The Spelling Bee

The final of the Chicago Citywide Spelling Bee was held in a school auditorium that smelled of floor polish and nerves. By nine o'clock only two spellers were left standing: Ana Morales, eleven years old, in a borrowed blazer two sizes too big, and a tall, serious boy called Theo Lindqvist, who had won the year before and spelled every word as if he were defusing a bomb.

Ana's parents sat in the fourth row. Her father had come straight from his shift at the bakery and still had flour on one sleeve; her mother was clutching a handkerchief she had embroidered herself back in Quetzaltenango. Neither of them spoke much English, but for six months they had sat at the kitchen table every night, holding the word list and reading out words they could not always pronounce. Ana had learned to recognize "rhythm" even when her father called it "reet-mo."

The words grew longer and stranger. Theo sailed through "onomatopoeia" and "connoisseur." Ana handled "unnecessary," "accommodate" and "irresistible," mentally underlining every double letter. Her coach had taught her to treat words like buildings: find the foundation, then look at what had been added on top. Prefixes, roots and suffixes were bricks, and bricks, unlike rules, did not change their minds.

Every speller had a ritual. Theo traced each word on the palm of his hand with one finger before he answered. Ana closed her eyes and pictured the letters in her mother's careful handwriting, the way they had appeared on hundreds of index cards stuck to the fridge, the bathroom mirror and, on one memorable occasion, the inside of her lunchbox.

Then Theo stumbled. His word was "liaison," and he left out the second i. The bell rang, a small, polite, devastating sound, and the whole hall let out its breath. If Ana spelled her next word correctly, and then one more, the trophy was hers.

Her next word was "pharaoh," and she got it right. The pronouncer, a retired librarian with half-moon glasses, cleared his throat and read out the championship word: "Embarrassment."

Somebody in the audience laughed nervously. Ana did not. She knew this word far too well, for reasons that had nothing to do with spelling. In second grade, trying to tell her teacher that she felt ashamed, she had announced that she was embarazada, and the teacher's face had gone through several colors at once. Ever since, the word had followed her around like a shadow.

"May I have the language of origin, please?" she asked. "French," said the pronouncer, "which probably borrowed it from Spanish or Portuguese." Ana's face lit up. Embarazar, the old Spanish verb, had once meant to get in somebody's way, to put a bar across their path. Bar. Barra. And in Spanish, she thought, nobody writes barra with a single r.

"Embarrassment," she began. "E-M-B-A-R-R..." She paused. The second half was French, and French loved its double s, the same way it did in "assemble" and "dessert." "A-S-S," she went on, more firmly now. "M-E-N-T. Embarrassment."

There was a heartbeat of silence, and then, instead of the bell, the librarian smiled over his glasses and said, "That is correct." The auditorium erupted. Theo was the first to shake her hand. In the fourth row, Ana's father was on his feet, flour and all, shouting something in Spanish that the newspaper the next morning politely translated as "That's my girl!"