The classroom was a converted lab space on the second floor of Jefferson Community College, Room 214, which meant it had been designed for a different purpose and adapted badly—tables too high for the chairs, outlets that sparked occasionally, a clock that ran three minutes fast in a deliberate attempt to keep them on schedule. Grace Kim had stopped adjusting it. She had learned to teach around it.

Eighteen students. Eight countries. A semester that would feel, when it was done, like both nothing and everything had happened.

The first day, Grace asked them to say their names and one thing they wanted to do with English. She had asked this question for fifteen years and she knew how it would go—practical answers, mostly: I want to talk to my children's teachers. I want to pass the citizenship test. I want to work in a hospital. I want to call my mother without my son translating.

This time, there was also a student from Guatemala who said, in careful, halting English, "I want to understand the jokes." And a student from South Korea—a man in his fifties named Jae-won, who had been a structural engineer in Seoul and was starting over—who said, "I want to stop feeling like a ghost." And a Somali woman, Fadumo, who said nothing at all, only smiled and looked at the table, and when Grace asked her name she whispered it like a secret she wasn't sure she wanted to give away.

That was September. In October, the American idioms unit began.

"Break a leg," said Marcus, the textbook, in its cheerful recorded voice. "This means good luck. We say it to performers before they go on stage."

Eighteen faces looked at her, none of them understanding.

"Why would you say 'break a leg'?" asked Daniela, from Guatemala. She was twenty-six, a dental hygienist in her home country, now working in a taco restaurant while she studied. "If someone breaks a leg, that is very bad. That is not luck."

"It's a metaphor," Grace said. "A reverse metaphor. We say the opposite of what we mean."

"Why?"

"I don't know," Grace admitted. "That's just how it is."

"What about 'it's raining cats and dogs'?" This was Yuki, from Japan, who had been in the United States for two years and still couldn't hear the difference between the idiom and the literal meaning. "Cats and dogs are falling from the sky. How is this rain? This is storm. This is disaster."

"It's poetic," Grace said. "It means the rain is very heavy."

"But the poetry makes no sense."

Jae-won, in the back row, raised his hand. "Ms. Kim. I have question. In Korea, we have idiom. 'When you see ox flying, open your mouth.' This means—wait, I am forgetting—" He frowned. "It means you should pay attention when strange things happen, because something important is coming. But the ox cannot fly. The ox is too heavy. So why—" He stopped, frustrated. "In English, is there similar? Something impossible, but also something true?"

There was a pause. Grace realized that Jae-won had just, without quite intending to, explained exactly what an idiom was.

"Yes," she said. "That's exactly it."

Daniela and Jae-won became friends in November, which surprised everyone, including them. They were an unlikely pair—she was twenty-six and loud, he was fifty-four and quiet; she spoke English with Mexican slang she picked up from her coworkers, he spoke it with a careful precision that suggested he was translating from Korean grammar in his head. But they had both, in their different ways, gotten lost in the same city. They found each other in the hallway after class one day, both waiting for the elevator, and they started talking, and then they were getting coffee together on Thursdays, and then they were doing their homework together in the library, and then they were something that approximated friends, in a language that was still not quite their own.

"Daniela," Jae-won said one Thursday, "I have question about American phrase. 'Piece of cake.' This is food. But it means easy. Why is easy like cake? Cake is not easy to make. My wife—she was—" He stopped. "She made cake. It took many hours."

Daniela laughed. "I don't know. Maybe cake is easy to eat?"

"But eating is easy. Eating is the easiest thing. So all foods are pieces of cake. Or no—" He was working through it, his brow furrowed. "Maybe the slice. The piece. A small piece is easy to eat. But then it should be 'piece of cookie.' Cookie is smaller. Or 'piece of crumb.' That is the smallest."

"Maybe someone who made this idiom has never made cake," Daniela said.

"That must be it. The American people who invented these sayings have never actually cooked."

They were both laughing now, which was the point, Grace thought, if you could get there—the laughing at the absurdity, the finding of humor in the confusion. That was when language started to become something you could live in, not just something you were visiting.

Fadumo was the hardest to reach. She came to every class and she did every assignment and she wrote her homework in a neat, precise hand that Grace couldn't read because it was in Somali script, which meant Grace had to rely on Fadumo's transliterations, which were always correct but always silent. Fadumo could read English and write English and understand English spoken at normal speed in a way that most of her classmates couldn't, but she would not speak it. Would not, or could not—it was hard to tell. In class, she sat in the second row and looked directly at Grace when she spoke, tracking every word, but when it came time for her to respond, her mouth would open and nothing would come out, or a small sound, barely audible, like a door that had been opened a crack and then quickly shut.

Grace worried about her. She had seen students like this before—trauma encoded in silence, a fear of being heard that was more powerful than any desire to speak. She didn't push. She made space. She let Fadumo volunteer when she wanted and sit silent when she didn't, and she tried not to notice the frustration that sometimes crossed Fadumo's face, the frustration of someone who had all the words inside her and couldn't get them out.

