The Exchange

When Alvaro found out that he was going to spend his last year of high school in Iowa, he had to look it up on a map. He had been hoping for New York or California. Still, he was looking forward to seeing what he called "real America": yellow school buses, football games on Friday nights, enormous breakfasts. He had watched hundreds of movies, and he thought he knew exactly what to expect.

His host family, the Hendersons, met him at the airport in Des Moines on a hot evening in August. Mark was a vet, Linda taught math at the middle school, and their son Tyler was sixteen and spoke so fast that Alvaro understood about one word in five. The drive home took almost two hours. For most of it, the view from the window did not change: corn, then more corn, then a red barn, then corn again. "Is the town far from here?" Alvaro asked after an hour. Linda laughed. "Honey, we're about halfway."

The town of Millbrook had two thousand people, one traffic light, a diner, three churches and a school where everybody had known everybody since kindergarten. On his first day, Alvaro was introduced at a special assembly, and for a week he was the most interesting person in the building. Students asked him whether people in Spain rode bulls to school and whether he had met Messi. After that, the novelty wore off, and he found himself eating lunch alone.

The hardest things to get used to were not the ones he had expected. He had prepared himself for the language, but not for the food: dinner at half past five, when in Seville he used to be having a snack, and bread so soft and sweet that it tasted like cake. He was not used to the distances either. There was nowhere to walk to, and without a car he depended completely on the Hendersons. Above all, he could not get used to the silence. At night, instead of motorbikes and neighbors talking on balconies, he could hear only insects and, once, a coyote.

In November, he wrote to his mother that he was thinking of coming home early. He couldn't stand feeling like a guest all the time, he said. She didn't try to persuade him to stay. Instead, she asked him to promise one thing: before deciding, he would say yes to every invitation for a month, no matter how boring it sounded.

So he said yes. He agreed to help Mark at the vet clinic on Saturdays, and he spent a freezing morning helping a cow give birth. He joined the school's cross-country team, even though he hated running, and discovered that the long training runs on empty roads were the best time to practice his English. He went to a church dinner where an elderly woman insisted on teaching him to make apple pie, and he taught Tyler's friends to cook a proper Spanish omelet, which they ate standing up in the kitchen at midnight.

Then came the snow. Alvaro had seen snow perhaps twice in his life. In January, Millbrook disappeared under half a meter of it, school was closed for three days, and Tyler and his friends taught him to go sledding on the only hill in the county. That evening, sitting in the kitchen with hot chocolate and red hands, Linda asked him if he still wanted to go home early. He realized he had completely forgotten about it.

By spring, things that used to annoy him had become things he loved. He liked the early dinners, because they left long evenings for talking. He liked the silence, because he could hear himself think. He even got used to the bread. At the end-of-year party, the cross-country coach gave him a prize for being the most improved runner, and the whole team stood on their chairs and cheered.

On his last night, Alvaro sat on the porch with Tyler, watching the fireflies over the fields. Neither of them said much. "You know," Tyler said eventually, "when you first came, I thought you hated it here." Alvaro thought about it. "I did," he said. "Now I can't imagine leaving." He flew back to Seville two days later. In his suitcase there was a recipe for apple pie, a cross-country medal and a jar of Iowa honey for his mother, who had made him say yes.