Not Much Just Chillin'

autumn
chapter one
i can't believe the day's almost over
On Monday morning some mothers drive their children to the bus stop, where they achingly resist the urge to hug their babies. Instead they settle on forehead kisses so quick as to be nearly invisible. One boy stands slumped, breathing in the muggy air slowly, tired from being kept awake most of the night by lingering images from The X-Files. A mom rolls up in a Suburban and leans out the window: "Brittany, did you remember your keys?" Brittany scrunches her face, mortified, and rolls her eyes to Mia. Mia's got on a camouflage tank top, khaki shorts, two old string anklets, and white, silver-striped Adidas with the laces tied under the tongue. (White Adidas are the best shoes you can wear; Vans or Skechers are okay, too. If your Adidas are colored because your mom says white gets ruined too soon, you may as well be wearing Stride Rites.) Having decided that a sixth grader has to care more about her looks, Mia took a while to get ready today. She had her mom blow-dry her shoulder-length chestnut hair pouffy, but not too pouffy.
As Mia pushes her hair behind her ears, the seventh graders, weighed down by enormous backpacks, grill her:
"Do you like school?"
"Yes."
"Well, you won't by the end of sixth grade."
One of the most popular kids in her elementary school, Mia has theconfidence that comes with having popular jocks as older brothers, plays soccer (the coolest sport), isn't afraid to try a never-before-seen hairstyle, and sasses just enough to crack the class up but still get away with it. She was the only girl not to cry at the end-of-fifth-grade pool party. So none of her classmates would guess that Mia Reilly has worries, too.
The only reason she didn't cry at the pool party was that she got it all out in private, the day before. She's anxious about middle school. If only she could wear her tall hidden-roller-skate shoes--then she might not be the shortest in the school. After being with the same group since kindergarten, she's looking forward to meeting new kids from the two other elementary schools, but that's also what scares her: "How will I know I can trust them?" She's concerned about times tables and about teachers "from the Black Lagoon."
Another huge issue: Mia has to broker peace between Lily and their friend Alexandra, who aren't speaking after a fight this summer. They ended fifth grade best friends--quite an accomplishment for Lily, who arrived, quiet and Southern and with no Adidas, in the middle of December. Lily and Alexandra spent practically all summer together, until one day Alexandra wanted to go outside to dance and Lily didn't. They argued and stopped talking to each other completely. "Alexandra has to be the boss of everything," Lily says. Seems to Mia like a stupid thing to fight over, but there it is. Getting them to make up "might take a little bit of time," she says, but "it's crucial, because I can't spend time with just one."




Dropped off by the buses but not allowed inside until the eight-forty-five bell, the students swarm outside the school building, a flat, cream-brick hexagon that lies in view of the big high school and the strip mall. A few eager boys peer through the front doors. They half shake hands or don't touch at all. The girls touch each other's hair. "Fine, don't say hi," one girl says to another. "I did say hi." The bell goes off and the students push their way inside, where Ms. Thomas snatches hats off heads. Teachers stand in the hall with homeroom lists, filtering kids down one hall or the other.
In homeroom Mia finds her assigned seat, up front. Lily sits in theback corner, wearing turquoise-plaid shorts, a white T-shirt, and a navy cardigan from The Children's Place. For an eleven-year-old she rarely slouches, conditioned from the discipline of ballet and gymnastics and a desire to one day be Miss America. Her dirty-blond hair spurts from a little ponytail; she hates the way it styles and wishes it were thinner. Her blue-gray eyes are always either cast down bashfully or (when she is sure they are not looking) studying the people around her, for clues on how to act. When her face is at rest, like now, it is inscrutable, but she will tell you she's pretty happy today. Last night she and Mia went to the Aaron Carter concert and screamed. Middle school all sounds interesting to her--the lockers, the teachers, getting to sew in home ec--and anyway, she doesn't fashion herself a worrier. Her answer to an annoyingly large number of questions is "I don't care," whether it's her mom asking what she wants for dinner or a friend asking what game she wants to play.
