Listen to Liz DeWolf read an excerpt from“Lingua Franca.”

We met most Sunday afternoons at the teahouse in Su’s neighborhood, in the city where we both lived as foreigners. We’d sit at a small table on the edge of a cobblestone street—more of an alley really, the buildings on either side so close that only scooters could pass through—and practice our new language, different in almost every way from either of our own. We’d first met in the beginner class at the language school, and after receiving middling scores on our final exams, we decided we’d had all the classroom learning we needed. From then on we’d simply live our lives, doing the best we could within our limited communicative means. Though we’d met plenty of locals, we most liked to practice with each other at the teahouse, where Su came almost every day. The people who worked there were always glad to see her. “This is what?” she would ask, pointing to the display of pastries on the counter, and they loved to answer her, speaking slowly so that she could understand. After I’d been to the teahouse with Su several times, they began to extend this treatment to me. The spectacle of us together delighted them—two friends from opposite sides of the world—and they especially enjoyed hearing us speak to each other, laughing kindly as we used their language in our halting, imprecise way.

Neither of us knew the other’s native language, and the fact that we couldn’t lean on the comforts of fluency lent our conversations an exhilarating sense of mutual risk. Maybe this was why Su was the only person in the city I’d told what really brought me there: I’d come at the invitation of a man.

“Man is gone?” Su had asked.

“Gone,” I confirmed. The afternoon sun caught in the tea and cast golden orbs onto our feet.

“So handsome?”

“So.”

“And love?”

I nodded, and Su clutched my forearm, bumping a splash of tea onto the pastries. I was moved by the gesture, but I wasn’t sure whether she’d understood my relationship had ended a while ago; I liked the idea that to her it didn’t matter. I’d met him in my own country, in the city where I’d moved after college, where he’d lived as a graduate student, and where we’d fantasized together about his return to his home country with me alongside him. It excited me to imagine a life somewhere new, and privately I was glad for the good excuse—love—to avoid or at least delay my return to the city where I was born, where my father’s health was declining and my sister would soon need my help. But a year after we arrived in his city, our fantasies and excuses were revealed for what they were. He left again, for yet another country, while I stayed, not ready to give up what I saw as an extension of my freedom.

I found work as a copyeditor for a newspaper that published in my language and used this to explain myself; if someone asked what I was doing there I told them I’d come for the job, though if they examined my story closely they’d see it didn’t really make sense: the job didn’t pay very well, and there were many just like it where I was from.

“And you?” I asked Su.

“Me, my country,” she said. “Getting difficult.” She said something about surveillance, something about loss, something about the economy, something about luck. Listening to her speak was laborious. I felt as if I were staring into murky, rushing water, watching for a shape I somewhat recognized to make itself visible to me, at which point I would snatch it up and match it to a roughly equivalent shape floating within the clouded field of my own mind.

“You are here is glad for me,” I said. I didn’t say I was worried about the politics of my country too, though I was, because the situation where we lived now was worse. I’d read that the circumstances of Su’s were even more complicated, which made her decision to move strategic in a way mine was not.

“Also here I work,” Su said, and I nodded, though I’d never understood exactly what she did for a living. I knew it involved clothes. She didn’t design them, that much I’d gathered, but was somehow involved in their sale.

Months later, Su returned from a work trip with a shaved head. I was stunned—she’d had beautiful hair, almost to her waist. When I asked why she’d done it, she gave a reason about wanting, or not wanting, to recognize herself. I imagined her standing before the mirror in her hotel bathroom with the shears in her hand (Had she purchased them on her trip, or had she brought them with her?). I was often filling in the blanks in my knowledge of Su’s life, as I assumed she did for mine. It thrilled me to think of her as the type of person who made abrupt changes to her life without self-­consciousness. When she’d walked into the teahouse that day to meet me, her bare head gleaming, the staff had cheered.

One Sunday, Su suggested I come along on her trip the following weekend, to a small city several hours south. By then her hair had grown into a soft fuzz that hugged her skull. She said something about a convention she’d have to attend on Saturday, and that she’d be free the rest of the time, when we could explore the city. I was flattered at her invitation, considering we hadn’t known each other long, and told her I’d be glad to come.

