speed limit at all times.

By the time the twins arrived, Wilber was just starting to feel settled, to build a life he could be proud of. He had Gabby, who spoke perfect English and came from a big family who lived, mostly, in Oakland. Gabby’s Chihuahua, Nicky, lived with them inside the house, unlike most dogs in La Colonia, who roamed the streets snapping up scraps and snarling at competitors. Nicky relaxed Wilber. Anytime he was having a bad day, the dog’s antics lifted his spirits. Gabby was finishing up her high school credits at the local community college, after which she’d enroll as a full-time college student. Wilber wanted to enroll in college, too, though he couldn’t, just yet, because of work demands. He also wanted to marry Gabby if things kept going well; he was saving up cash to buy a home and maybe even a ring. Gabby was a citizen, and if they got married, he thought he might get papers. But, Wilber reasoned, “you have to get married for love.”

Ernesto and Raúl bought new clothes with Wilber’s cash. At the local mall, Ernesto picked out a black T-shirt bearing an image of Bob Marley in profile, dragging on a joint and ringed with its smoke. Back home they dressed more conservatively, with straight-legged pants and collared shirts tucked in at the waist. Here the styles were different—skinny jeans and fitted, hoodless sweatshirts, with oversize high-tops only barely laced. It was like what Wilber wore—and not unlike gangster garb back home. When Wilber saw the Bob Marley shirt, he just laughed. The shopping trip drained him of all that month’s extra cash.

He was happy to see the twins, but it was also a game changer. Just when things had started to stabilize and he was thinking about going back to school, his brothers appeared, needing food, a place to sleep, and Bob Marley T-shirts. They were his blood and they needed him, so of course he’d help them, but damn.

Wilber secured another day off to enroll the twins in the local school, Westmont High. He gathered all the twins’ papers—birth certificates, release paperwork from Southwest Key, vaccination documents—and walked into the main office. The twins stayed home.

“I’m here to register my brothers for school?” Wilber said to the woman at the front desk.

She took the paperwork. “They’re seventeen?”

“Yeah,” Wilber said.

“Do they speak any English?”

“No.”

“Unfortunately,” she said, “they’re really too old to enroll here.” Since they didn’t speak English, they wouldn’t be able to graduate on time. She suggested another school that had a program for English learners.

Wilber didn’t argue. The U.S. immigration system required them to register in school, but that was proving complicated; the school she mentioned was in another part of town. (Though anyone under the age of eighteen is required to attend school in California, and thus eligible to enroll in school, not all schools are equipped to support newcomers.)

It would be a while before he could get another day off to try the other high school. If they couldn’t go to school yet, Wilber reasoned, they should at least help pay the rent and start sending money home. His boss said he might need a few extra hands. So in their second week in California, the twins began accompanying Wilber to his job sites a few days a week, where they mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, and pulled weeds from the gardens of the big houses that draped the hills like strands of pearls.

They made nine dollars an hour and, for two months, worked whenever the boss texted that he could use them. The money they earned went to food and rent, and whatever was left over they sent home: $100, $150, every couple of weeks when they had some extra to spare.

“Can you send more?” Maricela wrote over Facebook.

They didn’t know what the interest was—was it 5 percent or 50? All they knew was that the sum had started at $14,000, and, as Maricela reported once they’d settled in at Wilber’s, by the time they set foot in the United States, it was $16,000. Of the money the boys did send home, hardly any of it even went to the debt because the family needed it to eat. The larger swath of land that Wilber Sr. had first put up as collateral had been valued, loosely, at around $60,000.

To lose the land would mean losing the family’s livelihood, their food source. For Wilber Sr., the land also signified his very purpose in the world, entwined with his own origin story.

The twins’ father been born out of wedlock to a mother who was just fifteen; his father had run away. Ashamed and heartbroken, Wilber’s mother gave birth to him in a cornfield. She cut the cord, left him there squirming on the dirt, and then, like his father, ran away. Her sisters found the baby, miraculously alive. Their own mother had just given birth a few months before, so Wilber’s grandmother nursed both babies, one after the other.

After the second grade, he quit school to become a full-time farmer. At twelve, his father, whom he’d never met, showed up. He had another family by now, and he wanted Wilber to come and live with them. He did, but it quickly became clear that he’d been brought there to work. While the other siblings went to school, Wilber was in the fields. One of these siblings was Graciela, Agustín’s wife.

Wilber had wanted to get married, to have a family of his own, but his siblings dissuaded him. They preferred, he thought, to keep him working for them. Every time he brought it up, they berated him, until he nearly went mad from the pressure. He ran away to the forest for a couple of weeks, to be alone. But there, his story went, the spirit of an old woman appeared and told him she’d buried a treasure on the mountain. She told him he could find it beneath a pine next to a huge rock. He went there and dug up a stash of money—enough, he said, to purchase the land and start his own family.

