A Private Name
By the spring, Mira had been working on Mihaela for four months.
She had her notebook. She had a small list of Romanian words that had grown to about two hundred. She wrote slow letters to her aunt in Iaşi — at first in English, then in halting Romanian with the help of her mother and an online dictionary. Her aunt wrote back, every time, in a mix of both languages — kindly, patiently, never correcting Mira's mistakes but using the right words back. *I learned more from her three-page reply than I learned from a year of school French*, Mira thought.
She did not tell her friends at school. Mira at school remained Mira. She felt no pressure to announce anything. The Mihaela project was a private one. It belonged to a different room in her own life.
But things shifted, quietly. Mira at school began wearing — every day — a small thin gold cross she had inherited from her grandmother. Her grandmother had not been particularly devout, but she had worn it her whole life. Mira wore it now under her shirt; nobody saw it; that was fine. She knew it was there. The cross was a Mihaela object. Carrying it felt like having a hand in her own pocket holding her grandmother's hand.
In April, a thing happened.
Mira's school had a careers assembly. The speaker was a woman who had been a refugee from somewhere in eastern Europe in the 1990s and was now a translator. The woman talked, in a