—

I convinced my boss to let me leave the office early on Friday by promising I’d meet with an editor, a woman named Ren, who’d recently started at the local office in the city Su and I would be visiting. Our paper had been losing staff—as the political situation worsened, many were returning to their home countries—and my boss thought, since I didn’t seem in a rush to leave, I might be able to attract Ren to come work at our headquarters in the capital. At four o’clock I met Su at the central bus station. She’d covered her downy head with a wool hat and was dragging two suitcases, which I helped her load into the luggage compartment before tossing in my duffel bag.

It took hours just to leave the city; it would have been much faster to travel by air, but Su was afraid of flying, I think she said, and only did it when necessary. From the windows we watched the passing sprawl, concrete buildings in faded pastels, as the bus pulled lethargically through it. By the time we made it onto the highway, the sun had disappeared completely, and the near-­total darkness obscured most signs of movement so that even at high speed we seemed suspended in space. Su pulled bags of nuts and dried fruit from her backpack, and we chewed happily until we were startled by a strange wriggling by our elbows. We looked down to see a tiny hand reach between us from behind. Su pressed a dried apricot into the little palm, which yanked its prize back into the darkness behind us, making us laugh.

“Greedy baby,” she said.

“Very sneaky,” I agreed. Through the crack between the seats in front of us, we saw the old woman turn to examine us—this often happened when Su and I spoke in public, with our improper grammar, our conflicting accents. We sat quietly for a while, freshly aware of our strangeness, and then Su asked, surprising me, “How long here you stay?”

I’d been posed this question many times and typically gave evasive answers, but as usual I noticed in myself an urge to answer Su honestly. “Maybe one year more,” I said.

“At one year you go again with man?”

“I go home,” I clarified. “My father is sick. My mother is died.” I might have used the wrong word because Su looked confused, and, unsure how else to communicate it, I brought my hands together and rested my cheek against them, making the gesture for sleep. Su nodded gravely, and it seemed like she understood, though perhaps not that this had happened many years ago. I was relieved she didn’t say she was sorry. “My open life is closed,” I said, bringing my palms together to convey that I was approaching the vague limit I’d set on my freedom, the final moments in the countdown I’d mentally started after my mother’s death. It was impossible I’d successfully conveyed this to Su, who only stared at my clasped hands, but even my sorry attempt at articulation brought relief, possibly because it forced me to put things, even to myself, in only the simplest terms.

“Then one year more why?” she asked. Perhaps she sensed my discomfort at the question, because before I could decide what to say or how, she waved her hand and said, “No problem.”

An electronic sound rippled through the bus then: the driver turning on the intercom. He said something unintelligible, and we came to a stop on the side of the highway. Several men in military uniforms boarded, shouting orders. Su and I looked around in panic at the other passengers, who pulled forms of identification from their bags. We handed the soldiers our residence permits, and they lingered at our row, studying our documents with what seemed more like curiosity than suspicion. They were so young. The tallest one read the names of our home countries aloud, and the old woman in front of us said, “Ah ha.” Then, just as quickly, the soldiers were gone, the bus was moving again. The other passengers seemed unrattled, nothing more than a routine checkpoint, but my heart continued to pound. I was reminded then of what Su had first told me about leaving her country, the surveillance, the loss.

“How long here you stay?” I asked.

“All years.”

“Every time?”

“Forever,” she said, finding the right shape. If she’d been looking at my face instead of the back of the seat in front of her, she might have seen my eyes widen in surprise. I hadn’t understood she’d intended her move to be permanent.

“You family?” I asked, wondering whether she thought she’d see them again.

Su opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated.

“No problem,” I said. We were quiet after that, and it was late when the bus sputtered to its final stop. We collected our bags, and
Su led us to the hotel where her convention would be held, where she’d booked us a room. We collapsed onto the twin beds without cleaning our faces or teeth.

“Good sleep,” she said.

“Good sleep.”

I dreamt of the two of us at our table at the teahouse. Su’s hair had grown down to her shoulders. We had, apparently, both decided to stay. Su began to tell me a story about her brother, who’d left home before she had, after getting into some trouble with the state. I listened, rapt. It wasn’t until she finished her story that I realized we’d become fluent. Su watched my face, expectant, but I couldn’t think of what to say.

—

We woke early the next morning so Su could get ready for work. After many failed attempts at clarity, we settled on the day’s plan: I’d help bring her bags to the convention and then go into the city, where she’d meet me later at the contemporary art museum, which, we’d read online, would be open later than usual for a monthly Saturday event. As we wheeled her suitcases down the hall to the elevator, Su unsteady in her heels, I tried to explain that I’d be having coffee that afternoon with a colleague who worked at my paper’s local office.