Split personalities are common among middle schoolers, Lily included. At home she is chatty and confident, not a hint of self-consciousness about her. She is an able caregiver to her siblings, nine-year-old Gabrielle, five-year-old Sean and the foster newborns who arrive one, two, three at a time without names. Among the neighbor kids she is something of a mother hen, leading the skit-writing and fort-building and chalk-drawing. When she is alone with Mia, hyperactivity takes over. Heady with the companionship of a true friend, Lily gets wacky. She cannot stop moving, talking, touching, goofing. At school--in any large group, in fact--Lily rarely speaks, so her teachers would laugh if you told them this. Not Lily! Since she got to Maryland it's only every two months or so Lily figures she has something amusing to add to a lunch-table conversation. In the rare instances when, having appraised the sentence thoroughly in her head, she judges it worthy of emitting, everyone is like, "Uh, yeah."
Whereas Mia looks forward to meeting new kids, Lily's friends are set and she doesn't much care about making new ones. She learned the sign-language alphabet so they can communicate during class. Mainly, when Lily talks about friends, she is talking about Mia. "We're best friends," she's explained, "and we're the same height and same age. Our noses come up to the same place and so do our eyes. Her birthday is the day after my birthday. We were born twelve hours apart. So when my mom washaving me, her mom was in labor. I call Mia 'M' or 'MM' or 'Mi' or 'Mia.' She calls me 'Lil' or 'Lily.' I have four names for her and she has two for me."
Lily has only one name for Alexandra--"Alexandra"--and though the two saw plenty of each other during orientation last week, she didn't use it once. When Alexandra came into the cafeteria that day, instead of seeking out Mia and Lily, she bounced over to Tamika, one of the few other black girls from their elementary school, which was somewhat of a relief to Lily, because she sees Alexandra as competition for Mia's attention. At the same time she was a little insulted. Today Alexandra is late; she is supposed to occupy the empty seat in front of Lily, who eyes it nervously.
The school computer has run Lily's first and middle names together: Lilyelise. During roll, when the rest of the kids are offering up corrections and nicknames to Mrs. Stokes, Lilyelise is too shy to say anything about it. The students are silent, and efficient Mrs. Stokes is already going over schedules--no warm "Hi!" or "Welcome to middle school!"--when Alexandra walks in, wearing a white button-down, a plaid miniskirt that wouldn't pass the fingertip test, and chunky black-heeled loafers. She finds her seat in front of Lily, who watches and then tilts her head down and keeps it there, through morning announcements, through Mrs. Stokes reviewing all the papers that need to be signed, through the questions about gym shoes and recess and what if my backpack doesn't fit in my locker, through the explanations of Homework Hotline and hall passes, until the bell finally rings and the kids set out on their favorite task of the day: unloading backpacks into lockers. The girls walk through the hall with Mia in the middle, Alexandra and Lily talking to her from either side, but not to each other.
When they walk into the cafeteria for lunch, the swim-team girls at one round table, already making progress on their bagels and sandwiches and Trix yogurt, call out for Mia. They've saved her a seat, but she leads the way to an empty table. Everyone there except Alexandra brings lunch from home; when she returns with fries, they are dispersed, and enthusiastically approved of. Lily listens as the girls discuss Mia's blue Kool-Aid, the classmate whose new house has closets the size of bedrooms, and Brittany's mother's bus-stop appearance. In the telling, "Did you rememberyour keys?" has become "DID YOU REMEMBER YOUR KEEEEEEYS?" but the girls still agree that this was preferable to a hug.
Ms. Thomas comes by the table and asks, "How was your first day?"
"Good."
"Did they stuff you in the locker?"
"Too small."
She laughs. New sixth graders are just the cutest. Later in the year they'll turn a corner, and the teachers will wonder, "Who are you?" But for now most of them are overwhelmed, sweet, taking it all in soundlessly. In the cafeteria they raise their hands for permission to use the bathroom. The noise is one-fifth what it will be during seventh-grade and eighth-grade lunch. When Ms. Thomas counts down from five into the microphone, the room falls utterly silent, for which she congratulates them. "Welcome," she says. "It's nice to see people from all the feeder schools, and all over the world."
At recess, some boys chase a shopping cart. Keith West, the assistant principal, quarterbacks a football game. Mia marches to the soccer field with the swimmers, where they play against the boys and her shoe keeps flying off. Alexandra and Lily are left alone on the blacktop to speak their first words to each other in a month.
"What do you want to do?" Lily asks.
"Nothing," says Alexandra.
"I can't believe the day's almost over."
"Like my new watch?"
"Don't tell me--you got it at Kohl's. I put the pink one on hold, but I can't decide." Maybe this isn't so hard.
When the whistle calls everyone inside, the boy who played Robin Hood in the fifth-grade play passes by. "Hey, Joel," Alexandra calls, "nice tights!"
