His own
enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy,
inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire
house.
Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his
classmates carried ID. But his classmates *did* have Big Wheels,
catcher's mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and
Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents' night and sent trays
of cupcakes to class on birthdays -- Alan's birthday came during the
summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn't be an issue. So did his
brothers', when their time came to enroll.
At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one
day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room
boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the
teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched
spring moccasins -- a tithe of the golems -- were fit subject for a
brief exposition.
"Did your mom buy you any real shoes?" It was asked without malice or
calculation, but Alan's flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the
waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously
invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an
observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where
attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange
lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world.
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