“It’s nice,” Su said, though because I’d fumbled my way through the tenses, I couldn’t tell if she understood this would be happening today. I told her the café was just down the street from the museum, and that I’d wait there until she texted to tell me when to meet her at the entrance.

The room at the convention center where Su was to set up her stall was large and full of people, many of whom were from Su’s country. As she greeted her acquaintances, it was almost disorienting to witness her transform into someone so at ease in her own voice. Even her expressions were different, her gestures more assured. We wheeled her bags over to an empty stall and pulled out flattened rolls of fabric, which we hung over a metal rack. I understood by this point that it was not exactly clothing that Su sold, but textiles. A man stopped to shake Su’s hand, and when she introduced me, his face broke into a wide smile. I realized he was handsome.

“Lovely to meet you,” he said in my own language, lightly accented but fluent. He introduced himself as Zed and asked if I sold textiles myself.

“Just tagging along.” I explained I was about to head into the city. “Do you work
with Su?” I felt her eyes on me and wondered how my own voice sounded.

“Sort of,” he said. “I work for the company hosting the convention. But Su and I know each other from back home. I still live there, but I come here often for work.”

Before we could say more, a woman in a gray blazer appeared and began a lengthy monologue addressed to Su and Zed. Watching them listen to her, I wondered about Zed’s apparent comfort with coming and going while Su seemed so intent on staying away from home. I cycled through mental images of their possible shared past. I saw them as young people, leaning against a bar at a little place along a side street in the dense city where they’d grown up, one I’d never been to and probably never would, Zed listening to her tell a joke as they sipped their beers. I imagined them at a university, hanging around the meeting room of a student organization—was this when she’d first been surveilled? I saw them, later, in Su’s bedroom, high up in an apartment tower, solemnly packing the bag she’d take to her new city, where she planned to live for all years. Had she had to escape? Zed might have driven her, honking through traffic, to the airport—despite her fear she would have had to fly. They might have kissed at the gate, Su clutching her one-­way ticket. I didn’t know why this final image veered into the romantic, maybe because of the surprised way Su kept looking at him now, or maybe simply because I found him attractive. I was filling in the blanks of Su’s life, like I’d often done, but with information that had come from someone else. It felt wrong, somehow, like something I shouldn’t do. When the woman in the blazer finished speaking, Su turned to me. “Later I see you,” she said, and I went on my way.

—

The city was small and tucked against a windy sea. I spent hours walking on the promenade by the water, letting my hair whip wildly and watching the boats enter and leave the marina, pausing now and then at a shop. When the time came, I went to the café near the museum where I’d arranged to meet Ren. I found her waving at a table in the back, so recognizably from my own country from her clothes, her hair. When we introduced ourselves, at ease in our native language, the looks we attracted from nearby tables were different from the old woman’s puzzled stare on the bus—these were knowing, comprehending glances, those of eavesdroppers who understood exactly where we were from.

Someone came to take our order, and I asked Ren how she liked working at the paper. What I really wondered was why she’d come to this country in the first place, since I knew it wasn’t for the job, but I wouldn’t ask so as not to have the question turned back to me.

“I don’t really care about the paper,” she said. “I moved here for love.” The flush in her cheeks told me they were still together.

“She’s from here. With the way things are going, she wanted to be closer to family.” My boss would be disappointed; Ren wouldn’t be coming to the capital.

“You didn’t mind moving so far?” I asked. I didn’t express my surprise that they’d chosen to move to a country where their relationship couldn’t be legally recognized. I thought of my flight over with my ex, when we’d all but proposed to each other above the ocean, wanting a glimmer of certainty. Then I remembered Ren was from a part of our own country where they might not have been recognized anyway.

Ren shrugged. “Family means a lot more to her than it does to me. And I’d rather be here with hers than back home with mine. I don’t really get along with my parents.”

She asked how long I’d been in the country. I told her two years and preempted her next question by saying I’d first come to visit friends and liked it so much that I stayed. It was the reason I gave in instances I couldn’t point to the job.

“So you’ve got nothing tying you to home either.”

“Well, my dad,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. I didn’t like sharing personal details with people I hardly knew; I felt it opened me up to being misunderstood. If there was a risk that someone might not fully comprehend the reasons I did things—and there was always that risk—I’d rather they knew nothing about me at all. Su was, apparently, the exception, perhaps because full comprehension was impossible.

“What’s his situation?”

