arms flapping at his sides. He doesn’t like to be away from it for this long.
Travis raises his hand. “I have a question.”
“Shoot,” Mr. Goldman says, tilting his chin up quickly. The eyebrows go up too.
“Are you Italian or something? Greek?”
Dr. Queen winces and holds up her hand. “Are there any appropriate questions?”
“I’m Jewish,” Mr. Goldman says. He points at his face, and then at his name on the chalkboard. “Goldman? You know?” He says this like we are supposed to know that the last name Goldman means he is Jewish, like we are stupid if we couldn’t figure that out by ourselves. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Jewish person before. I didn’t know they had special names either. And I didn’t know you were supposed to be able to tell, just by looking at someone’s face. Anne Frank was Jewish, but she just looked normal.
Eileen says Jewish people are from the land of Israel, and God’s chosen people. Abraham and Moses and all of them, they were Jews. Every time in the Bible when God was helping someone win a fight or a war because they were blessed and someone else wasn’t, those were the Jews. God helps them more than other people. Helped them, actually, Eileen said. Not anymore. They had been chosen, she said, but then they’d messed it up and killed Jesus, so now it was the Christians who were chosen because we had the ears that could hear and the eyes that could see. That’s why there was all that sadness going on in Beirut, she said. Because some people have eyes to see and some people don’t, and when you’ve got that many people who don’t know Jesus living together in one place, of course there’s going to be trouble.
But Mr. Goldman has eyes and ears, and everything seems to be open and working. He is still smiling at us, his teeth straight and white.
“Are you really from New York?” Travis asks.
Mr. Goldman nods. “Manhattan.”
“And you came here?”
Dr. Queen says she doesn’t like Travis’s tone, but this does not stop him.
“Why would you come here from New York? Aren’t there schools in New York?”
“No shit,” Ray Watley says. Dr. Queen stiffens, and it is clear she heard this word, but not where it came from. She stands in front of the room with her hands on her hips, scanning our faces.
Mr. Goldman shrugs and shows us the wedding band on his hand. “My wife’s from Kansas. Her father’s sick, and she wanted to be here for a while.”
Libby Masterson quickly writes another note, holding it up for Traci: THAT IS SO SWEET!
“So here I am.” He looks around the room again, and the way he is looking at us makes me think of the show Voyager, where the little boy and the man travel around in a time machine, going on missions. Every time they come to a new place, they stand by the time machine for a while, just looking around, not sure yet where they are, what year it is, or what it is they’re supposed to be doing.
When I come home from school, there is an orange-and-white-striped kitten curled up on the sofa. It looks up at me, yawns, and tucks its head back under its paw.
“What’s this?” I yell, putting down my backpack. “What’s this cat?”
My mother answers from the bedroom. “We’ll be out in a minute,” she yells. “Hold on.”
I sit down on the sofa next to the cat, not seeing the bowl of milk that was sitting on one of the cushions. I knock it over and try to set it upright, but it’s already seeping in under the upholstery. The kitten starts to lick what it can.
My mother comes out of her room, Samuel on her hip. She is smiling, wearing the glitter hat, jeans, and the gray sweatshirt. “Oh, Evelyn, didn’t you see the milk? I had it there for the kitty.”
“No. That’s why I sat in it. If I would have seen it, I wouldn’t have sat in it.”
“Okay, Evelyn. Okay.” She dabs at the wet part of the sofa with her hand and sits down, Samuel’s legs hanging over the edge of her lap. “No use crying over it. Ha ha.”
I point at the kitten. “What’s it doing here?”
Instead of answering, she picks up one of the kitten’s paws and makes it wave. “Hi there!” She is speaking for the cat as if it were a Muppet, her voice high