Who knows what was true? Wilber Sr. told the story of his life in this sort of parable, always with a clear moral, blurring the line between fiction and fact. The moral of this tale: his land was something he’d come to through both patient suffering and divine intervention.

Now his sons’ debt was putting it all in jeopardy, and Wilber Sr. felt an uncharacteristic tremor of doubt. Not Esperanza. “God will find a way,” she insisted. She lit a candle on the altar.

To Maricela, this wasn’t about God—it was about numbers and math, a sum of money that needed to be paid off quickly. “Can’t you get more work?” she asked Ernesto via Facebook.

“If they find out we’re working, they’ll know we aren’t going to school, and we could get deported.”

To this, Maricela didn’t respond.

Ernesto and Raúl received a letter from immigration court. Their case had been transferred from Texas to California. They were due at the San Francisco Immigration Court in February 2014: in less than two months’ time.

By December 2013 the boys had been living with Wilber in San Jose for two months—long enough to feel comfortable again, thus long enough for the bickering to begin. When they weren’t at the landscaping job with Wilber, they were at home, confined to Wilber’s dark apartment, worrying over their debt and their court cases, and what might next go wrong.

Nights were the hardest. Once Raúl awoke to a feeling of someone standing over him. He saw a thick figure against the wall, but there was no light. He thought of the Guatemalan boy at the shelter, the barking dogs the night before he left La Colonia, the guys with the photo on the side of the road. Now the dark spirits were here with him in California. He frequently spotted a flash across his wall, or felt a cold chill come over his body. He waited and prayed until these went away. Ernesto didn’t see spirits, but when Raúl told him, he believed him.

Ernesto’s sleep was still afflicted—worse now, even, than in Harlingen—and in San Jose, he had no counselor to help him. Almost nightly he fell into suffocating dreams. He’d be in a bus, or out in the desert, or in the forest back in El Salvador, and a dead man would rise and chase him. The first night he had that dream in San Jose, he woke up screaming. He opened his eyes and saw Wilber above him, shaking him.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he asked.

Ernesto brushed him away. “I’m fine, sorry, I’m fine.” He rolled back over.

“You sure you okay?” asked Raúl, after their brother left.

“I’m fine!” he said, and yanked the covers over his head.

Once the dreams became a pattern, Wilber stopped coming in. Raúl would just roll over, groan, and ignore Ernesto’s screams. Raúl didn’t ask about what he was dreaming about. Clearly, that dead body he had fallen on had really affected him, or maybe it was the stress of the upcoming court date, or the lingering taste of fear from those last weeks back home. It used to be that Raúl could just look at Ernesto and know his thoughts, but not anymore. The twins were losing their special powers up north.

Around the holidays, Wilber began to talk about moving. Gabby was starting school again in Oakland. If they all moved to Oakland, about an hour north, they could rent a larger house along with her mom, Rosalinda. Wilber would have to commute to work an hour and a half every day, each way, but the rent would be cheaper, he figured. Then the landlord found out how many people were living in the apartment. He issued an eviction. They had no choice but to move.

Christmas was one of their last days in San Jose, spent at a barbecue in a parking lot across town, grilling meat and eating pupusas with a dozen or so other Salvadorans. They missed the nativity scene their mother always set up on the home altar, missed the songs in church and the fireworks at night. But they had something to look forward to: they were moving to Oakland. Maybe there they’d be able to go to school.

They moved into an eight-unit apartment complex in East Oakland, on a small street just off the Bancroft Avenue thoroughfare. It stood at the nape of the gradual hill that rises from crime-riddled flats to towering hills speckled with new housing developments. Oakland was busier and, to the twins, felt poorer than even La Colonia. Urban poverty was different; it was split open, glaring, and on display for everyone to see. Homeless people walked the streets, people did drugs out in public, there was litter everywhere, and sometimes even they heard gunfire. But living with Gabby, Rosalinda, and Rosalinda’s two other kids—José, age eleven, and Silvia, three—provided, at first, the semblance of an actual home. The freezer was full of icy cuts of chicken and off-brand bags of cauliflower and peas. Sometimes Rosalinda would make food from scratch for her kids, and sometimes for the twins, too. Wilber bought a television and hooked it up to the building’s cable.

The twins had their own bedroom again. It was small and dark; their windows leaked in heavy rains, and the carpet was laced with mold from years of too much moisture. To prevent their neighbors from seeing in, the boys tacked up large fleece blankets in the window wells—one beige and the other printed with SpongeBob SquarePants, hung upside-down and slightly askew. It was still nicer than their soot-stained room back home. It had a door.