I hesitated, but Ren was only being polite, expressing an appropriate level of interest, and the facts of my life were mundane. It was hard to justify how carefully I guarded them.

“He has some health problems, and he lives alone. My mom died when I was in college.”

“I’m sorry,” Ren said.

“Thanks.” I never knew what to say to that.

“So you’re planning to go back?”

“At some point.” I explained that my sister lived a short drive from our father, but that I didn’t want to leave her to manage it all; she had her own kids now. Ren asked about my nieces, and I told her their names and ages, beginning to worry, perhaps because this detail shamed me, that she was now wondering why I’d moved so far away in the first place, given my father’s situation, considering my sister already had young children. As if to defend myself, I started telling her even more: that I’d never been especially close with my father, though both parents had cared for us in the necessary ways, and that for a year or so after my mother’s death I hadn’t even considered moving back to be near him. That this had changed when my sister’s kids were born, and my father’s health took a dive, and it became clear that at some point I’d have to return. The particulars of my life rushed out with precision, like a forceful leak bursting through the weakest of plugs. “But, actually, I also came here for love,” I finally admitted, and then I told her the whole story with my ex, thinking surely Ren would agree that love was a good enough reason to turn your back on anything.

She laughed. “Then we have that in common.”

I nodded and sipped my coffee, which was now cold.

“Can I ask why you lied? Before, I mean. About why you moved here.”

I told her things hadn’t worked out, that he’d left. She apologized, and I thanked her.

“So what’s keeping you here now?” Her tone was light, merely curious, but I felt my face grow hot; it was the question I most tried to avoid. When I asked it of myself, all that arose was an ill-­defined sense that I wanted to see through what may have been my final reckless choice. It was the truth that shamed me most of all, for its selfishness, for the way it denied my sister, who’d done everything expected of a daughter in her situation, any reckless choices of her own. I didn’t want to explain this to anyone, in any language. I’d already revealed more than I’d intended, having let someone I barely knew push me to articulate things I preferred not to think about.

“I want to learn the language,” I said. “I took a beginner class, and I’d like to stick with it.”

“What for?”

I was getting tired of her now—for each of my answers she had another question at the ready—but this one was also fair: the language wasn’t widely spoken and had few practical uses if you weren’t planning to stay long term.

“I just enjoy it,” I said, which was true.

“I love that,” Ren said. “That’s what life should be about, doing what we enjoy. At the end of the day, our lives are our own.”

“Exactly,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I agreed. I checked my phone: nothing from Su.

“I need to get going,” I told her anyway, standing up to put on my coat. I’d wait for Su at the museum. “It was really nice to meet you.” I was relieved I could report to my boss that Ren was intent on staying where she was—she was perfectly nice, but I wouldn’t have minded never seeing her again.

“What are you up to tonight?” she asked. “My girlfriend and I are meeting some
friends for dinner later, if you’d like to join.”

“That’s so nice of you,” I said. “But I’m traveling with a friend, and I need to meet
her back at the hotel.”

There was a hand on my shoulder then, and I turned to find Su, wearing her wool hat. She’d traded her heels for boots.

“You came here,” I said.

“I came here.” She must have thought I’d told her to meet me at the café.

Reluctantly, I introduced her to Ren. “We met in our language class.” To Su, I said,

“Ren work my job also but here.” In both languages, the words felt clumsy in my mouth.

“It is nice to meet you,” Ren said stiffly, having probably just learned the phrase.

“You come museum?” Su asked her.

“There are dinner plans already,” I explained, feigning disappointment.

“Did she say museum?” Ren asked. “The one down the street? I’ve been wanting to see the new exhibit.” It was a retrospective of one of her favorite painters, she said, and her dinner plans weren’t until later, so she’d love to come along, if we didn’t mind.
I tried to think of a valid reason she couldn’t but came up with nothing. If the language barrier had been between me and Ren, I could have said something vague and made a break for it.

