Claude’s first day at the clinic began with breakfast, which was actually, literally called “joke” and probably was one since it looked like watered-down kindergarten paste sprinkled with grass clippings and had a raw egg cracked right into the middle of it. The sight of it made Claude woozy. Or maybe it was the smell of it. Or maybe it was just the fact of it. He had not been hungry since what had happened, happened. He thought it was possible he might never be hungry again. But he managed to eat at least a little bit of it. He didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. And now that he knew they ate still-jumping shrimp in Thailand, he thought it prudent to force eggs when they were on offer, even raw and in jest.
There were infinity people who wanted to meet and thank and say nice things to and about his mother and then take her away. “Do not worry,” a woman with white smears painted on her cheeks and nose called after his mother. “We take good care your child,” but his mother evidently was already not worried because she didn’t even turn around. “So”—the woman squinted at Claude from under a ratty straw hat—“what we do with you all day?”
Claude couldn’t even guess.
“Your mama is big helping us. Maybe you big help us too.”
It took Claude a little while to understand that the building he’d been brought to was a school. Schools had classrooms, desks, whiteboards, computers, art projects, homework trays, and playground equipment. This place had a dirt yard out front with a bunch of old tires sinking into dust and one big, open room with a falling-apart bookcase piled with papers spilling out of folders and small heaps of ancient-looking books and a stack of dog-eared, water-stained flash cards in English. The students were mostly younger than he was, and there were a lot of them, spread over the thin, tatty linoleum, its bluebells and buttercups faded to rumor, chatting in small groups or napping curled up against the wall or just sitting and staring into nothing. If Claude sat on the floor at school staring into nothing, he’d get in trouble for being off task, but he could see that there were not many more productive alternatives available here.
“You teach?” the painted woman asked.
What did this mean? She could not possibly think he was a teacher. Even people who imagined this worn, wounded room a school would not imagine a ten-year-old a teacher. Would they? “No?” Claude guessed. “I don’t teach?”
But apparently that was the wrong answer because the woman grinned and shook her head. “You sit here. I bring student over. You teach English.” She left and came back moments later with three smiling pigtailed girls and a stack of picture books. She said something to the girls about Claude in some language that didn’t sound like Thai but was just as incomprehensible, and the girls looked at him and giggled. Even in Thailand, everyone laughed at him. He understood why they did though because he knew he looked completely absurd. His lumpy head was ugly. His lumpy clothes were even uglier. And every time he walked or sat down or crossed his legs or stood back up, he had to think about how to do it because whatever natural movements he used to just have seemed to have gotten lost in transit. He would laugh at him too. At least they had that in common.
“Okay?” The painted-cheeks woman smiled at him. It was a question that seemed to encompass many things. Did he have everything he needed? Did he understand what he was supposed to do? Did he need water? Supplies of some kind? A snack? A lesson plan? An anything plan?
“Okay” did not seem like the truthful response to any of these questions—like hungry, okay was something Claude didn’t think he’d ever be again—but it was what he answered anyway.
“You fine.” The woman winked. “Begin read. You know what do next.”
But Claude did not know what to do next.
“Where your robe?” one of the little pigtailed girls demanded before Claude could even sort out the books on his lap. Her name was Mya, and Claude was relieved because apparently she spoke English already. Not that he knew what she was talking about.
“My robe?”
“You monk, right?”
“A monk?”
“Nen? You call, I think, ‘novice’?”
“I’m not a monk. I’m a gi … kid.” He felt himself flush. If Marnie Alison and Jake Irving ruining his life weren’t reminder enough of who he was now, what had to happen to make Claude remember? The little girls seemed not to notice though.
“But your head is”—Dao, whose pigtails were tied with red ribbons, searched for the right word—“naked,” and Claude wondered who had come before him, who had taught these girls some English and how and why “naked” was part of their vocabulary. He didn’t think it was probably from the picture books.
“I used to have long, dark hair just like you.” He spoke slowly so they would understand him. “But I shaved it before I came here.”
