The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder Page B

the school’s tidy classrooms and manicured grass and swept stone pathways, Juliet cannot find her way. She is chronically, bafflingly late, searching the campus for a familiar face, disoriented, wandering, and it does not get easier over time. She gets lost on the playground. The ringing bells indicate different things at different times, and she cannot keep their meaning straight — was that the first or the second bell, and is she supposed to be in art class or at lunch? On odd days, at unexpected times, she is removed from her peers to sit with a handful of other children, most of them kindergartners — children of foreign diplomats who are also learning Spanish for the first time.
    Placed into the fourth grade late in the term, Juliet will never catch up. Classes are conducted in English, which the teacher speaks with a Nicaraguan accent, but this offers Juliet no apparent advantage. She cannot remember the names of the seven seas, she confuses latitude and longitude; in desperation she checks the test of the girl sitting next to her — cheater. Sick at heart, she rips to shreds a note from the teacher and sends it fluttering out the open bus window. Keith doesn’t tell. He has a facility for languages, and no one has suggested he sit with kindergartners.
    At dawn, Gloria brushes Juliet’s fine hair until it crackles with electricity and clips it behind her ears with pastel green barrettes. The barrettes arrived with an incoming delegation, in one of Grandma Grace’s regular care packages, cardboard boxes crammed with small luxuries: homemade granola, Dinky cars, underwear, Black Stallion books, even a potty chair for Emmanuel. In return, Gloria writes long letters on yellow foolscap to send back with outgoing delegations. If the children need something Gloria makes a request, though never for herself.
    In the bathroom mirror at home, Juliet believes in the power of new green barrettes. But at school they render her neither less obvious nor less invisible, the impossible reality in which she’s trapped. She hovers at the rear of the classroom while the other students push through the open doorway, loose and free with laughter as they greet and compare and bump against Juliet, who might as well be furniture.
    “Juliet,” says the teacher. “Juliet, sit down. Now.”
    She has managed to be last, and those same students turn at their desks and stare with cool appraisal. I had lots of friends back home! Juliet imagines shouting at them. It is true, but it does not matter. She can’t pick up who she was before and by force carry her across the barrier of stranger.
    For phys ed, Juliet’s class is herded down to a spacious green playing field, immaculately maintained, where they are split into separate groups of boys and girls. The girls shed uniforms inside a concrete building at the far end of the field. The room is crowded; slits for light are cut into the walls at the top. Juliet wears a poor facsimile of the school’s uniform: lime-green skirt instead of navy; white T-shirt standing in for a buttoned blouse, the ironed-on insignia peeling off. She doesn’t care but the other girls do, and she understands that she is supposed to too. Not caring makes her even more of a stranger. But if she cared, she couldn’t bear to come to school in the wrong uniform, and she has no choice: there is a lag time between letters to Grandma Grace and packages in reply, and she is still waiting for navy, and for buttons.
    On the shining grass, Juliet runs fastest, jumps farthest, throws like a boy, but her talents are themselves humiliating, inappropriate. Girls don’t try; girls don’t sweat.
    Back in the change room, Juliet searches the floor and under the bench, but she can’t find Grandma Grace’s gift. Hoarsely, in English, she whispers, “Has anyone seen my green barrettes?”
    “Has anyone seen my green barrettes?” mimics the girl sitting next to her, dark thigh exposed beneath pink lace panties, and the