Tommy Greenwald

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY

My mom was way ahead of her time. Nothing she did surprised us: not that she’d kept her maiden name, not when she went back to college and then graduate school, not when she became a professor at a college three states away and lived there from Monday until Thursday every week.

Nope, nothing shocked us, until she came home one day and announced that she’d gotten a visiting professorship in Germany for a year, and she was taking my brother and me with her. I was in sixth grade; he was in seventh. We were smack in the heart of middle-school life—friends, sports, the occasional flirtation—in short, it was not the best time in the world to go live in a foreign country.

But it wasn’t like we had a choice, so off we went. We ended up living in a small suburb of Bonn, which was then the capital of West Germany. There was a significant American military presence there, so my mother enrolled my brother and me in the local American school.

When I walked into my sixth-grade classroom, I noticed one thing right away: All the boys had crew cuts. It turned out everyone in the class was from a military family and had been living there for a number of years. And all the other students knew one another really, really well.

Let’s just say I was a bit of an outsider.

This was new for me. Back home, I was a pretty social kid—not record-settingly popular or anything, but I had plenty of friends. But Germany was a very different story. For the first few weeks I was there, I sat alone at lunch, or occasionally with another kid or two who felt sorry for me. I had no buddies coming over after school. I had no girls passing notes to me when the teacher wasn’t looking. Nobody even called me “Tommy”—they just called me “you” or “kid.”

Then, one day, everything changed.

It had been a rainy morning. We got to school, took off all our rain gear, and stashed it in the hall. Our teacher, Mr. Williams—who wasn’t very nice, by the way—launched into that day’s lesson. Slightly bored, I glanced down, and noticed that I’d forgotten to put away my umbrella. It was dripping all over the floor.

Oh, great, I recall thinking.

I considered my options.

Should I raise my hand and tell Mr. Williams?

Absolutely not.

Should I just get up and take my umbrella out to the hall, dripping all the way, with everyone staring at me?

Forget it.

Should I close my eyes and magically transport myself back to peaceful, friendly Connecticut?

Yeah, good luck with that.

I decided to go with my fourth option: Stuff the thing out of sight without anyone noticing.

I bent down and tried to kick the umbrella farther under the desk, but things went wrong right away. First, it got stuck under my chair. Then, one of the spokes in the umbrella got bent. And finally, the kid next to me saw me and whispered, “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I whispered back. But that wasn’t true. A lot was going on. And what was going on right then was me trying to figure out how to avoid a disaster.

The good news was: I managed to yank the umbrella out from under the chair.

The bad news was: As soon as I got it out, the umbrella opened with a big pop!

Actually, it was more like POP!!!!

Mr. Williams stopped talking. Every head in the room turned my way. I was sitting there with an open umbrella in my hand, in a classroom full of strangers, in a foreign country.

“May I ask what it is you think you’re doing?” said Mr. Williams, in a scary “teacher” tone of voice.

Without thinking, I said the first thing that popped into my head:

“It looks like rain.”

Mr. Williams cocked his head, like he couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard.

I felt my face start to burn.

And then a couple of kids started to laugh. Then more kids. Until pretty soon, the whole class was laughing. At something I had said!

I felt my whole body relax, for what seemed like the first time in months.

Of course, I got in trouble. No recess for a week. But it was a small price to pay for the note that Jennifer Welbourne passed me in math later that day.

It said: What’s your name?