Smile One More Time

This short story was inspired by Whirlwind; the girl is very real (as well as her smile). Feedback/criticism is welcome; this was a response to the Reflections prompt: "Beauty is..."
And this place was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places I've visited yet.

I wasn’t expecting much when I timidly stumbled into Azalea Park, an old and tattered apartment complex in metro Atlanta. Needless to say, I was scared. I shied away from the thought of handling a room of rowdy third-grade children, especially when I found myself staring into the large and barren parking lot, shadowed by menacing apartment buildings that stood stiffly on the yellowed and withering grass. The naked trees threatened to fall as they shooed me away, howling that this was no place for me. I wasn’t looking forward to the coming week. As I clutched my lesson plan notebook and a carefully selected sticker sheet for the star students, I suddenly doubted whether I really wanted to do this, to step out of my comfort zone and tutor children in this run-down neighborhood of shabby apartments. But it was too late to quit now.

I slowly crept up to the building that would house me for the week. It looked no more welcoming than any of the other apartments; it only looked less intimidating because it housed a small, red flower that sat outside the window. This piece of shrubbery stretched out its petals, yearning for a drop of water and a beam of sunlight. But its attempts were in vain, and now, it sat shrunken and withered, awaiting the deadly breath of the next breeze.

This building was not intimidating. It was pathetic.

I cracked open the door, and found that I was late. Orientation had already begun, so I found my place in the back of the room and settled in to listen for any details I had missed in the informational packet that I’d already read five times. To my surprise, tutoring would only last for thirty minutes every day; the other ten hours would be dedicated to nothing but nonstop playing with the children in the neighborhood. “Show them love,” the director said.

So I sat on the curbside, with a cluster of young girls eagerly crowded around a tiny basket of chalk. Red, yellow, blue, and green - they were hypnotized by the possibility of a rainbow on the road and a pot of gold at the end. One girl, Jossie, begged me to play the role of a mother in her house that she had just drawn with a piece of chalk. We slept in our chalk beds, ate dinner from our table, ran down the stairs, pressed buttons on the elevator, and yelled that our house was crashing down whenever a car drove over. I was amazed then at how much fun I was having with a stick of chalk and a second grader’s enormous imagination; she was satisfied with simply pretending that her life was more glamorous than reality. Jossie put the chalk down then and tugged at my sleeve, looking up at me with large, innocent eyes and an enormous smile that was wide enough to affect every other feature of her face; her eyes crinkled into reflections of her grin, and the bridge of her nose scrunched up to reveal the tiny teeth in her mouth. I was frozen in place by an unexplainable force, and for a few seconds, I was almost confused at being bombarded with such a dazzling smile.

“Will you come to my house please?” she asked.

I hesitated. I was a bit intimidated at unexpectedly intruding on her mom’s privacy, but I finally obliged. How could I refuse? When I doubtfully creaked open the door, I suddenly found myself in a flurry of arms and flower-printed clothing, until I was pressed into her mother’s bosom and wrapped inside her large arms. She was hugging me as if I were her long-lost daughter and not as if I were a stranger who she had seen for the first time.

“Bienvenido!” she cried, welcoming me inside the small kitchen. I offered her a gift - a large jigsaw puzzle that depicted a few men on the street of a marketplace. It wasn’t an exciting picture, but the mother accepted the gift as if she were receiving the Nobel Prize or a new convertible; she clapped her hands and called her daughter over to begin piecing the puzzle together. I watched in awe as the pair attempted to match one square to another, with genuine grins plastered on their faces for the entire stretch of time. “Thank you,” she said over and over again in her broken English; I felt as if I had just cured a woman fated to die of cancer. How could anyone be so happy at receiving a jigsaw puzzle?

As the week progressed, I grew more and more attached to Jossie. She came to my class every day, and afterwards we went outside and sat on the curb, sucking on our ice pops and watching the cars pass by. I learned more from her innocent second-grade thoughts than she probably did from my lessons. She taught me of the beauty behind the singing birds, telling me fairytale stories about a lonely bird flying after his lost love. She took my hand and demanded that we perform a talent show for an imaginary audience. She showed me the games the kids played on the streets and the desire they had for piggy-back rides; she helped me rediscover the fun in simple games like hide-and-go-seek. At the end of each day, she’d take my hand and look deeper in my eyes than any other person had ever tried to look, with a face of earnest admiration and trust - so earnest that I felt almost guilty for knowing that I was far from the perfection she imagined me to be. But then she smiled and stirred up that inexpressible feeling in me again, and suddenly, all my doubts were erased.

At the end of our last day, I took Jossie and embraced her, but to my surprise, she pulled away from my hug and looked at me with a determination lit aflame in her eyes.

“Are you going to be here tomorrow? I’ll see you, right? You won’t disappear?”
I nodded and stroked her head, then bent down and looked straight into those large, innocent eyes.
“I’ll be here as long as you remember me.” I replied.
Of course, such a vague answer didn’t satisfy her, so she tried again.
“Will I see you next week?”
I sighed. “Jossie… no, but I-”
“-you’re going to leave?”
“No, let me finish. I’m going to leave because I can’t live here-”
“Why not? You can live in my room. We can be like sisters!”
“No, Jossie… I have a family at home. I have to go to school. I only came here to visit and tutor, and I have to go back home this Saturday… I don’t live here.”

I could see tears swelling up at the corners of her eyes, and I felt like a monster. But a monster was only a thing that hid in the closet or slept under the bed; it only triggered tears in a child for one night before disappearing in the depths of darkness again. But I had unleashed tears not from a temporary scare, but from her heart, where years of hurt and pain had already settled ever since the disappearance of her father and the fragmentation in her household. I was worse than a monster.

“Hey, I’ll come visit, okay? Twice a month at least. Okay?”
Her sniffles caught in mid-air, and silence enveloped us again.
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“Can we celebrate Christmas together?”
“Of course; I’ll bring you presents and hot chocolate, and we can sing Christmas carols for your mom.”
“And we’ll play hide-and-go-seek like we always do?”
“Of course.”
She paused for a moment, contemplating whether she should buy my answers or not.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”

The moment our pinkies linked to cement that promise, her face broke out in that familiar smile again. A bird flew out from behind the apartments, and another followed. Music seemed to play in the background of my mind, and the trees swayed along with the rhythm, the branches welcoming our renewed friendship.

And then I saw the beauty in this squalid neighborhood, as the tall buildings that once seemed ominous revealed themselves to be full of bustling life and vibrant colors. I saw the joy that seemed to be permanently drawn on the kids’ hearts, and I saw how easily they were able to find love in all the slightest things. This place was not the ugly godforsaken place I had first imagined it to be; rather, it was one of the most beautiful places I had ever set foot in, more beautiful than the pristine beaches in Cancun or the unsullied snow on mountain peaks. This place, apartment complex, neighborhood, group of people, family - whatever it was called - was able to touch a person’s heart with smiles and welcomes that a teenage girl like me could only have dreamed of. This place made me realize that such joy and happiness was, in fact, possible.

The director had told me to show these children love, but little did he know that they were the ones showing me love, and as much as I tried to make it up to the families with lessons and gifts, I knew that in reality, it was Jossie and all the other smiling faces in this neighborhood who had puzzled together the pieces of joy in my world.

And finally, the red flower on the doorstep began to grow again.