On our walk over to the museum, Su told us about her workday, which even I barely understood. I went to the counter to buy our tickets, and, while I waited for my change, I glanced back to see Su and Ren looking around at everything but each other, both smiling politely out into space. I felt exhausted in advance, anticipating the impending labor of translation. In the first gallery we stopped to read the wall text, which was presented in the local language as well as in Ren’s and mine. Reading in my new language remained difficult for me. Its syntax was flexible; the same meaning could be expressed with the words in any number of orders, and sentences always seemed written in ways that opposed how I heard them spoken. But I stood with Su in front of the original text, parsing my way through words I recognized in isolation but not in these particular combinations, stealing glimpses of the translation, which Ren read quickly in full. I pieced together that while the artist was not typically known for his politics, the retrospective was concerned with how his work responded to his country’s social upheaval during the first half of the twentieth century. The artist had worked abroad in exile, feeling it would be unsafe to return under his country’s dictatorship. I looked over at Su, who appeared to be reading the original text, though I knew she didn’t understand it any better than I could. I wondered whether the artist’s story might upset her, if she herself had been forced to leave, or if it would reassure her, if she’d left for similar reasons. We started making our way through the exhibit, pausing to look at sculptures, drawings, and paintings. In one oblong room, Su stopped at a chaotic image of cartoonish figures scrawled in ink.

“Funny,” she said, first in our shared language, then in my native one—it was one of the few words she knew—so that Ren could understand. We laughed; the figures were funny, they were crude and ugly. Su pointed at a square of vibrant ink at the drawing’s center. “Blue,” she said, another of her available words. Then, “Nice.” It was nice, all of us agreed, the way the gouache seemed to levitate off the charcoal-­smudged paper. We moved over to another drawing of figures swirling whimsically around balls of primary colors.

“Artist so happy man,” Su said. I glanced at the drawing’s title, which I understood only in my own language: False Escape.

Feeling I shouldn’t correct Su’s impression, I turned to Ren and said, “The colors are so uplifting. But from the title you understand it’s actually about pain.”

“That’s what Su said?”

“Essentially.”

Later, in front of a large abstract painting, Ren said to me, “It’s interesting that he left his home country but kept depicting it through his work. It’s like he was still stuck there, in a way.”

“Artist doing art of country, but left country,” I translated to Su. “Cannot go home.” She nodded, though I doubted I’d conveyed anything meaningful. I may have imagined it, but she seemed quieter after that, more subdued.

We continued like this, Ren remarking on her favorite pieces or aspects of the artist’s biography, me shoddily translating her remarks to Su. There were many concepts that surpassed my linguistic limits, but Su seemed to accept this without comment, sending back no further signals for me to convey in the other direction. It was strange to be with her like this, so withdrawn. I wondered if by now she’d gleaned the theme of the exhibit and was thinking of her own home, her own escape. It was possible she was just tired, having worked all day.

As we approached the exit, Ren continued to talk.

“So why did Su move here?” she asked me.

“For her job. She sells textiles,” I said, as if I’d always understood this. “She’s actually here this weekend for work. I just came along.”

“Wow,” Ren said, as the three of us started down the steps outside. “I don’t know if I could move countries just for a job. Seems like it would be lonely.”

“Not everyone has a choice,” I said, then felt ashamed. I’d meant to defend Su but had implied things about her life I didn’t really know.

Someone else might have taken my comment as a signal to let the subject drop, or perhaps propose a new one, but not Ren.

“What happened?” She paused on a step and looked at Su, who smiled.

“I’d rather not go into it,” I said. I turned to Su, who was still waiting to be clued in, and said, “Ren say me tell you she go now. She say meeting you so nice.”

“Ah.” Su waved at her. “Goodbye.”

“Oh,” Ren said. “You sure you don’t want to come to dinner?”

“Next time.” I hooked my arm through Su’s. “Let us know if you’re ever in town.”

In the morning Su told me we’d be meeting Zed for breakfast once we checked out of the hotel. “Old friend,” she reminded me.

She seemed anxious as we organized our suitcases, folding and refolding her clothes before putting them away. When we were ready to leave, we left our bags at the front desk and walked to a restaurant by a plaza surrounding a grand clock tower. We sat at a table outside, and Su asked for menus. She appeared to study hers carefully.

“Zed is friend only?” I asked.

She looked at me as if she were about to laugh, but then Zed appeared at the table, squinting in the sun, and pulled out a chair.

“Good morning,” he said in my language. He shook my hand and shook Su’s as well, and I remembered he’d done the same at the convention the day before, so probably they weren’t lovers.

The waiter came out to welcome him and though Zed nodded it was clear he didn’t understand the words. We ordered our eggs and I steeled myself for another conversation in which it was impossible for all parties to communicate at once.

