Nestor was bowled over. He didn’t know what to think. He had been ready for her to turn out to be some rare bird of paradise, from the way she looked… Haitian?—and she claims she’s French?
She smiled at Nestor for the very first time. “Stop staring at me like that! Now you see why my father told us not to bring up the subject? As soon as you do, people say, ‘Oh, you’re Haitian… one of those… and we can’t count on you for whatever-it-is.’ Come on, admit it. I’m right, aren’t I.”
That made Nestor smile at her, partly because smiling was easier than trying to come up with some appropriate comment… and partly because that smile of hers really lit up her face. She became a different person ::::::radiant… is the word, but she’s vulnerable at the same time… she needs a protector’s arms around her… and what a pair of legs!:::::: but he hated himself for even thinking about that! Hers was the pure kind of loveliness… and there was something else, too… She was so smart. He didn’t say that to himself in so many words at first. The things she knew, the vocabulary she used… it all built up gradually as she spoke. Nobody he knew would ever say, “He swaggers in a certain manner”… They might say “swagger”… maybe… but none of them would ever use the expression “in a certain manner” or a little thing like “he doesn’t.” He didn’t have a single friend who ever said “he doesn’t.” They all said “he don’t.” On the rare occasion he heard “he doesn’t,” it touched off a visceral reaction that made him sense “alien” or “affected,” even though he knew, if he thought about it, that “he doesn’t” was plain correct grammar.
“Anyway,” said Ghislaine, “I had to tell you, because it gets down to the heart of what happened at de Forest. My brother was in that class.”
“He was?—when the teacher knocked that boy to the floor?”
“When he was supposed to have knocked ‘that boy’ to the floor. ‘That boy’ is a big, tough Haitian kid named François Dubois. He’s the leader of some gang or other. All the boys are terrified of him… and I’m afraid ‘all’ includes my brother. I’m sure it happened the other way around. The teacher, Mr. Estevez, is a big man, but I’m sure this Dubois kid knocked him to the floor… and to cover it up, Dubois starts pressuring boys to tell the police it all started when the teacher, Mr. Estevez, knocked him down. And my poor brother let himself be used that way. Philippe is so desperate to be liked by the tough guys… Now this Dubois has Philippe and four other boys enlisted to back him up when the police come. The rest of the class says they don’t know what happened, they didn’t see it. That was the way they weaseled out of it. That way they didn’t have to lie to the police, and at the same time they didn’t have to incur the wrath of Dubois and his gang.” Incur the wrath. “A teacher hitting a student—that’s a very serious thing right now. Not a single student, not one, says that Dubois hit Mr. Estevez. So Mr. Estevez doesn’t have one witness to support him, and Dubois has four or five. The next thing you know, the police come out of the school with Mr. Estevez. They’ve got his hands handcuffed behind his back.”
“Well, what did Philippe say happened?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it to me or my father. He said he never saw what happened, and he didn’t want to talk about it. I knew right away that something was up. I mean, most kids—if something sensational like that happens at school—or even if it’s not sensational—you can’t keep them quiet. All we got out of him was that the whole thing began with this Dubois kid saying something to Mr. Estevez in Creole, and all the Haitians in the class start laughing. Mr. Estevez—”
“Wait a minute,” said Nestor. “He won’t talk about it—then how do you know he’s being set up to lie for this kid Dubois, him and the four other boys?”
“My father and I overheard him talking in Creole with a boy from the class named Antoine, one of Dubois’s posse, I think they call it. They didn’t know anybody else was home. I don’t know Creole, but my father does, and they mentioned the four other