Lily rolls her eyes--at the boy having worn tights once, at Alexandra taunting him, at all of it.




At eighth-grade lunch, Eric Ellis and his friends are discussing whether the plane crash that killed the R&B singer Aaliyah will affect the Video Music Awards and whether it's okay to cry if you're injured (only ifthere's blood involved), when Mr. West sits down and asks what grades they're going for this year. Liam, who always gets A's, says "A's." Chris, who wants to stop being the class clown so he can play football in high school, says "A's." Shawn, who thinks he's too dumb to get A's but is not too dumb to know what the right answer is here, says "A's."
Eric figures he could make A's if he really wanted to. But with skating and paintball and missing his mom and getting along with his dad's girlfriend and improving at saxophone, he says, "It's too hard to get A's. My brain is too full. I'm gonna get B's."
Sixth and seventh grade, Eric pretty much lay back, did what he was told. This year, there's a little excitement at being at the top of the school, an "I'm not a little kid anymore" feeling--for once, wanting to succeed not just for Mommy but for himself. This is a typical shift in attitude among eighth graders, as they prepare for the big league of high school. But in Eric and most of his classmates, it does battle with an equally strong attitude: ambivalence. The collective eighth grade of the United States could be labeled "Doesn't work to potential." Decline in motivation from elementary school to middle school is universal and documented. Thirteen-year-olds can't get interested6 in anything that bores them, no matter how many times they're told, This is important, you'll see why in ten years. In the preteen years, the brain's gray matter has almost fully thickened, but it is not yet pruned to its most efficient level of activity. All of a sudden there's a vast overproduction of brain cells and connections--by the time puberty is done, only some will have survived--and quantity trumps quality. It's not a particularly spectacular time to soak up information, because, even though emotional centers closer to the core of the brain have developed well by now, capacity for skills like logic, organization, and judgment, centered in the still-immature frontal lobes, is poor.
Eric's level of effort is typical for his age: Sometimes he does his work, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he pays attention in class, sometimes he doesn't. He likes school, and he doesn't like school. He likes his teachers, he thinks they're shrews. He thinks he's very bright compared to Chris and Shawn, and tells them, "You'll be sorry when you're out there asking for pennies on Route Forty." It's because teachers tell him so that Eric assumes he could get A's whenever he wanted, but when he's bored he can't pay attention, and when he's frustrated he can'teither. "I want it to challenge me," he says, "but not to be too hard." He doesn't want to be too smart, "just a little intelligent." If you're too smart, people talk behind your back--"He thinks he's all that," and so on, like they do about Liam--and he's heard it's even worse if you're an adult. What would be best, he figures, is if everyone were born just smart enough so that school didn't have to exist.
Adults love Eric, who knows when to "sir" and especially when to "ma'am" and never curses above "Dag!" or "Snap!" In conversation Eric shows genuine interest, looking straight at them with his dark-ringed eyes and nodding and laughing along. He escapes the torture normally directed at a boy of his substantial weight, partly because his chubbiness doesn't prevent him from attempting the normal physical adventures of boyhood (as proved by the topography of scars on his legs) and partly because Eric is kind to everyone who doesn't cross him. He is black, but the racial divides of friendship don't apply to him. White boys in younger grades argue about who was friends with him first.
All in all, Eric does okay in school, particularly when his mother gets on his back about it, and when he has a teacher he adores, like Mr. Shifflett in seventh grade, who was really into sharks and always made science fun. Eric briefly had a 104 average in that class and once had all B's on a progress report. He was invited to the Most Improved pizza party, which felt good, though he didn't appreciate his friends calling him "Teacher's Pet" and "Egghead." There are always dozens of sixth graders at functions like that, but often by the time kids get to eighth grade they've banished A's to the same black hole where they keep their Backstreet Boys CDs. Despite the teasing, Eric really would like all B's again, although he has no idea how hard it's going to be this year to make that happen.
Last year he lived in a town house with his mother, Tenacious, and his half-brother on his mom's side, Tim, who's eighteen. They were evicted over the summer and Tim left for college, so Tenacious has moved in with friends in Baltimore, where she works as a health counselor in the jail. Eric has moved in with his dad, William, an over-the-road trucker; his fiancée, Beulah; and Eric's half-brother on his dad's side, nineteen-year-old Thomas. Their town house is only a half-mile from Wilde Lake Middle School and barely a mile from Eric's old place, but it may as well be in another state. Without a ride, he doesn't see his old neighbors. Nobody around here walks that far. His new neighbors--notthat he wants to be friends with them anyway--go to a different middle school. (Eric is breaking the districting rules, but nobody will complain.)
