“No way! You’re lying,” Zeno objected. He dashed to the back of the class, pulled out a tattered copy of The Meriam-Webster Dictionary flipped through it, and settled on a random page. “Come here and read this,” he asked pointing at the longest word he could find on the page.

“Photograph,” I confidently replied.

Not content with my testament, Zeno hastily grabbed more books from the shelf and resumed his interrogation. In disbelief that I had scored an ‘A’ and he had scored a ‘B’ in reading, Zeno was doggedly committed to finding a fault in my responses. I didn’t mind however. Even I would be shocked given that I was virtually illiterate just four months back.

Having moved from an all Armenian school to a public school in the heart of Scarborough, I could not read English – a plight I shared with Zeno who had just moved from Shanghai. Labelled as “the quiet ones” by the rest of the class, we soon became best friends and unitedly embarked on our journey towards literacy.

At first, our progress was slow, but armed with dual-language copies of our favorite Disney books, we were determined to learn how to read. When one of us could not annunciate a word, the other would help and together we persevered. Come December, in the first grade, we were reading at the fourth-grade level.

The ever-changing world is filled with arduous challenges and tribulations, but Zeno taught me that united, even the voiceless can roar.