The Place Will Comfort You by Naama Goldstein

and tan and pink against the backgroundof concrete. You’re pale and you have a pale sound. Your parents came here from elsewhere and say they brought you with them, a history you don’t broadcast in your public life.
    Your mother likes to send you to the grocery with lists; she says you need occasions to speak up and, to this end, the lists are always subtly revised. From all your whining, all the begging off before each shopping trip, she says, no one would ever guess that you are practically a native. Where’s the bluntness? Where’s the extroversion?
What
is the big deal?
    When your father and I brought you here, she says, oh boy. We didn’t even speak the language. Transitioning on that scope, she says, it takes conviction and persistence. You will call things the wrong name, you won’t know how to argue like the locals, you’ll be found amusing, so? You can’t afford to dwell. You forge ahead. You give yourself a push. So, go! And if he gives the wrong percentage fat this time, say something, say it twice. Out. Now!
    She won’t acknowledge this is all her fault. Because of coffee. It’s your job to buy it, to influence, with varying success, the proper quantity, the right amount of change. But you are not allowed to drink it. Your mother says it stunts the growth. In your mind there is no question that it does the opposite. To wit, the children here all drink it, and they are sharp and harried as grownups, no one in sight as permanently stunned as you. It is as if you were raised somewhere very different, then put down here. You drink milk. You speak soft and slow. You sneaked a taste of coffee just last week, and it’s too late. The harshness! You’ve been raised on mac and cheese.
    An eastern current lowers a fine mesh of desert particles over the schoolyard. You trip up on an early stage of Chinese jump rope, once again assume the static role, supporting the elastic with your ankles. The other end is looped around a chair because you like to keep the players down to two.
    Shlomtzee hops through three stages without snagging. “You upfor cafeteria duty soon?” she says, and graduates to the next level. You slither the elastic to your waist.
    â€œDo I know? What letter are we up to in the roster? Tet, right?”
    â€œYud.”
    â€œAlready? Like I care.” Of greater pertinence to you is whether one must eat the fare once one has done the work. “They give you eggs a lot?” you ask her. Shlomtzee owns a meal-plan card. “Hard-boiled? Soft-boiled?”
    â€œSure. Either one.”
    â€œPoached is just as bad, and fried with runny yolks or omelets not mixed-up enough, that slippery white. Disgusting.” You move the rope up to your armpits. “She ever give you three-bean salad?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œSour pickles?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBut only if you want, right? Anything with vinegar they can’t make you eat. It tastes like nail polish. That stuff’s on the side. She make you eat that? She really crazy in the head?” Everyone knows about the cook. Everyone could be wrong.
    Shlomtzee weaves the white elastic with her gray-kneed legs. “Be sick the week your turn is up. Get better on a Friday. Friday is without exception schnitzel.”
    â€œI can taste the vinegar in ketchup.”
    â€œKetchup’s optional.” She completes the stage successfully, and starts as if from the beginning—the elastic fully lowered—but with added complications in the steps. Shlomtzee Ateeya didn’t used to be your type, a bolter and a brayer. Her mouth opens so wide it might unhinge her face and stick limbs from a recent growth spurt finish off the look. But she is winding down.
    The fifth grade marks the start of a peculiar decline. It seems the shrill girls, like balloons, are caving in to circumferential pressures. Then again, some of the softer girls are growing tense. You have earned