A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 1
Lejla had been on campus for less than a week now and already it was becoming very clear how
many ways she did not fit in. This was largely thanks to the many students and faculty who seemed to
feel duty-bound to inform her of this fact.
They were not unkind, these American colleagues, but it was sometimes difficult to tell how
sincere they were being when they spoke to her.
“Bosnia? Wasn't there a war there?”
“Are you staying in America very long?”
“You're twenty five? And just a freshman? Wow.”
Hesitancy and half-smiles always accompanied these questions, like they weren't jokes but they
weren't serious either. Lejla was eternally unsure about how to react to them, and so she mimicked. It
was a mechanism that had served her well so far, allowing her to teach herself the English language,
American customs and fashion, and basically giving her the tools to function with relative ease, if not
comfort.
It certainly didn't help that as soon as she sat down with her new counselor—the one who was
meant to guide her through the first rough year of her college career—he had told her she'd have to take
a special kind of class, one that nobody except foreigners had to take. Her English was good, he'd
clucked, but not good enough. The man's name was difficult to pronounce and he refused to correct
Lejla's attempt, insisting that she simply call him Mr. G. It was an admission that made Lejla feel like a
child.
“Lejla,” Mr. G growled as he began to type her new schedule into his computer, “Like from
Futurama?”
Mr. G's head was round and bald except for some wisps of black hair which struggled across the
top, and which embarrassed Lejla to look at. She glanced down at her lap, noticed her blue nail polish,
applied just this morning, was already chipping.
A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 2
“I don't know?” Lejla told her counselor. She could hear other meetings with other counselors
from all directions in the cubicles surrounding Mr. G's.
“L-A-Y-L-A?” Mr. G asked without looking up from the computer screen.
“L-E-J...” Lejla started, but Mr. G's eyebrows shot up suddenly, wrinkling his wide forehead
sharply.
“Found it! Wow, that is one heck of a last name!”
The foreigners' class consisted of four kids from Mexico, one kid from Germany, and seven
kids from various Asian countries. One of her high school teachers had told Lejla she shouldn't use the
term Asian, but she didn't know what else to say, and plus it was too confusing to try and keep them all
straight. How was she supposed to remember that Sun-hee was from Korea but that “Steven” was from
Japan?
She knew why the distinction mattered. If one of those kids accidentally thought Lejla was
Romanian or worse, a Serb, she would have stormed out of the room. But she still could not find much
empathy in herself for them.
The students' foreignness was where the similarities between them halted, though, and neither
Lejla nor any of the other students in her class seemed to care much about manufacturing more
common ground. The teachers tried. Lejla could tell that. They always made an attempt to encourage
conversation among the class, usually in thinly veiled and vaguely graded assignments. But already
Lejla was losing her patience. These students didn't seem to care one bit about learning English, and in
fact, tended to pair off with other students with the same mother tongue so they wouldn't have to speak
English at all. And those who didn't have a native counterpart were often so lazy or perhaps too stupid
to make the attempt at crossing the language barrier that they'd simply stare blankly when asked a
question.
A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 3
The German student, for example, sat in the back of the class and doodle dumb cartoons.
Whenever Ms. George called on him, he would ignore her until she had to physically tap him on the
shoulder. He would always look up with this faraway look on his face and, in tortured English, he
would explain that he didn't notice Ms. George calling on him because she didn't pronounce his name
correctly.
If that weren't already wearing on Lejla's patience, it seemed that Ms. George and Mrs. Roberts
lived under the assumption that playing children's games was somehow the best way to teach a
language.
When she'd tried to tell Ms. George that she'd really rather read or watch television to learn the
language, she had reacted like Lejla had announced her favorite color to be purple. “Those are very
good ways to learn English, thank you, Lejla,” she'd said in her slow, smiley way, “Do you have a
partner for the next game yet?”
And so Lejla played Scrabble and she played Apples to Apples and all the while she watched
the clock until it was time to go to her next period or to the library to complete her assignments on the
computers there.