More significant, Eric is separated from his mother for the first time ever. She still plans to stay in control of his schoolwork. She figures she'll be more lenient about his time now that he's in eighth grade. "I'd prefer he do his homework right away," Tenacious says, "because that frees his afternoon up, but if he calls and says he's getting a snack or needs to unwind, that's okay." Since Eric will be reading Romeo and Juliet this year in English, she has bought a copy.
"It's a great love story," she says.
"Yuck," he says.
On the days he comes home, Eric's father may ask if he's done his homework, but he never questions the "yes," is usually too tired to check, and doesn't make Eric talk about school. "I don't talk about work if I don't have to," William says. So Tenacious plans on driving a half-hour from Baltimore to Columbia each morning by six-forty-five, to check Eric's work and take him the half-mile to school. And she has made her expectations clear: "The absolutely lowest grade you can get is a C. B's are great, just as good as A's to me. C's are beneath you, but I'll accept them. D's are out of the question." William, too, says anything less than a C is unacceptable7.
It's also unacceptable to the powers that be. Concerned that middle schoolers were allowed to coast in mediocrity for too long, last year the school-board members of Howard County, which encompasses Wilde Lake, implemented strict rules: A student can't move from eighth to ninth grade without passing state reading, writing, and math tests designed for high schoolers. If he has below a C average or even one F, the principal can hold him back, or bar him from sports and extracurricular activities in ninth grade. Ms. Thomas, the principal, is serious about helping kids over the bar, and it breaks her heart--and theirs--when they don't make it. Last year thirty eighth graders were put on the no-sports list, and eleven were held back. So far, Ms. Thomas thinks the new policy is working, that kids have seen enough classmates retained to focus far more on their grades. When she tells parents about the new policy, she says of the students, "They do understand that academics are number one--that's why we're here."
In Eric's mind, academics aren't number one. That spot is reservedfor God. They're not number two. That's his mother. Music and the rest of his family--tied for third. Skating is fourth, paintball and video games are fifth. But Eric does know that, in order to satisfy the Lord, Tenacious, and the Wilde Lake High School marching band, he has to do his homework.




Eric's science class is two hallways and a universe removed from the hush of the sixth grade. The eighth graders have dropped their forbidden backpacks on the floor--they are supposed to be kept in lockers--and laugh and taunt and fiddle and compare who grew over the summer and who didn't. They keep finding reasons to go in and out of the room, and they ask things like, "Do I need to do all this?" Ian Garvey zips off a section of his cargo pants, tosses it in the air, and says, "Look, my leg came off."
Most kids arrive at Wilde Lake behaving just fine, but there are enough who are so inattentive to direction--enough Ians--that the whole first week is spent going over school rules and philosophies. Students take quizzes on the importance of their agendas, perform skits about the school motto, and answer questions like, "Which is the most important rule and why?" They highlight key sentences from an Ann Landers passage called "How to Fail" and parse the school's Mission Statement:
WLMS staff, students, family, and community members will work together to create a supportive and stimulating school environment for all. This will enable students to achieve academic excellence, demonstrate cultural sensitivity, provide service for the community, and develop the skills for lifelong learning.
For the many children who have never acted up in class--who still respond to "Boys and girls, raise your hands if you're waiting quietly," or "Put your hand on your head when you have your name on your paper"--all this emphasis on rules is overwhelming, and boring, and they wonder how they'll ever finish the curriculum at this rate. To be told you have to raise your hand before answering is like being told you have to put the toilet lid up before you sit down. When they are debriefing overdinner after school the first night, the main thing Lily and her friends tell their parents, aside from which friends are in which classes and the unfairness of the no-spaghetti-strap rule, is that some of these kids are just plain rude. At Clemens Crossing Elementary, disobedient kids might talk in between what the teacher was saying, but not over it. And sometimes the teacher doesn't do anything about it!
Though Eric, too, finds these sessions numbingly tedious, this year he has decided to be Mr. Participation. So he alone volunteers to read aloud from the worksheet and to answer every question of today's lesson, positive and negative consequences.
"What would a negative consequence be?" Ms. Drakes asks.
