Little Bee

Yevette leaned in toward me and whispered.

“Are you sirius? Yu no see de way Sari Girl start gigglin at dat taxi back dere?”

“Okay. Maybe Sari Girl is not very clever. But she is prettier than all of us.”

Yevette made her eyes big and snatched her see-though bag closer to her body.

“Dat hurts, Bug. How dare yu say she de prettiest? Me was gonna share me pineapple slice wid yu, but now yu on ya own, darlin.”

I giggled, and Yevette smiled and rubbed the top of my head.

Then we turned around very fast because there was a scream from the girl with no name. She was standing on her bed and she held her bag of documents against her chest with both hands, and she started to scream again.

“Make them stop coming! They will kill us all, you girls do not understand!”

Yevette stood up and walked over to her. She looked up at the girl with no name. The hens pecked and clucked around Yevette’s flip-flops.

“Lissen darlin. Dese ain’t mens commin to kill yu, I tole yu before. Dese is chickens. Dey is more scared of us dan we is of dem. Look yu!”

Yevette put her head down and ran into a group of hens. There was a great explosion of flapping wings and flying feathers, and the hens were jumping up onto the mattresses, and the girl with no name was screaming and screaming and kicking at the hens with her Dunlop Green Flash trainers. Suddenly she stopped screaming and pointed. I could not see where she was pointing because there were hen feathers everywhere, falling down in the bright beams of sunshine from the skylights. Her pointing finger was trembling and she was whispering, Look! Look! My child!

All of us girls were looking, but when the feathers finished falling there was nothing there. The girl with no name, she was just smiling at a bright beam of sunlight on the clean gray-painted floor. There were tears falling from her eyes. My child, she said, and she held her arms outstretched toward the beam of light. I watched her fingers trembling.

I looked at Yevette and the sari girl. The sari girl looked down at the floor. Yevette shrugged at me. I looked back at the girl with no name and I spoke to her.

“What is your child’s name?”

The girl with no name smiled. Her face shone.

“This is Aabirah. She is my youngest. Isn’t she beautiful?”

I looked at the place she was looking.

“Yes. She is lovely.”

I looked at Yevette and made my eyes wide at her.

“Isn’t she lovely, Yevette?”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure. She a rill heartbrekka. What yu say yu callin her?”

“Aabirah.”

“Dat’s nice. Lissen, Aa-BI-rah, why don’t yu come wid me, an help me chase de fowls outta dis barn?”

And so Yevette and the sari girl and the youngest daughter of the girl with no name, they started chasing the hens out of the building. Me, I sat and held the hand of the girl with no name. I said, Your daughter is very helpful. Look how she chases those hens. The girl with no name, she was smiling. I was smiling too. I think it was nice for both of us that she had her daughter back.

If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, then one of the new words I would have to explain to them is efficiency. We refugees are very efficient. We do not have the things we need—our children, for example—and so we are clever at making things stretch a little further. Just see what that girl with no name could make out of one little patch of sunlight. Or look how the sari girl could fit the entire color of yellow into one empty see-through plastic bag.

I lay back on the bed and looked up at the chains. I was thinking, That sunshine, that color yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new color of my life was gray. Two years in the gray detention center, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means, you are free until they catch you. That means, you live in a gray area. I thought about how I was going to live. I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colors and living in the twilight and the shadows. I sighed, and I tried to breathe deeply. I wanted to cry when I looked up at those chains and thought about the color gray.