And so had the sign. Usually, Kayla was careful to switch to blander, more standard versions of signs in mixed company to avoid the inevitable white people meltdown—not to appease them or anything, just because she just didn’t feel like dealing with them. At least on this side of the Ohio. When her family had done a stint in Texas, things were slippier. More BASL users meant less shock and awe when a Black person happened to use a different sign.
But that was the problem with the North in general—things were still racist, they were just coy about it, all holier than thou because they happened to be living on the “right” side of some invisible line.
Anyway, Kayla decided to go easy on Austin this time. She could’ve gotten him in trouble if she wanted. She could have gone in and talked to Sybeck, or even Headmistress Waters—she knew neither of them played when it came to that kind of thing. But Austin had already doled out the harshest punishment to himself, acting a fool in front of Charlie like that, her looking at him like someone had ripped the stars right out of her eyes.
That didn’t mean Kayla wasn’t going to leverage his clout, though, and Austin was agreeable in the way guilty-feeling people are. So she had brought him on her TikTok and slapped him. The video went like this:
Kayla signs “chicken” and Austin makes his correction; Kayla slaps him and Austin spins round dramatically and falls to the floor, where Kayla zooms in and lays a caption over his eyes that says, BASL WITH THE KO. Austin rouses briefly to sign a groggy “Respect BASL” before passing out again.
It wasn’t her best work, but it was something. And it already had four thousand views.
She had plans for a follow-up series—the history of BASL, or something about how in some cases segregation wound up giving Black kids better language access, because when oralism took over white Deaf schools, Deaf teachers were sent to Black Deaf schools, since no one cared whether Black kids learned to talk. She was still working on the angle, though. Most people swiped right by a video unless it was funny. Then again, a system so hateful that it ended up depriving white kids of language and accidentally giving it to Black kids was kind of funny, in a way.
Kayla loved the internet. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch—she consumed it all. It reminded her that there were other people out there, beyond the claustrophobic walls and iron gates of River Valley. Sometimes she dreamt of going viral, the kind of viral that made you money, the kind of money that could free her mom and aunt from a life of cleaning other people’s houses or clearing other people’s plates. She would pay someone to clean their house and take them out to restaurants; she would buy her own damn sheets for her dorm bed; she would hire a personal interpreter who followed her around to every event, and she would sign chicken any way she pleased.
Even if TikTok didn’t save her, in two years, she would be out of this place. She would graduate and collect her diploma and take her straight A’s to Gallaudet, or RIT, or hell, even Ohio State or Wilberforce. Her goodbye to this place, to all of Colson, would be unsentimental, as unremarkable as the city itself. She would learn as much as she could and do whatever she could to dismantle all that she knew to be broken, brick by brick, by hand if she had to. She would keep the bricks, though. She would use them to build something new.
february found the emptying of the dorms before holiday breaks to be one of her more difficult tasks as headmistress. It was a chaotic affair, frenetic energy of students and parents eager to leave, their begrudging the security sign-out measures that slowed them down. Privately, February agreed with their frustration—she knew all her families by name—but the protocol had come straight from Swall, districtwide operating procedure post-Columbine–Virginia Tech–Sandy Hook–Parkland. Even the oldest of today’s students wouldn’t remember a time before.
Not everyone was in a hurry to leave RVSD, though. There were the good-naturedly late families—those with too much on their plates in the way of work or children, or Deaf clans like the Workmans, who ran on what the community called Deaf Standard Time, a reliable forty-five minutes late for almost any occasion. February scanned the crowd and saw no sign of the Workmans. Austin was probably still in his room, knowing better than to come out and stand waiting on the curb.
On regular weekends it was easier—kids who couldn’t or didn’t want to return home could get standing permission to go to a friend’s instead. But for a holiday, those permission slips were null, meaning students who hadn’t established a bus route with their districts had to be retrieved by their parents. No surprise that these children were also usually the school’s most vulnerable. Here were the screaming kindergarteners and first graders who had found language in the classroom and tantrumed ostentatiously at the thought of going home. February felt both protective of these children and an acerbic mix of pity and anger toward the parents, who looked at her forlorn, as if this was fate and there was nothing they could possibly do to change it. You could try! she wanted to shout, though she knew it was judgmental of her to assume they weren’t, in their way. The most she ever did was remind them of the school’s free friends and family ASL classes. But usually she said nothing, did her best to keep her head down and attend to logistics: directing traffic, dispatching deep-cleaning crews, or fondling her walkie-talkie in a performance of security.
Here were the foster children whose erratic placements meant no bus would come, waiting for some harried social worker to turn up. And then there were the “Malloys”—those who neglected or sometimes downright refused to retrieve their children. It had been years since she had seen the actual Malloys, but they had been the first such people February had encountered in her career, and the name had become her personal umbrella term for the kind of parent who would rather not have their kid. The original Malloys had a lovely, wide-eyed boy named Jamie, whose black hair stood on end—as if he needed another attribute to distinguish him from his fair and freckled family. The first couple of pickups, she’d thought it was an accident. It was not yet in her nature to assume that a parent did not have a child’s best interests in mind. But by the end of Jamie’s first year, when the Malloys had failed to materialize to collect their son and his belongings for summer break, February realized they were doing it on purpose. She’d called and called the numbers on his emergency contact card, waited until 5:00 p.m., long after everyone else had gone—it had been a half day. Then she called the police.
The deputy sheriff had turned up to take Jamie to the station, where the Malloys, she’d later heard, had been threatened with Child Protective Services before he was released into their custody for the summer. The next Thanksgiving it happened again. February watched helplessly while Jamie was foisted off on various relatives before finally applying to emancipate himself. She learned via the Deaf world’s gossip trellis that he now lived in Rochester and had become an electrician. By all accounts, he was happy. By all accounts, this was exceptional.
This year’s Malloys were the Schneiders, their daughter Emily pacing the length of the curb with increasing speed as the crowd waned, obviously nervous that she would be the last one standing, again.