In December, Grace assigned a creative writing exercise. Five sentences. Any topic. Something true or something invented. She didn't expect anyone to share, but she left time at the end of class for anyone who wanted to read theirs aloud.

No one volunteered. This was normal. Then Yuki, who was shy in a different way than Fadumo—Yuki was shy about making mistakes but not about trying—raised her hand and read hers in a voice so small it barely reached the back row. Five sentences about her grandmother's garden in Osaka. Simple sentences, full of small errors, the kind that Grace could correct with a pen if she wanted to. But she didn't want to. The sentences were perfect in the way that mattered. They were true.

After Yuki, there was a long silence. Then Fadumo stood up. She stood very straight, in her long printed dress and her headscarf, and she held her paper in both hands like it was something fragile, and she read.

Her English was beautiful. Not perfect—there were articles missing and wrong verb tenses and the syntax was sometimes her own, shaped by a language Grace didn't know—but it was beautiful in the way that mattered. It had music in it. It had thought in it. It was a poem about leaving, about a country that had become a before, about the strange grief of gaining a new language and losing your hold on the old one. It was about her mother's hands, and the way they looked the last time she saw them, and the way she tried to remember them in English and found that English didn't have the right words for the color of her mother's skin or the smell of the oil she used on her hair.

When she finished, no one said anything for a moment. Then Daniela started clapping, and then everyone was clapping, and Fadumo sat down and put her face in her hands and stayed like that for a long time, her shoulders shaking, and Grace realized she was crying, or laughing, or both, and it didn't matter which.

Grace was fifty-three years old. She had come to the United States from South Korea when she was nineteen, alone, on a scholarship she had fought for against her family's wishes. She had spent her first year in America so homesick she thought she would die of it, so confused by the language and the customs and the way Americans stood too close or not close enough that she had considered going home eleven times. She had not gone home. She had become an American, which was not a thing you could plan or achieve but a thing that happened to you slowly, imperceptibly, until one day you looked up and realized that your Korean was fading and your English was home and you were living in a country you had chosen without knowing you were choosing it.

She had been teaching ESL for fifteen years, and in all that time, she had never stopped recognizing her own journey in her students' faces—the exhaustion, the hope, the terrible determination it took to keep learning a language that was not given to you, that you had to take. She knew what it cost. She knew what it gave back, eventually, if you were lucky and stubborn enough to wait.

After class, she pulled Fadumo aside. "That poem," she said. "Would you be willing to share it with the whole department? We're putting together a showcase of student work for the end of semester."

Fadumo looked at her. "You want me to read it? Out loud? To everyone?"

"Only if you want to."

"I can't," Fadumo said. Then: "I don't know if I can."

"You read it today. To the class."

"That was different. That was—" She searched for the word. "Warm. This room is warm. Other places—" She shook her head. "Outside this room, I am not ready."

"That's okay," Grace said. "Take your time."

Fadumo looked at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, she nodded. "I will think about it," she said. "I will think about being ready. Maybe by May."

"May is good," Grace said. "May is a good time to be ready."

The semester ended in May. On the last day, the students brought food—Daniela brought tamales, Jae-won brought Korean rice cakes he had made himself, Yuki brought mochi from the Japanese grocery, and someone else brought something from somewhere else, and the table in the back of the room was covered with dishes that represented eight different countries and one shared language that none of them owned but all of them were building, together, out of pieces.

They ate. They talked. They laughed, sometimes at things that were funny in English and sometimes at things that were funny in other languages and sometimes at the gap between the two. Grace watched them from her desk, drinking coffee from a mug that said World's Okayest Teacher, and she thought: this is it. This is the whole thing. Eighteen people in a room, trying to say what they mean, trying to understand what others mean, and mostly succeeding, sometimes failing, always trying again.

She thought about the idioms. The phrases that didn't make sense until suddenly they did, the metaphors that took years to understand, the language that was alive and messy and full of contradictions that couldn't be resolved, only inhabited. She thought about how she had spent her whole life trying to teach people how to speak English and how, in the end, what she had really been teaching them was how to be patient with themselves. How to sit with confusion. How to believe that the confusion would eventually become clarity, or at least something like it.

Fadumo approached her at the end of the day. She had an envelope in her hand. "For the showcase," she said. "My poem. I want—" She stopped. Started again. "I want to read it. I am ready."

Grace took the envelope. Inside was the poem, written out again in Fadumo's neat hand, and a note that said: Thank you for making this room warm. I will carry it with me.

"You're going to be wonderful," Grace said.

Fadumo smiled—a real smile, not the careful one she usually gave, but the one she kept for things that mattered. "I hope so," she said. "I have been practicing. At home. In my room. Where no one can hear."

"What do you sound like?" Grace asked. "When you practice?"

Fadumo was quiet for a moment. Then: "I sound like my mother," she said. "My mother in another country. My mother who is still waiting for me to call."

Grace handed her back the envelope. "Then you should let her hear," she said. "Even if it's only once. Even if it's only here."

Fadumo nodded. She walked to the door, and she turned, and she waved—a small, shy wave, a wave that was saying goodbye and also something else, something that didn't have an English idiom for, something that was just hers.

Grace waved back.