The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
_*_ 1 _*_
It started in detention. No surprise there, right?
Detention was invented by the same idiots who dreamed up the time-out corner. Does being forced to sit in time-out ever make little kids stop putting cats in the dishwasher or drawing on white walls with purple marker? Of course not. It teaches them to be sneaky and guarantees that when they get to high school they’ll love detention because it’s a great place to sleep.
I was too angry for a detention nap. The zombie rulers were forcing me to write “I will not be disrespectful to Mr. Diaz” five hundred times. With a pen, on paper, which ruled out a copy/paste solution.
Was I going to do it?
Ha.
I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden
book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.
Belmont High—Preparing Our Children for the Nifty World of 1915!
I turned another page, held the book close to my face and squinted. Half of the lights in the windowless room didn’t work. Budget cuts, the teachers said. A plot to make us go blind, according to the kids on the bus.
Someone in the back row giggled.
The detention monitor, Mr. Randolph, lifted his orc-like head and scanned the room for the offender.
“Enough of that,” he said. He rose from his chair and pointed at me. “You’re supposed to be writing, missy.”
I turned another page. I didn’t belong in detention, I didn’t belong in this school, and I did not give a crap about the Stalinist rules of underpaid orcs.
Two rows over, the girl wearing a pink winter jacket, its fake-fur-edged hood pulled up, turned her head to watch me, eyes blank, mouth mechanically gnawing a wad of gum.
“Did you hear me?” the orc called.
I muttered forbidden gerunds. (You know, the words that end in “ing”? The -ings that we’re not supposed to say? Don’t ask me why, none of it makes sense.)
“What did you say?” he brayed.
“I said my name isn’t ‘missy.’” I folded the corner of the page. “You can call me Ms. Kincain or Hayley. I respond to both.”
He stared. The girl stopped chewing. Around the room, zombies and freaks raised their heads, awakened by the smell of potential combat.
“Mr. Diaz is going to hear about that attitude, missy,” the orc said. “He’s stopping by at the end of the period to collect your assignment.”
the impossible knife of memory
I swore under my breath. The girl in the jacket blew a lopsided bubble and popped it with her teeth. I tore a sheet of paper out of a notebook, found a pencil, and decided that this, too, would be a day not to remember.