With the pants leg balancing on his head--sending it there will get Ian no negative consequences--Eric raises his hand.
"Eric?"
"A negative consequence would be getting punished. I can't do nothing. I can't even play with Power Ranger toys," he jokes, and plucks the pants leg from his head.
"What's a positive consequence?" she asks.
Eric's hand is up again. "Get a piece of candy?"
"What's one positive consequence you want to earn? Eric?"
"Positive phone call home."
"What would you have to do to earn that?"
"Pay attention in class and keep up with homework and stuff."
Ian announces, "I was good once. I went to the Capitol. I still have the ticket in my wallet. It was free. See?" Next to him, Eric drums a sophisticated beat with his knuckles and fingers.
"Okay, Eric, stop." Ms. Drakes stands up front and folds her fingers down, one at a time. "Five, four, three, two, and one. One, two--You went two past my countdown. You shouldn't. Ian, turn around."
After the class has listed more positive consequences of doing schoolwork ("ice cream," "pizza party," "extra recess"), the students complete a worksheet. Eric fills in the blanks: "My goal for this year in order to earn good grades as a positive consequence is to study and work hard." When Ms. Drakes asks if anyone wants to share, Eric reads what he's written.
Good grades alone as positive consequence? He may as well havewritten "know a lot." Ms. Drakes suggests, "Maybe the consequence you would want is the honor-roll breakfast or something."




It doesn't take long to know what a class is going to be like for the rest of the year. By the second week at Wilde Lake, Eric's hand is already cramped from writing class goals and expectations, and he has made some assessments:
Science, she's no Mr. Shifflett. Too many worksheets, not enough labs.
Band should be good. The new teacher was visibly impressed when Eric, the best sax player in the school, said he had taught himself to play in only two years. Sometimes he gets bored with band, but Mr. Vega seems enthusiastic, and, anyway, his mom would be crushed if he quit. Music, she tells him, is his special gift, even at age two, when he would pull the pots and pans out of the cupboard and entertain himself for hours.
English might be cool, Romeo and Juliet notwithstanding. Mrs. Brown has set the bar high--"Eighty and above, that's success"--but she also lets them set expectations for her: Be prepared, don't pick favorites, don't go too slow, don't go too fast, don't punish the whole class for the misdeeds of a few, and, from Eric, make sure you understand a kid's question before you answer. Also, Mrs. Brown and Eric share a passion. One of the first days, she asks, "Does anyone like auto racing?" Eric, who has sweated with excitement each of the nine times he's watched The Fast and the Furious, shouts "Yes!" and stops tapping his pencil. Mrs. Brown tells about one of her favorite authors, who spent eight years studying auto racing for a novel, and she answers Eric's questions about NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt, even though they're irrelevant.
Eric's not sure about academic enrichment, a class where students who aren't taking a foreign language learn study skills and review subjects there's not time for in other classes. He likes that Mrs. Cook seems stern and caring at the same time, that it's instantly clear she's determined her students turn out good citizens. She already has the class totally under control. "When it's time to work in her class," Eric says, "you work." But he goes blank at the topics she announces they'll learn: Microstudio and PowerPoint and Hypertext and Concept Mapping, whatever all that is.
He has Mrs. Cook for reading, too. Reading and English classes are a lot alike, and for Eric the two just combine to mean too many books. Even though his mother tried to pass on her passion for books to Eric, and he fondly remembers their Peter Rabbit moments, officially Eric says that no book is good unless it's about cooking, cars, funny stuff, or skateboarding. Unofficially he really liked two books he read in sixth grade: Freak the Mighty, a novel about a midget kid and his grotesquely huge friend Max, whose dad killed his mom, and a biography of Langston Hughes. When they read how Hughes was treated poorly in his new allwhite neighborhood, Eric says, "That related to me. When I lived in the city everybody was black, and then when I moved out here--aside from Shawn and James; they were like, 'What's up?'--everybody else was like, they already had their little cliques, and I had to find somebody else to be friends with." Eric's thinking he might not hate reading so much this year, because they're going to write a research paper on whatever they want, which for Eric is cars, and for class he has written a poem he's pleased with, called "I Am":
Soft, friendly sometimes, mamas boy, easy!
