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diligently attended. But after a boy aimed a softball to strike Mark in the eye, he worked out a deal with his parents and attended the academic morning classes and skipped the dreary afternoon activities like pottery and softball for dummies; he had told his mother a love-struck girl was stalking him, and for his safety, he had better stay off the field.
    She wrapped his entire head up the way he asked so he looked as sinister as an Egyptian mummy.
    Who is this girl?” she demanded. Her face was a black cumulonimbus cloud. “Do I know her mother?”
    He patted her leg. “I’m okeydokey,” he said in English, which always got her off his back. “It doesn’t hurt
that
much.”
    “Now it looks like you survived brain surgery,” she said.
    He liked that even better than being a mummy, so he allowed her to kiss his bandaged forehead.
    He watched for Chanhee. Their gauzy white curtains fluttered like ghosts. The neighborhood was so ­nature-unfriendly that there wasn’t a bird in sight, not even a pigeon. The grass was the color of cement. His mother was grateful, praising God for this neighborhood that was the grit of liquor stores and gang members signing the walls, lottery machines where people lined up as if for a concert, and a battalion of ­languages—
battalion
,
one of his new favorite ­words—competing with one another. Even the telephone box was graffitied with THESE ARE THE UNDYING VOICES OF THE PEOPLE
.
YOUS THE BASTARDS OF THE WORLD.
CHICA, ESTOY ENTIENDO . PROPAGANDAOF THE UNHEARD . Sometimes he wondered if the same lonely person was writing back and forth to himself. He watched cars growl past. The heartbreaking melody of the elusive ­ice-cream truck and the blur of pickup trucks loaded with swap meet goods, grandfathers squatting on the stoops of houses who told him they were waiting to die. He watched people trickle in and out of Chanhee’s house. Then as June became July, more people visited the neighbors’ home.
    “For people new to America,” his mother said, “they have a lot of friends.”
    His father picked up the paper and covered his face. “She’s a nice person,” he said.
    “How do you know?”
    The sound of cymbals clanging next door crashed into their conversation.
    “We’re neighbors. A friendly talk here and ­there—what’s wrong with that?”
    “It’s not right, what they do. It’s not good for you to associate with them.” Her voice rose as she spoke, becoming shrill. “It’s bad memories, and there’s enough worries without them.”
    She persisted until his father threw the paper down.
    As usual Mark had to mediate their argument. Even though he knew the answer, he asked, “What’s a prostitute?” Which got them to behave themselves.
    The sun beat down. Chanhee wore a lot of red. Red T–shirts so old that the ironed–on letters were peeling off: ETTY OOP, MAR MONRO , always with red patent leather shoes. In his waiting he was getting a tan though he’d never even been to the Pacific Ocean, which was rumored to be very close, somewhere to the west. He was about to give up on Chanhee when she materialized and tookaway the Webster’s dictionary he was ­reading—he’d gotten up to
M
so ­far—and balanced it on her fingertips.
    She said, “It’s true. You don’t have any friends.”
    He scrutinized a spot of dirt under his fingernail and wished he had taken the dreaded bath the night before.
    “Well,” she added, “I don’t, either.”
    He lingered every day for her. When she emerged from her house, it was the best day since the Republicans left office; and when she was convinced that bacteria were devouring her intestines or that the sun would give her eye cancer, and she mournfully drew the curtains, it was the worst day since his favorite movie theater with ­three-dollar seats on Wednesdays raised prices on caramel popcorn, which his mother now refused to buy him. But Chanhee could touch her nose with her tongue, played a mean game of