Back for the Summer

Prologue: Granada, Spain. February 2019

I walked through my neighborhood square on the granite sidewalk. It's surrounded by apartment buildings on top of cafes and bakeries and other small businesses. Even if I wasn't looking for a shortcut to my favorite cafe, it was my favorite spot to study. The weather was starting to get warmer and the trees provided enough shade to keep the benches cool. 

My favorite cafe wasn't anything special. I had picked it one morning three weeks ago when I knew I had to get out of my homestay family's small apartment, and it was too cold to study on their balcony. I often got claustrophobic in their apartment. It isn't like my parents' townhouse in Alaska or my dorm room that I shared with my roommate Emily in Colorado. It was tight and I had to get outside to breathe. 

I had gotten used to routine and the friendly faces at the cafe. I was the only Korean in the neighborhood, so after a while, I started noticing the people in the neighborhood and they seemed to know me too. 

The CEFR scale, or the Common European Framework of Reference for Language that I studied for my TESOL degree made me cringe at the thought of putting myself at a B2 level with Spanish, or in universal terms, a high intermediate. I made sure to study every day, but I really felt like I was still a B1, or low intermediate. I was only a month in to living in Spain, but studying in Granada wasn't helping me like I thought it would. 

To fix this problem, a few weeks ago, I started volunteering at an English conversation group that was a 15 minute walk away from my homestay. That's where I met Lucia. She was from Madrid--really bougie, with golden bobbed hair and gold hoop earrings. She wanted to meet me again for coffee. I told her to meet me at my favorite cafe. 

When I walked in, I greeted the barista in Spanish and Lucia waves at me from a table by the window. "Café con leche, por favor," I ordered. It was half coffee, half milk, often served with a pack of sugar I now can't resist putting in my coffee. I would have never drank coffee like this in America, but it was addicting in Spain. I brought my coffee over to Lucia and sat down. 

"Do you want to speak in Spanish or English?" Lucia asks me in Spanish. I opened my packet of sugar. 

"We can speak in Spanish," I answered in Spanish while dumping the packet of sugar into my coffee. "I need to practice." 

"Your Spanish is just so good," Lucia gushed. "And you've only studied since university?"

"I studied a lot last summer too," I told her. "But thank you." Lucia was too kind. My Spanish was trash. 

"Did you just study in the summer?"

"No, I worked too."

"What was your job?"

"Camp..." I didn't know the word in Spanish. I hadn't encountered a reason to use the word until this conversation with Lucia. I switched to English." Counselor."

Lucia repeats the word in Spanish and I repeated it after her to make sure I both said it correctly, but that I would also remember it. "I was a camp counselor," I said in a complete sentence in Spanish. In second language acquisition, I studied that if you use the new word in the target language immediately after learning it, it will stick more. "In Alaska."

"Alaska?!" Lucia exclaimed. "Why Alaska?"

"My parents live there," I explained. 

"Now I'm going to look at your Instagram," Lucia says, pulling out her phone to stalk my account. "Oh, it's so beautiful. Who is he?" Lucia showed me her phone which was the picture I had with my counselor group from the summer--Sarah, Caleb, and Kai. I smiled, remembering we had asked Josiah to take it, before we had to shut down the camp for the rest of the summer. We didn't know that it would be our last week of camp at that time. "He's very handsome."

"Yeah," I said, knowing she could only be talking about Kai. "That's Kai."

"Kai," Lucia repeats while nodding and staring at me, waiting for more information. Kai Rivera was just too hot to not have a story. 

"Kai was my best friend."