Female Brain (EN)

Preface

The beginning of the new school year had already been started a week in the past, and Carina had arrived in Mr. Webber's grade 2 class. She was a year older than her classmates, but that was only because she'd just moved here from Italy and the curriculum wasn't the same.
That, plus the fact that English wasn't her mother tongue; this wasn't going to be a problem in itself, but she was still apprehensive about communicating in English all day long. It was different from learning English with her mother at home.

When she had arrived in class with the principal, Miranda Bailey, all her classmates had already been seated.
She had returned with the principal.

-"Hello everyone, I'd like to introduce you to your new classmate, who has come all the way from Italy. Carina DeLuca"

-"Hello Carina, I'm your schoolteacher, Richard Webber. I'll let you settle down in the third row, in this aisle, just behind Maya".

- "sì"

- "remember what we talked about, Carina? No Italian. Please use English" Miranda reminded her.

- "Excuse me, Mrs Bailey" replied the little girl in her lovely Italian accent, before heading for the only empty seat in the third row.

She took her seat and, once Miranda had stepped out, Richard asked the girl to introduce herself.

-"Do you mind, Carina?"

Carina, rather shy, stood up again.

- "buon- hello, my, my name is Carina and I'm come from Catania, it's in Sicilia, in Italia"

-"I think it's Sicily and I'm sure it's Italy where we come from".

- "pardon sir"

- "that's all right. Why did your family move to Seattle?"

-"My dad came to work at Seattle Pres, at the hospital, and my mom got a job in teaching. She's normally a teacher, an English teacher, but now she's going to be an Italian teacher. And I have, I have a two-year-old brother, Andrea."

Her classmates started laughing, and she heard one of the students say that her little brother had a girl's name.
She immediately turned to him and gave him a black look worthy of the most temperamental Italian.

"Andrea is a name for both boys and girls!"

- "Very well, thank you, you can sit down again" said her teacher, who didn't want a fight to break out in the classroom.

When she sat down again, Carina met the eyes of the girl in front of her, the only one who hadn't laughed at her.

At break time that day, Carina sat on a bench, alone, watching her classmates play. At lunchtime, she sat alone to eat.
The other pupils, in her class or not, watched her from a distance, as if she were an alien.

She tried to speak as little as possible in class, as almost all her classmates made fun of her accent.

It had been four days since Carina had arrived in her new class. Once again, at break time, she found herself alone on the bench she had obviously appropriated a few days ago. She was alone with her fresh little bag of dry Italian cake made by her mom, Lucia.