But as Su and Zed began to speak, I was surprised by how nice it felt to retreat into the comfort of my ignorance. Again, it amazed me to hear Su express herself with such fluidity; she still seemed tense, but there was a certainty in her voice I didn’t otherwise hear, one that came from knowing someone a long time. I looked out at the plaza, surging with weekend life, children and pigeons swarming around the clock tower, and left the other two to their business, whatever it was. If they were lovers, and if they met at these events regularly, Su probably wouldn’t have asked me to come.

After the waiter set down our steaming plates, Zed leaned over and rubbed the top of Su’s shorn head. She swatted his hand away and crossed her arms. I incorporated these observations into the flimsy narrative I’d constructed, reorienting it again: they’d been lovers but no longer were, he’d always loved her hair, she’d shaved it off to spite him.

Zed turned to me. “I was asking why she did that to her hair.”

“Oh,” I said, looking between them. “Why did she?”

He shook his head. “Apparently she woke up on her birthday and felt like it.”

“Fair enough,” I laughed. Then I noticed with alarm an expression on Su’s face I’d never seen before—was it anger? I couldn’t tell if it was directed at me. Had she thought I was laughing at her? They resumed their conversation and I busied myself with dipping bread into my eggs. There was a gravity to their tone that told me they’d moved beyond the topic of haircuts.

When Zed excused himself to the bathroom, I asked Su, “It’s okay everything?”

She nodded but didn’t look at me, only fidgeted with her silverware. I reached to put my hand on her forearm and knocked over the red pepper shaker, sending crimson flakes across the table. Zed came back smiling.

“Sorry we’ve been excluding you,” he said to me. “I haven’t seen Su in months, and she never answers my messages or calls.” He looked at Su as if she were his exasperating teenage child.

“I don’t mind,” I said, sweeping the errant pepper flakes into my hand, deciding I didn’t like him.

Su shouted something at Zed then, and I was so startled I dropped the flakes into my lap. The waiter poked his head out from the restaurant and then quickly retreated.

“Su, it’s okay?” I asked again.

Her face was red, her mouth tense. She opened it as if to answer me but only sighed.

Zed said, “She gets upset when I mention her family back home.”

“You know them?”

“Of course,” he said. “Su and I grew up together. I was at her wedding. We’re like cousins.”

“Her wedding,” I repeated, though it was impossible I’d misunderstood, we were speaking my own language. The images of Su’s life cycled through my mind again, the man in them now faceless.

“She doesn’t like when I say she should come back.”

I glanced at Su, who only stared into her plate.

“Can she?” I asked. I was hungry for specifics, to fill in the blanks of my under­standing of my friend’s life.

“Probably,” Zed said. “If she really wanted to. Under certain conditions.”

The way he said this troubled me. What would she have to do? But I suddenly felt that asking him for more information would be a betrayal. And I had the suspicion, from the way he seemed to align himself with the place she’d left, that what he told me might also be a misrepresentation. Her life is her own, I wanted to say to him, because in this context that felt true.

“We go now,” I said to Su, standing up and pushing my eggs away. “I have sick.”

—

We didn’t speak much on the bus ride back. I felt Su was avoiding my gaze as she stared out the window, and I had the sense she was waiting for something, for me to reveal some damning fact Zed had told me about her. I offered her the bag of nuts I’d saved from our last bus ride, but she turned them down.

“Too much egg,” she said, though I hadn’t seen her eat much at breakfast.

A little boy across the aisle looked over at us. When I waved, he covered his ruddy face with his hands, which bore traces of something sticky. We watched the passing countryside through the window as we rolled steadily northward. After an hour or so, the bus approached a checkpoint where soldiers huddled at the side of the road. Su and I rummaged frantically in our bags for our residence permits, but for a reason we couldn’t discern, the soldiers waved the bus along. We took turns falling in and out of sleep until we were both woken by a sharp glare, the sun reflecting off the straw-­colored grasslands outside.

“Yellow,” I said, and Su looked where I was pointing.

“Yes.”

When it seemed she wouldn’t say anything else, I closed my eyes.

After a while, Su asked me, “Zed tell you what?”

When I opened my eyes again I saw hers were now closed, her face angled toward the window, with all that yellow going by, as if bracing herself for what I might say. The boy across the aisle watched us through his gummy fingers: two friends from opposite sides of the world, using his language in our strange, misshapen way. I wanted to tell him we were doing our best, that plenty of things that don’t make sense are true.

“What Zed tell me, I don’t understand,” I told Su. “No problem.”

She turned her face in my direction, opening the eye closest to me, and laughed. ■

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