A Bad Day for Sunshine (Sunshine Vicram #1)(40)

American Sign Language. She’d finally arrived. She’d been looking forward to this class for weeks, and it was all Jimmy Ravinder’s fault.

When they were younger, Jimmy had had a difficult time talking, so his mother and his uncle Levi learned some ASL to help him communicate. And Jimmy taught her. She didn’t know much, but whenever Jimmy got flustered, he’d use sign to talk. And she’d been fascinated ever since.

But the school year was half over. To get into the second semester of ASL I, she first had to catch up on the first. She’d spent her entire break learning the signs, classifiers, and grammar—which, in ASL, was mostly on the face—so they’d let her into the class.

Mrs. Johnson, a pear-shaped woman with short red hair and purple wire-framed glasses, signed her schedule and handed it back to her along with a book and workbook. Then, without a word, she gestured toward a desk in the middle of the room.

Auri ignored the eerie silence and slid into her seat as quietly as possible, only to find Mrs. Johnson finger-spelling in the air while reading from her computer screen.

She would pause and look up at a raised hand, and then repeat the whole thing again and again, and Auri realized she was taking roll. Panic began to rise inside her when she found herself unable to understand a single thing she spelled. It was all so fast, the teacher’s hand a blur of motion, and yet every time she paused, a student would raise his or her hand.

She’d made a mistake. A huge one. When she felt a trickle of perspiration slip down her back, she followed it, sinking farther down in her chair.

The teacher stopped and looked up as though confused. She looked at her screen again and then back at the class. Then she stood, put her hands on her hips, and said aloud, “Mr. De los Santos, what are you doing in my classroom?”

Like the rest of the class, Auri turned to see Cruz hunkered down in the back row.

He lifted an indifferent shoulder and said, “Have to have two years of a foreign language. ASL counts.”

“Yes,” she said as though struggling for patience, “but why are you in this class?”

“I don’t like the French teacher.”

She rolled her eyes. “No one likes the French teacher.” The entire class erupted in laughter, but she continued, “But that doesn’t explain why you are in my class.”

Clearly, the teacher had a problem with Cruz, but Auri was getting defensive. If he needed the credit, she couldn’t stop him from getting it, could she?

“Two years. There are only two classes. ASL I and ASL II. I don’t have a choice.”

Mrs. Johnson crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against her desk. “You know very well that you could test out of this class and take the next one. You could test out of that one, too, if you really wanted to.”

Auri straightened her shoulders in surprise.

“So, once again, why are you in my class?”

He lifted that same shoulder and let his gaze land on Auri. “I like the company.”

The class laughed again, and Mrs. Johnson went back around her desk, but before she sat down, she signed something to Cruz, her movements so fast, Auri only caught one word: help.

Cruz nodded as though agreeing to something, but that wasn’t the interesting part. He’d understood her. Every word. As though he knew ASL as well as he knew English, because another student raised her hand, shook her head, and signed understand. She didn’t understand either and was asking for clarification.

Mrs. Johnson spoke aloud again. “I just asked Mr. De los Santos if he would consider helping out in class every so often, and he agreed.”

The female student flashed him a smile, clearly as impressed as Auri, but he didn’t seem to notice. Nor did he seem to notice the seven other girls vying for his attention. But he did notice Auri. He had yet to take his eyes off her.

Auri faced the teacher again before she lost control of her own inane smile, but she burned with a million questions for him, not the least of which how he seemed to know ASL so well. Hopefully, she’d find out when she interviewed him for their history assignment.

When the teacher passed out a worksheet, Auri opted to check out Sybil’s schedule instead. As luck would have it, she shared not one, not two, but three classes with Sybil, and one of those was their seventh-period class, athletics.

After obsessing over Cruz and the fact that he knew ASL like the back of his hand through the entire class, Auri refocused her energy twenty minutes later on investigating the elusive St. Aubin girl. So far, no one in her seventh period knew that much about her. Nor did they know of any friends she may have had.

But surely Sybil hung out with someone in PE. There was safety in numbers in such a class.

As luck would have it, Chastity was in the class, too. The only person in school ridiculously happy to see Auri rushed up to her after they dressed out. Auri was assigned to the bleachers since she had yet to purchase the requisite uniform, which was basically shorts and a tee in the school colors, red and gold.

Still, bleachers as opposed to slamming her face into someone’s elbow during basketball? New-girl perk.

“Hi!” Chastity said, sitting beside her on the bleachers while the teacher, a curvy brunette, took roll. “I have an extra pair of shorts and a tee if you want to dress out.”

“I’m good,” Auri said with a grin.

Chastity laughed. “Right. Sorry. So, you and Cruz seem to be getting along well.”