Multiple-choice reading

On my first morning at the Van Lier School, my mother walked me as far as the gate and then stopped, as if there were an invisible wall. “You’ll be fine,” she said in Portuguese, a little too loudly. Two girls turned to look at us. I wanted the pavement to open and swallow me.

We had been in the Netherlands for nine days. In that time I had learnt to say hello, thank you and “I don’t understand”, which turned out to be the most useful of the three. My father had been offered a job at the port in Rotterdam, and he had explained the move at the dinner table as if it were an adventure. My younger brother believed him. I was fourteen and I didn’t believe anyone.

The classroom was brighter than any I had been in before, with big windows and no uniforms. The teacher, Mrs de Wit, introduced me and said something that made everyone laugh. I laughed too, a second too late, and that made them laugh again. I sat down and stared at my pencil case as if it contained something extremely important.

The lessons were a kind of noise. Maths was easier, because numbers are the same everywhere, but even there the teacher wrote her sevens with a line through the middle and I wasted ten minutes thinking they were a letter. In history, I understood one word, “Napoleon”, and held on to it like a rope. At lunch I sat at the end of a long table, ate the sandwich my mother had made, which was nothing like anyone else’s, and pretended to read a book I’d brought from home. Nobody sat next to me, though nobody was unkind either.

On the third day, a boy called Joost sat down opposite me. He was tall and had a laugh you could hear from the corridor. He pointed at my book, which had a footballer on the cover, and said a name. I nodded. He said another name, a Dutch player, and raised his eyebrows. I pulled a face, and he laughed so loudly that the dinner lady looked over. It was, I suppose, our first argument. We didn’t share a single sentence, but we disagreed about football for the whole of lunch.

After that, things changed slowly rather than suddenly. Joost taught me the words for things we could see, pointing and repeating them until I got them right, and I taught him some Portuguese words my mother would not have approved of, which he enjoyed much more. By Thursday I could ask for the toilet and the canteen without pointing. I still didn’t understand most of what the teachers said. But I began to notice that I wasn’t the only one who was lost sometimes. A girl from Syria sat near the window and frowned at the board the way I did, and on Thursday she smiled at me as if we belonged to the same secret club.

On Friday my mother was waiting at the gate. “Well?” she asked, in that careful voice parents use when they’re afraid of the answer. I thought about the sevens, and Napoleon, and the laughing. Then I thought about Joost shouting “See you Monday!” across the playground in English, especially for me.

“It was okay,” I said. Then, because she looked as if she might cry, I added, “Actually, it was quite good.”