“To become monk?”
“No…”
“To be not hot?”
“Not that either.”
“You want hide?” said the third little girl, Zeya.
And that was it exactly. “Yes. I wanted to hide.”
“But why? You so pretty.”
At home, you did not call boys pretty. Pretty meant girl. But probably it was a foreign-language problem because there was no way these little girls thought he was one. Was there?
“I was … angry,” Claude half explained, but the girls’ faces lit with comprehension.
“Oh angry,” they agreed all around with huge smiles and much clasping of Claude’s and one another’s hands. “Angry very good reason.”
Interrogating him was probably a pretty good way to learn English, and Claude didn’t have a better idea, but he put a stop to it anyway. They couldn’t ask very many questions before they were ones Claude wouldn’t answer, answers they wouldn’t understand even if he were willing to give them, even if he knew the answers, which he did not. He didn’t want to think about those answers, or even those questions, anyway.
Then he remembered the origami fortune-tellers PANK had been obsessed with in third grade. Aggie’s uncle had shown them how to make them one rainy Saturday afternoon, and soon every worksheet, homework assignment, and notice home got folded into a square that got smaller and smaller until each plane revealed a color or letter or secret symbol to choose from and each corner untucked a final question. With the paper folded into bird beaks over your first fingers and thumbs, you opened the bird’s mouth, closed, and spread, closed, opened, closed, and spread, as many times as the fortune-teller directed, and at the end, you had to answer the question thus revealed by the origami gods.
Claude got a precious sheet of paper—the school seemed to have so little of anything to spare—and wrote four questions in the heart of the heart of it. He let Zeya be the first fortune-teller. He was going to do it, but they were all bouncing-while-trying-to-sit-still excited, and Claude remembered being an eight-year-old girl.
The first question went to Mya: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Next life?” said Mya.
It took Claude a minute to understand what she was asking. “This life,” he assured her, then tried again: “What job do you want to have when you become an adult? If you could have any job in the world?”
Mya looked like she had never considered this question before. “What my choice?”
“Anything.” Claude opened his hands wide to hold all the options. “Whatever you want.”
Mya trolled for ideas. “What you want when you grow up?”
Poppy. This answer burst into Claude’s brain uninvited. He wanted to be Poppy when he grew up. He knew if Jake Irving heard this answer, baseball announcer would sound much more plausible by comparison. If Claude wouldn’t grow up to be Poppy, he couldn’t imagine growing up at all. This was another thing he and the pigtailed little girls had in common: none of them could imagine growing up.
Since no one—not the pupils, not the teacher—could think of any answers, the second question went to Dao. “What is your favorite subject in school?” That had been the kind of question PANK had asked one another even though they all knew each other’s favorite subject in school as well as they knew their own.
“What is subject?”
“You know, like math or reading or art or whatever.”
They all looked at him blankly, so he tried a different way. “What is your favorite part about school?”
Dao brightened. “Oh, we love school.” She seemed to speak for all of them. “First time.”
“This is your first time in school?” They were eight. How could that be?
“My father sick so we come long way to clinic. Then he die and I am sad. But then I live here, go school, am happy.” She had taken the fortune-teller from Mya and was tapping her fingers together within its tiny walls.
Claude thought he felt wind on the damp back of his neck, but the air was still as stone. He had always heard adults say something took your breath away because it was beautiful or surprising in a good way or precious like a baby. But this really did take his breath away, and it was the opposite. This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn’t silver lining; it was a whole silver sky. Claude was totally over fifth grade, but even he could see that school was a miracle for Dao except she couldn’t have it without first becoming an orphan. It was the least fair thing he had ever heard in his life, which, considering the state of his life, was saying something. But Dao, Mya, and Zeya were all nodding and smiling as if Dao’s were as good an answer to “What’s your favorite subject in school?” as science or social studies would have been.
