Learning Signs

Strolling through the open doorway of the classroom, he made his way to the back. Weaving in and out of desks, he only stopped to pick up a random pencil someone earlier had left, not even noticing that it was pink. even while slouching with his backpack slung lazily behind one arm he would stand out from the crowd.

He is Asian, yet he towers above everyone like a skyscraper in a farm town. You can pick him out from his stocky build, tan skin and cropped black, Asian hair. He also has his always present red jacket zipped up all the way so that you rarely see his shirt. It is ripped half way around the right sleeve and has not left his back since we started school even in the hot Oklahoma summer. His light-brown backpack that he’s had since elementary school looks even more beat up.

As he tosses it on the ground next to a desk, his last two colored pencils tumble out. He sits down heavily in the old wooden desk that does not have enough leg room and proceeds to lay his head down with his forearms covering his face still grasping the pink pencil that he had grabbed not a moment ago. He continues to sit like this for awhile until I walk in, only the second person to enter the classroom, and open the heavy door.

Immediately his head popped up, quick as a fly, and grabs a textbook on the desk next to him proceeding to open it to a random page and pretend like he had been reading it the whole entire time. I laugh and joke with him on how he thought I was the teacher while making my way back to him. In response to my joke he just flipped his hair to the side by looking to the side and uttered a very dramatic, “Well.” This was usually his way of responding to my jokes whenever he couldn’t come up with a response.

He has been getting better at putting up more of a fight ever since he joined me in our debate class. That’s another thing we share, love for arguing, and we love to practice whenever we’re together, even if I win most of the time. He’s also been getting better at chess since I started playing him even, when no one at school can repeatedly best me.

But, probably one of the best things I like about him is that he will never back down from a challenge and will never give up no matter what happens. Just recently he went up and challenged our best debater, a senior, to a match. He knew he didn’t have much of a chance but he still stood up there and did his best to prove himself, and he did an awesome job. From all of this I know, that Phu Tran is my best friend.