Save Me A Seat by Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan (2016)
RAVI
My school in India was called VidyaMandir, which means “temple of knowledge.” My new school is called Albert Einstein Elementary. Perimma could hardly wait to show off to all her friends at home that her grandson had been accepted to a school named after a scientific genius.
I’m not a scientific genius, but I am a very good student. My favorite subjects are math, English, and sports-especially cricket.
“Boys and girls, please welcome our new student, RAH-vee,” Mrs. Beam says after she has taken the roll call. “He’s come to us all the way from India! Isn’t that exciting?”
Mrs. Beam is short and round. When she smiles, her eyebrows touch each other.
As I look around the room, a sea of mostly white faces stares back at me. I feel a little nervous. It is my first day of fifth grade in room 506, and I am the only Indian in my class. There is one other, a boy named Dillon Samreen, but he doesn’t count. He is an ABCD. American-Born Confused Desi. Desi is the Hindi word for Indian. I can tell Dillon is an ABCD, because he speaks and dresses more like an American than an Indian.
“Tell us something about yourself, RAH-vee,” Mrs. Beam says, smiling at me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, standing at attention.
Everyone laughs.
Mrs. Beam claps her hands. “Boys and girls, where are your manners?” she asks. “Go on, RAH-vee. We’re listening.”
I push up my glasses and continue. “My name is Ravi Suryanarayanan, and I just shifted from Bangalore.”
Everyone laughs again. What’s so funny? I wonder.
Mrs. Beam claps her hands. Her eyebrows are twitching like mad. “Boys and girls, is this how we welcome a new student to Albert Einstein?”
The room gets quiet. The spotlight is on me. I can feel the whole class staring. This is my first day of school in America, and things are not going well.
Mrs. Beam turns to me. “You can call me Mrs. Beam,” she says softly. “And RAH-vee? Here in America, students don’t need to stand up when the teacher calls on them. Do you understand?”
Of course I do. I push up my glasses and rub my nose. It’s something I do when I’m nervous.
Mrs. Beam comes over to my desk. She has a look of pity on her face.
“Don’t worry, RAH-vee,” she says, patting me on the shoulder. “You can introduce yourself to the class later, after you’ve had a little time to work on your English. We have a very nice teacher named Miss Frost in the resource room. I’m sure she can help you.”
I want to say:
- My English is fine.
- I don’t need Miss Frost.
- I was top of my class at VidyaMandir.
But here’s what I do instead:
- Push up my glasses.
- Rub my nose.
- Sit down and fold my hands.
My friends and teachers at VidyaMandir would have a good laugh if they could see me now—their star student taken for an idiot. What a joke!
Mrs. Beam is writing out our homework on the board. I open my notebook and carefully copy down the assignment. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Dillon Samreen staring at me. He looks like a movie star straight out of Bollywood. His long, shiny black hair falls over one eye; with a quick jerk of his head, he shakes it away. Then he smiles and winks at me. I smile back. Dillon Samreen may be an ABCD, but I think he wants to be my friend.
(Page 5-8)
JOE
Today is the first day of school, and Mr. Barnes is the first person I run into when I get here. He's wearing a red bow tie with little blue whales on it. I'm pretty sure it's new, or at least I've never seen it before. Last year, Mr. Barnes had seventeen different bow ties that he always wore in the same order starting with the green one with white diamonds and ending with the orange-and-purple-striped one. Mr. Barnes's bow ties were another one of my favorite sequences.
"Yo, Joe," he says. "How's it feel to be a fifth grader?”
"Good," I tell him. "At least so far."
Maybe this year will be different, I think. Maybe Dillon Samreen won't be in my class.
But when I get to room 506, there he is, standing over by the windows with his underwear hanging out. Polka dots.
Lucy Mulligan and a bunch of her annoying girl friends are standing around him, chanting, "Do it, do it, do it!" They want him to stick out his tongue, but Dillon won't.
"Come on, Samreen, let's give 'em what they want!" Tom Dinkins shouts before sticking out his own tongue and wagging it at the girls.
Tom Dinkins is a Dillon Samreen wannabe. The girls don't care about his tongue.
"I warn you," Dillon tells his fan club, "I think it grew a little over the summer."
Lucy and her friends start jumping up and down, screaming, "Eeeew!"
One thing I will say about Dillon Samreen: He really knows how to play a crowd.
All the screaming starts to get to me, so I do the in-two-three, out-two-three breathing Miss Frost taught me. If that doesn't work, I'll have to use my earplugs. I always keep a pair in my pocket just in case. They Come in different colors, but I like the tan ones best,because they don't show as much. They're made out of some kind of squishy foam rubber, and when I wear them, I can still hear people talking, only it's softer, like when you're underwater or have a pillow over your head. I'm allowed to wear my earplugs in school whenever I want, but mostly I use them in the cafeteria, on the playground, and in gym class.
"Settle down and take your seats," announces Mrs. Beam, my new teacher. This is her first year teaching at Einstein, and she looks a lot younger than any of the other teachers I've had. She's shaped kind of funny—wider on the bottom than the top—and she's shorter than me, which is weird, considering that she's my teacher. She seems nervous, and there's something freaky about her eyebrows.
At Einstein, kids have to sit in alphabetical order. Every year since kindergarten, my seat has been right behind Dillon's. I know the back of his head by heart. Mrs. Beam has made name cards for us and put them on the desks, but when I go to take my seat behind Dillon, somebody's already sitting in it. He's a shrimpy-looking kid with thick glasses and greased-down black hair parted on the side. I've never seen him before, and I'm not sure where he's from. His skin is darker than mine, but not as dark asDillon's or Caleb Burell's. When I look at the card sitting on his desk, I see his name is about a mile long and full of y's and a's.
He seems kind of nervous too. He keeps rubbing his nose and looking down at his hands, which are folded in his lap like he's in church or something. His shirt is so white it hurts my eyes to look at it, and he's got it tucked in and buttoned up all the way to the top. When Mrs. Beam asks him to tell the class about himself, he stands up like he's in the army and calls her ma'am—which is about the only word he says that you can actually understand. Everybody starts laughing, and for a minute, I think, Hey, maybe fifth grade isn't going to be so bad after all.
Maybe Dillon Samreen will decide to pick on this new kid with the weird name and the funny accent instead of me.
(Page 12-15)