or ten, so absorbed in reading my books that I didn’t hear my name when I was called to the dinner table. “You have your head in the clouds,” my mother would say, often with affection. A few years later, when I helped out at the restaurant after school, the remark turned into a bitter reprimand. “You gave out the wrong change. You have your head in the clouds,” my mother complained. And later yet, when I decided against medical school, it became an accusation. “You’re going to ruin your life, benti. You have your head in the clouds!”
Having my head in the clouds was my way of surviving. This realization came to me early, on my first day at Yucca Mesa Elementary, when Mrs. Nielsen cheerfully read the children’s names on the roster, but could not bring herself to say “Nora Zhor Guerraoui.” Twice she started on the middle name and stopped, frowning at the consonant cluster. The class grew silent, united in its curiosity about the word that had made the teacher falter. Then Mrs. Nielsen lowered her reading glasses over her nose and peered at me. “What an unusual name. Where are you from?” At recess, the kids fanned out and gathered again in small groups—military kids, church kids, trailer-park kids, hippie kids—groups in which I knew no one and no one knew me. I stayed behind by the blue wall that bordered the swings, and watched from a distance. In the cafeteria, I ate the zaalouk my mother had put in my lunchbox, while the other girls at my table whispered among themselves. Then Brittany Cutler, a pretty blonde with plaited hair and a toothy smile, turned to me and asked, “What are you eating?”
I looked up, immensely grateful for a chance to finally talk to someone. “Eggplant.”
“It looks like poop.”
The other girls tittered, and for the rest of the day they called me a poop-eater. At story time, we all gathered around Mrs. Nielsen to hear her read from “Rapunzel,” but nobody wanted to sit next to me. Later, Mrs. Nielsen started playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the xylophone and asked us if we recognized the tune. I said, “It’s the purple and green song!” to which Mrs. Nielsen replied, “No, sweetie, the star twinkles, it’s not purple or green. You really need to learn your colors.” I didn’t know how to tell her that I already knew my colors, that I was talking about how the music looked, the shapes and shades the notes made. So when my father came to pick me up after school, I ran across the blacktop and into his arms as though he were a savior. He dried my tears, took me home, and let me have Oreos before dinner.
But the next day I still had to go to school. I learned the alphabet, learned the pledge of allegiance, learned to stay out of the way of bullies. In class, I was quiet. At lunch, I sat alone. The silence cloaked me with safety, but it betrayed me a few months later, when Mrs. Nielsen became convinced I had a learning disability. She called my mother into the classroom one sunny morning in May and used words like severe mutism, social anxiety, oppositional behavior. The terms failed to elicit a flicker of recognition from my mother. After a moment, Mrs. Nielsen’s voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s something wrong with your daughter,” she said. I sat on a yellow mat in the corner, playing, listening, waiting for my mother to say, “There’s nothing wrong with my daughter.” But she only nodded slowly, as if she agreed with the teacher.
When my father came home that night and found out what had happened, he said the teacher was a fool. “Hmara,” he called her, a word he reserved for the television anchors with whom he argued during the eight o’clock news. Then he reached into the fridge for a beer and started sorting through the bills on the kitchen counter. I watched my mother’s face for a reaction. It was immediate. “And you know more than the teacher?”
“I know more about my daughter.”
“Salma didn’t have this problem in kindergarten. She was first in class, always.”