They’d come to adore Nicky, Gabby’s Chihuahua, and now they got to see her every day. Each evening they’d coax her into their room. Raúl chuckled as he flipped her over and rubbed her belly and held up chips for her to jump after. When they finally rolled over to go to sleep, usually after midnight, Ernesto would swipe Nicky from Raúl’s side of the bed to his own and tuck her beneath his chin. When Nicky slept with him, he had fewer nightmares.

Gabby’s younger brother, eleven-year-old José, became the twins’ frequent tagalong. He bounced between his grandmother’s house, his dad’s house, and the apartment where the twins lived, where he often ended up sleeping in the twins’ room, playing video games and watching movies late into the night. The twins could have done without a third bunkmate most nights, but José was harmless, and once they got over ceding part of their space to a strange kid, he was even nice to have around. He was younger, which took the pressure off the twins to be mature and tough, and his presence made their small world on Hillside feel more like family.

José had a computer that the boys used to check their Facebook accounts. Though they didn’t post much of anything except the occasional photo of themselves and a “What’s up, everybody,” they still liked to scroll through their old friends’ walls. But this always left them feeling adrift and far away.

Plus, they started to get private messages from their school friends in La Colonia. “You guys look good,” one said. “Living the dream in North America, man!” “Hey, can you send a little money? I need to buy some shoes.” The requests for money came almost anytime they posted a photo. Even their enemies, the guys who they were sure had ratted them out to Agustín, asked for favors—the audacity, fucking assholes.

They had no money, but felt a twinge of pride that those maggots thought they might. Raúl finally unfriended all his old friends, even the ones who likely hadn’t done anything to him. Because who knew, exactly, where people’s allegiances were anymore? They tried not to think about it but harbored a needling fear that someone might come here looking for them. On their new profiles, they said they lived in San Jose and attended high school—to throw anyone from their old life off their trail.

“Fuck them,” said Ernesto. He followed Raúl’s uncharacteristic lead, unfriending their ex-friends too. He wasn’t in charge of much in his life, but he could block a person with a click.

They pulled into the Oakland Unified School District’s enrollment office, in a set of trailers behind an old elementary school on Grand Avenue, abutting Lake Merritt. Wilber had taken yet another day off work.

“How old are you?” the woman behind the counter asked.

“Seventeen,” they all replied at once.

“Yes, you can enroll, as long as you’re under eighteen.” This is what they’d been hoping for, naturally, but that it came so easily was a surprise. She handed them two long sheets, in triplicate, on two matching clipboards.

Given their limited language, they were placed at Oakland International High School (OIHS), where I worked. It was about an hour bus ride from where they lived, and it catered specifically to newly arrived immigrant English-language learners. The school’s 370 students came from more than thirty countries, but at the time over 50 percent were Spanish-speaking, from Mexico and Central America.

The next Tuesday they walked a little under a mile to the corner of International Boulevard, as Wilber had instructed, where they caught the 1R bus. They rode in an unsteady silence. The route ran along most of International, one of the city’s main arteries, carrying them from the littered political neglect of the outer avenues, through the throng of commerce in the Fruitvale district, and past the limp chain of street walkers alongside rows of seedy motels. They continued past the outdoor fruit stalls of the Vietnamese shops and Chinese markets, glided by the shimmering Lake Merritt and through Chinatown, and headed into the morning bustle of downtown Oakland. There the bus route hooked north, and they rode up Telegraph Avenue to OIHS.

The first day they were all nerves and jitters. In spite of their age, seventeen—normally an eleventh or twelfth grader—they were placed in the tenth grade, which according to the school’s programming would give them enough time to learn English, earn all their credits, and if they worked hard, graduate in three years at age twenty-one. When Wilber filled out the registration paperwork the week before, he had agreed to this plan. He knew he wouldn’t be supporting them for three years of leisurely finishing their studies. No way. But he simultaneously wanted the best for them, and for now they would be in school.

The twins were assigned to separate classes and were too nervous to argue. Settling into their respective seats, they felt as though they’d touched down on an alien planet. Back home, all their classmates had been somewhat familiar. They knew where they lived, at least, and who they hung out with, and who their grandfather was. Here they didn’t know a single face, and they couldn’t communicate with half the students. There were cues and customs—using a binder, for example, rather than a textbook, and working on a “do now” at the beginning of every class—that eluded them.

Instead of individual desks, students at this school sat at shared tables in groups of four to six. Ernesto made his first friend quickly enough: a kid named Diego, from Mexico. He’d been in the United States a few years and spoke English already, which he often commingled with his Mexican-slang-riddled Spanish. He was smart, and class was easy for him, so he spent his time cracking jokes and playing on his phone.

