A name said right

Text 1: The Paper Star, by Leyla Brandt

An original novel extract.

On my first morning the teacher stood me at the front of the classroom and said my name, and she said it wrong. She said it carefully, and kindly, and wrong, and twenty-eight faces looked up at me, and I did not correct her, because I did not yet know the English words for ‘that is not how it goes’.

The classroom was very bright. Everything was bright: the walls covered in paintings, the plastic chairs in red and blue and yellow, the long windows full of grey sky. On the wall by the door there was a map of the world, and somebody had stuck a small paper star on it, and I saw with a jolt that the star was on my country. A paper star. As if it were somewhere you might go on holiday.

The teacher pointed to an empty chair beside a girl with a long plait and very serious eyebrows. I sat down. The girl glanced at me sideways. On the table between us was a pencil case shaped like a fish.

The lesson began. I understood perhaps one word in five, and the words I understood came at me in the wrong order, like coloured beads with the string pulled out. Number. Twelve. Please. Quietly. I copied what was on the board without knowing what it said. My handwriting looked strange in their alphabet, like someone walking in borrowed shoes.

At break the playground roared. I stood by the wall with my back against the warm bricks and watched. Boys ran past in a shrieking pack. A ball bounced near my feet, and I did not kick it back, and someone shouted, and I did not know whether it was at me. I put my hands in my pockets and found my grandmother’s ring on its cord, and held it.

Then the girl with the plait was in front of me. She did not say anything. She held out the fish-shaped pencil case, unzipped, and I saw that it was full of sweets: small, sugary, sour-looking ones, in colours that did not exist in nature.

I took one. It was so sour that my eyes watered, and the girl watched my face with great interest, and when I gasped she laughed, a sudden, delighted snort, and after a second, without meaning to, I laughed too.

“Amina,” she said, pointing at herself.

I told her my name. She said it back to me. She said it right.

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