When he origamied that first paper fortune-teller that long ago rainy afternoon, Aggie’s uncle had wiggled his fingers over it and sung a bunch of nonsense words which, he promised, turned it actually magic so that now it would tell real fortunes, reveal real secrets. Poppy’s hands were shaking so hard on her first turn she could barely operate the bird beaks. She was terrified she’d count out her number and color and letter and symbol and untuck a panel that read: SECRET PENIS!! Of course, Aggie’s uncle was just teasing, and of course, even at eight, she had been pretty sure that was the case all along. But as awful as that would have been, it was still less upsetting than the answers untucked here.
* * *
Claude had nowhere else to go, so he stayed late at the school. The woman with the painted cheeks put him to work cleaning brooms, which seemed like a waste of time to him though he supposed you couldn’t get clean floors with dirty brooms. When he finally got back to their room at the guesthouse, it was empty. It felt late—it felt like tomorrow—but his mother was nowhere. As soon as he opened the computer though, it rang. Claude hoped his father wouldn’t be too disappointed to find yet another son instead of his wife.
From fifteen time zones away, Penn held his breath as electrons danced across oceans and connected and a window opened in Thailand to reveal his daughter. Her stubbled bare head, her baggy clothes, her swollen red eyes burned through his computer screen and made her look like a small, sad, tired version of his little girl, but his little girl nonetheless. She could go halfway around the world and transform herself utterly, but she was still right there before him. He remembered back when she first became Poppy, how his brain could not use pronouns anymore, and this felt the same. This strange new boy who called himself Claude was only pretend. Penn could still see Poppy right there, unmissable as Christmas.
“How was your first day at the clinic?” Penn could hear the inanity of this as if he were asking how was school or had she done all her homework. But he didn’t want to scare her or, worse, plant as yet seedless ideas, so he refrained from asking what he really wanted to know.
“Stupid,” Claude sulked.
Penn kept his voice upbeat. “What did you do?”
“They made me teach.”
His father’s face lit up. “Teach what?”
“English. To little kids.”
“How wonderful!” Penn launched brain waves of ecstatic thanks toward Southeast Asia. “Pop … Claude, what a gift to you and to these children. What a fine teacher you must be.”
“They think I’m a monk,” Claude said.
“They do? Why?”
“Because I’m bald.” Claude ran a miserable hand over his miserable hair. His miserable nonhair.
“They’re little,” said his father. “They’re just confused.”
“Can girls be monks?” Claude did not raise his eyes from the keyboard. “Or does that mean they can tell I’m a boy?”
“I don’t know,” Penn admitted. “I don’t know much about Buddhist monks.”
“I thought maybe…” Claude trailed off.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s stupid.”
“I bet it’s not.”
“I thought maybe it would be like when you do an experiment in science and you make it so the results are fair.”
Penn’s eyebrows reached for each other. “Blind?”
“I thought since they were little kids and they never met me before if they could tell I was a boy I must be a boy, but if they thought I was a girl, then maybe…”
Claude trailed off again. Halfway around the world, his father chose his words very carefully. “You know, for you, this has been a big question all your life. Boy or girl. But not just for you—in this country, it’s one of the first things we notice about everybody. When someone has a baby, that’s our first question. When we meet new people, we like to be able to tell right away. Here, even people who’ve never asked the question about themselves still think about gender all the time. There, your little students probably see other things first.”
“What things?”
“Well, it’s probably unusual for them to meet a white person. You might be the first American they’ve ever met. You probably have a lot more money than most of the people they know, a lot of privileges they never dreamed of. They must have so many questions about who you are; boy or girl just isn’t what’s most pressing to them.” Penn imagined Claude’s identities reordering themselves like a split-flap display announcing train departures and arrivals. It made sense that these students saw foreign, white, American, healthy, rich, and whole before they ever saw male or female. Penn watched the flaps spin over and over themselves until they displayed forlorn, lonesome, and lost. “What do you see, sweetheart?” This was one of the things Penn really wanted to know but was worried to ask.
Claude thought about his day of children without futures or at least with futures unforetold. “I see nothing,” he told his father. “I am unforeseeable.”