Ernesto was seated at his table. “Here, man, lemme show you.” Diego leaned over to help him fill out his first handout.

The twins learned quickly: where to stand in line for lunch, how to log into their school emails, how to use Rosetta Stone to practice English, the order and location of their classes. Every morning they took great care to shower, slick their hair with gel, and don their cool new American clothes—which, because they had so few, they had to wash at least weekly at the Laundromat down the street. The finishing touch was a generous helping of cologne splashed onto their necks and hair.

They felt dumb in school for not understanding English, but not the dumbest—it helped that everyone was learning alongside them. If they came to school and tried hard, the teachers promised, they could pass their classes—they’d learn English eventually, and the more they practiced, the better they’d do. In 2014, the year the twins enrolled in school, an estimated 4.5 million students enrolled in U.S. public schools were English-language learners—nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. public school population. (Over 75 percent of those students spoke Spanish.) Around 1.4 million U.S. English-language learners lived in California, or, as of 2012, 25 percent of the state’s public school population. In Oakland, nearly a third of all students were English-language learners.

Oakland International High School had opened in August 2007 as part of a network of public schools, based in New York City, designed for newly arrived immigrant students. These schools taught language alongside content—that is, each subject was simultaneously a language class, so that students could study standard high school subjects while also acquiring the language needed to understand what they were learning. Grades at OIHS were based on a combination of skill, effort, and growth in English, and students were allowed to continue enrollment until the age of twenty-one.

Many students had gone to school for only a couple of years before starting with us; a few had never attended school in their lives. A small minority arrived at OIHS with strong educational backgrounds, or with a few years of U.S. middle school under their belts. Teachers, then, were charged with instructing an astoundingly diverse student body—in terms of language background, cultural mores, life experience—with a wide spectrum of abilities.

Like other high-density immigrant schools, Oakland International was a delayed mirror of world events. In the first ever class, of sixty students, most were from Mexico, China, and Karen state in Burma (by way of refugee camps in Thailand). Within a few years, as environmental and political crises swelled in Yemen, the school became home to dozens of Yemeni students, and as the United States began resettling tens of thousands of Nepali refugees who had been ethnically cleansed from Bhutan, dozens of them, too, enrolled. A decade after the U.S. invasions, students from Iraq and Afghanistan joined our student body. And starting in 2013, unaccompanied minors began to fill our seats.

We had been home to undocumented students since we opened—students from Mexico, Mongolia, El Salvador, China who lacked immigration papers, because they had either unlawfully crossed a border or overstayed a temporary visa. We didn’t ask for students’ immigration status as per U.S. law, but they and their families often confided in us as they sought support.

Most undocumented kids were unknown to immigration authorities. Unaccompanied minors, however, had been caught—meaning that they were in more immediate danger of deportation, even though their day-to-day lives, and the circumstances of their departure, were often similar to those who merely lived under the line. Eventually this created a strange hierarchy among students: those who had immigration cases were more quickly supported, due to their imminent court date; those who had not been caught, or who arrived with parents, received less support. It was difficult and unfair.

The twins were expected to talk to their classmates, in whatever mishmash of languages they could, to finish their assignments. The more students worked together on projects, the more they had to talk to one another in their common language, English. (The best way for students to learn English, we saw over the years, was for them to date someone from another country. No better incentive than love.)

They met other kids from El Salvador as well as from countries they’d never heard of: Burma, Vietnam, Yemen. Everyone had a story, but even with the Salvadorans—especially with the Salvadorans—they didn’t discuss the particulars. They didn’t want to out themselves as kids without papers, or kids who had problems with gangsters back home, although unknown to them they were far from the only ones. They kept their mouths shut about the fact that, within a few weeks, they might very well be ordered deported, and they left for home as soon as they could after the bell rang. Walking from the bus stop in the dark made them nervous, and sometimes, as the twins fell asleep, they thought they heard gunshots—or maybe just a backfiring car.

The night before their court date, Ernesto and Raúl sat up worried. What would they say to the judge? What if he deported them right then and there? What if he accused them of being gangsters? They planned what they would wear—the dark jeans and light-blue-plaid shirts Wilber had bought them, buttoned up all the way. They checked and rechecked the papers in their manila envelope: their exit paperwork from the shelter, their birth certificates, their Notice to Appear. The judge might ask about their grades, how they liked school, and why they’d left home; they practiced their answers. They would do their best to look like reliable young men, diligent students, civic participants worthy of sanctioned entry into the United States of America.

So focused were they on how they’d fare and what would happen afterward, it never occurred to them to worry about how to find the courthouse.