Who discovered, that its hard to be popular in a variety of cultures in a school
Who feels alive, brainy, curious
Who fears breaking another bone, failing, parent-teacher conferences
Who loves my rollerblades, sportscars, and my parents
Who wants 99.9 million dollars, a fully equipped car
Eric thinks America is one of the best countries in the world, even though for its celebrations Africa has cool decorations like beads made from animal skin and "we just have that flag." But he's not pleased with American-history class. First of all, Eric hates the way Shawn copies from his homework. His classmates cheat a lot; there's a homework worksheet being copied at half the cafeteria tables every day. Eric doesn't have a problem with people copying off him, but only when he gives permission. He hates the way Mrs. Conroy capitulates to the girl who complains, "Obstruction of justice! I know my rights, and I have a right to go to the bathroom!" and the way she seems to just stand up there at the front of the room smiling, calling on them, and referring to the book.Still, Eric raises his hand to answer all the time, as if a pulley attached to the ceiling were jerking his wrist.
Ms. Adams, the new, young math teacher, who wears a different pair of funky glasses practically every day, intrigues Eric; he touches her long blond ringlets and says, "Your hair is mad curly!" Sometimes her lessons are cryptic, though, or incomplete. The first day, in an attempt to interest the many black students in the class, she asks what "40 Acres and a Mule" means. After some guessing (Eric: "Oooh, did the slaves use mules to fight back?"), she explains. She adds, "Everything we do in here is not necessarily what you'd think is math," though why they're discussing forty acres and a mule, beyond the fact that forty is a number, never becomes clear.
Within days Eric realizes that when he's not in a math mood he can talk about Red Lobster or Gridlock with the kid sitting next to him, or watch the girls across the room stick tape all over a boy's ears and face. "Do you not know better?" Ms. Adams says. "Do you not know better? You owe me a roll of tape." Still, when Eric feels like working, he wants to get it right. One day in the second week of school, the drill for the day is written on the overhead:
1. What day followed the day before yesterday if two days from now will be Sunday?


Eric says to himself, "Wednesday. Yep, that's easy."


2. A math teacher drove by a playground that was full of boys and dogs. The teacher happened to notice that there was a total of 40 heads and 100 feet. How many boys and how many dogs were there?
Eric doesn't know where to begin on this one. He guesses fifteen dogs, in which case there's twenty-five boys. Too many. He shakes his notebook. There are kids working; there are kids talking. Eric picks some numbers randomly and figures them in his head, but they don't work. "I don't get number two, Ms. Adams, so I'm quitting because I'm getting frustrated and then I'll get mad." He pounds the desk: "How many legs on the goddamn dogs?"
3. Replace A, B, and C with numbers so that A x A = B, B--A= C, A + A = C.
Last year Eric's half-brother Tim, a college freshman, taught him tricks to figuring these kinds of expressions, but variables don't make sense to him. Can you own "A" CDs? Invite "B" people to your birthday party? Are there "C" days till Christmas? Ms. Adams tries A as one, then two, then three. Bingo. "I still don't get what you're doing," Eric says.
Ms. Adams, a twenty-five-year-old who spent the two years before teaching school as an exercise physiologist, doesn't totally get it either. In the last two weeks she's been learning the rules, too. Don't stand on a desk to put up your bulletin board. Check the duty map to see when you have hall patrol. Write comments to parents every week on the agendas, and phone if a grade goes down. Make sure kids don't fill out their hall passes in pencil. Keep your eye out for bandanas, hats, purses, Palm Pilots, spaghetti straps, pagers. Follow the official levels of discipline intervention laid out in this fat binder--don't make up your own system.
Last year Ms. Adams student-taught sixth graders in a prosperous middle school near Pittsburgh; here, the amount of time spent going over the discipline policy has made her fearful for what the teachers call "our population." She can't pronounce the foreign kids' names ("Give me a vowel, just one vowel"); she worries black kids will call her racist; she doesn't know much about geography, which she has to teach in addition to math; she doesn't know how to plan for an eighty-minute class, because she's used to fifty; she rear-ended a Cadillac on the Beltway and can't afford the five-hundred-dollar deductible (in addition to the five-hundred-dollar deductible from when she was rear-ended herself); she's already missed a day of school to fight a speeding ticket; her neck hurts; she can't find an affordable apartment that will take her dog and cat, so she's staying on her boyfriend's brother's girlfriend's couch; and she's realizing that eighth graders are way different from sixth graders, even when they're at the same place mathematically. They look ready to tear her apart. She wonders if she can help them.
"Eric," she says, "explain to me what's confusing."
"Everything."
Copyright © 2003 by Linda Perlstein