Of all the classes she was taking, her weekday night class was by far her favorite. She came all
the way to Kirksville, away from her family working so hard in a factory ninety miles away to make
sure she could afford tuition, and her husband had relocated here and now cleaned the spills and
emptied the trash her fellow classmates left behind, all so that Lejla could learn how to be a teacher of
social studies for secondary classrooms.
As soon as Mr. G had mentioned the remote possibility that Lejla could get a head start on her
coursework for her teaching degree, she had felt an anxiety lift that had been crushing her, for how long
she didn't know. Laughably, he had tried to deter her, tried to urge her to focus on her general classes,
A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 4
focus on her major. With a smile and a shake of her head, she had slain him and gained access to the
education class. One step closer to success. She repeated it in her head like a mantra.
Just like the previous two class periods, Lejla was the first person at the classroom, arriving
even before the preceding class had let out. She settled down on a wooden bench nearby and slid an
assigned book from her satchel. The reading wasn't due for a week, but the faster she got ahead of
things, the more time she would have for Ahmad and for her other courses.
A few students came trickling down the hallway, with one she recognized from class sitting on
the bench next to her. The previous class let out and Lejla followed a couple other, more confident
looking students into the room. She took a seat at one of the clusters of desks—she couldn't get over
that. Why clusters and not rows? Her teacher hadn't even mentioned it yet, and she had two other
classes which also had clusters. No other students questioned it, though, so neither did she—then she
pulled out her notebook, her folder which was empty so far, and three pencils.
All around her, students were chatting, laughing, joking. Lejla had promised Ahmad that she
wouldn't refuse friendship, but she also didn't feel much need to chase anyone down for conversation.
She had friends in Columbia where her family was, Bosnian friends who understood her and liked her.
To Lejla, Kirksville was a place of opportunity, but it was by no means home. She had no intention of
making it one.
A girl whose name Lejla kept forgetting sat next to her. They were on friendly terms and Lejla
offered a polite smile. The girl grinned back, her cheeks rounding like gumballs. Her dark red hair was
half-concealed under a baseball cap and pulled back into a ponytail.
“How are you, Lejla?” she asked as she stashed her bag under her chair. The girl didn't get any
materials out for class, and she stretched her hands across her empty desk.
“I'm fine,” Lejla said, “How are you?”
“Great. I just talked to my counselor and she said I should only have one more semester of this
A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 5
shit.”
The curse word made Lejla giggle. It was so strange to hear those words pronounced by
Americans. She hadn't yet gathered the courage to say one herself.
“Crap, sorry,” the girl said, lifting a hand as if Lejla was threatening to hit her. “My stupid
mouth. I really ought to watch it, especially if I'm gonna be teaching middle schoolers. Can you
imagine?”
Soon after, the teacher strode in, her head high and back straight, a colorful scarf tossed
casually about her shoulders. Lejla loved Ms. Torres for that. She was always so professional, always
dressed so nicely with her perfectly coifed hairstyle. She looked like Lejla thought a teacher should
rightly look.
“Good evening,” she said, her words rounded and precise. Lejla vowed she'd practice forming
her words like Ms. Torres, jotted herself a note. “If you will all get in the habit of turning in your
homework on the corner of my desk at the beginning of each class period, that would be wonderful.
Please bring your papers up now.”
All around Lejla, there was a mass rustling of papers and shuffling of shoes as every student
mechanically withdrew crisp white pages lined with black text. Even the girl she had been chatting
with now dug around in the bag under her chair, pulling out slightly crumpled pages. Meanwhile, Lejla
felt as if she were being slowly lowered deep underwater. Her head hurt and she couldn't see straight
and her heart beat so hard she felt she couldn't breathe. If she were ever going to say a curse word out
loud, this would be the time.
As she got up, the red-haired girl whispered to her, asking what was wrong, but Lejla couldn't
answer. Ms. Torres stood at the computer in the corner of the room, directing the screen at the head of
the classroom to pull up the day's lecture notes. For an instant, Lejla considered the possibility of
sprinting out the door and running home to Ahmad, explaining that college wasn't for her and that her
A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 6
old factory job really wasn't so bad after all.
But she stayed in her seat and wiped the sweat from her palms and took notes through the class
period with even more fervor and detail than ever. Lejla couldn't imagine when Ms. Torres had given
the assignment without Lejla noticing, since there was hardly ever a point in class where Lejla was not
taking notes or watching the board... but if it had been so, then Lejla was going to make sure it wouldn't
happen again.
At the end of class, Lejla gathered her materials and approached Ms. Torres right as she was
preparing to leave the room. By then, ninety percent of the class had left, the only stragglers being
students whose conversations with one another were not quite finished.
“Ms. Torres,” Lejla started timidly, consciously trying to round her vowels and enunciate her
consonants. “Somehow I missed the assignment from yesterday. Could you please remind me what we
were meant to do?”
The woman's fleshy face was impassive as she looked Lejla over. From this close, Lejla could
see wrinkles crackling out from the corners of Ms. Torres's eyes; these wrinkles became thick creases
when she furrowed her brows before speaking.
“Miss Ibrahimovic,” she started, and Lejla felt a surge of pleasure at hearing her name
pronounced almost perfectly before the teacher continued. “This is no course for slackers. You are
expected to keep up with the coursework just like any other student in this class. If you cannot, I have
no qualms about dropping you from my roster. You may have until tomorrow to complete yesterday's
assignment alongside today's assignment, at an automatic twenty percent penalty.”
With that, the imposing woman hefted her colorful patched bag onto her shoulder and strode out
of the classroom.
Lejla wanted to cry. She wanted to hit herself across the face. She wanted to hide for an eternity.
Nothing had prepared her for this response from Ms. Torres, and now that her reputation had been
A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 7
trampled, she wondered if there was any point in carrying on at all. Surely now Ms. Torres would do all
she could to bar Lejla from passing this course, which would prevent her from securing her teacher's
degree, which would send Lejla back home full of shame with nothing to show for the money her
family had raised to send her here.
“Damn,” came a voice from behind Lejla. She turned and saw the red-haired girl from before,
looking at the door and shaking her head. “Sorry.” When she looked back at Lejla, her brows shot way
up under the bill of her cap. “Oh, hey, you're alright. Don't take it personally. That's sort of just how
Ms. Torres is sometimes. She takes this shit really seriously.”
Lejla wanted to flee the girl's wide-eyed sympathy, but she had no choice. “Where do you find
assignments, please?” Lejla was working hard to keep her emotions in line, to keep tough in front of
this stranger who had no business knowing Lejla's struggles, and her grammar faltered. Her shame
redoubled.
The girl seemed confused, concerned. “I mean, it's all online. Don't you know about
Blackboard? Or your inbox?”
The words brought to mind vague memories of Mr. G flipping through screens on his swiveled
computer screen and typing fast, smiling proudly he explained that Lejla would get the hang of it
before she knew it. Lejla shook her head, feeling tears swell in her face, her throat.
“Well, hell!” the girl rolled her eyes, “That's pretty damn important. Way to go, Truman
University, thanks a lot.”
Before Lejla could wonder what the college had done wrong when it was clear that Lejla had
made the mistake, the girl placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Listen, I'm going to this free dinner thing at a church downtown with some friends. You should
come with me, and then afterward, we can run back to the library and I'll show you the ropes. What do
you think?”
A. Hamilton, Excerpt From Yet Unnamed Novel – 8
She knew Ahmad hadn't prepared supper since it was his turn to work late that night. All they
had left in their pantry was some noodles and a few spices, and exhaustion swept through her when she
thought about going to the market. So Lejla found herself nodding yes.