I’m only signed up for one class, which meets on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. It’s called Reading Is Power. I didn’t know classes could have names like that, in complete sentences, but all the classes here do, things like “Cooking Is Cool” and “Math Is Fun.” Angel told me about a group therapy session she’d had once called “Coping Mechanisms Are for Rock Stars!”
After breakfast, I walk in line toward the bay of old classrooms in the west wing of the detention center, the only area of the repurposed school that’s actually used for its original purpose. A youngish teacher in a violet cardigan stands at the doorway of the classroom. She shakes the hand of each student and looks them in the eyes, pronouncing their names easily. When she sees me, she puts her hand behind her back.
“Minnow?” she asks. “I’m Miss Bailey.”
“How do you know my name?”
She nods. “Your file showed up in my mailbox today.”
“You’ve read my file?”
She shakes her head. “I choose not to read students’ files.”
“Why?”
“I find it helps with the idea that detention is the start of a new life, not the continuation of an old one.”
“But wouldn’t you rather know if you’re teaching someone who’s killed before? Who might knife you in the back?” I ask.
“You aren’t your crime. I don’t look at the files because I refuse to treat you like you are.” She clasps her hands together. “You’ll be at computer number one today. Everyone takes a reading assessment when they arrive. For goal-setting.”
She gestures to the back of the room. I walk to a gray cube of a computer with a piece of masking tape on top labeling it #1. From the back of the room, I observe my ten classmates, all around my age, dressed in the same bright jumpsuits. I spot Rashida sitting on an overturned orange bucket in a half circle around Miss Bailey’s rocking chair. “Where did we leave off?” Miss Bailey asks, opening a blue book.
“Bud was going to the library,” a girl with freckles says.
Miss Bailey nods and begins reading. My eyes move to the gray screen in front of me. A passage from a text perches at the top of the screen above four possible answers and their corresponding bubbles. I recognize the letters, but they are assembled in words and sentences that mean nothing. I blink, the strange light from the computer making my eyes blurry.
I turn toward the window. Cellophane hearts in purple and pink are stuck to the windows with tape, rippled from sunlight and dust-covered. The classroom windows face a residential street, the first view I’ve gotten of the outside. Beyond the window, there’s a slash of short brown suburban homes, snow-covered lawns, and a twenty-foot fence fringed with double loops of barbed wire—the only thing separating us from them.
I raise my arm in the air. Miss Bailey looks up from the book.
“Okay, ladies. Stop and jot down what you think the Amoses’ motivation was for adopting Bud.”
“They wanted the money,” shouts Rashida.
“Write it down for me,” Miss Bailey says. Rashida makes a clumsy fist around her pencil and begins eagerly printing block letters into her notebook that even I can see from the back of the room.
Miss Bailey approaches the computer.
“Yes?” she asks.
“I don’t know what to do,” I say.
“You click the answer you think is correct.”
“Click?”
“With the mouse.”
I shake my head.
“Here,” she says, crouching down beside me so her knees pin her calico skirt to the ground. “You tell me the answer you want and I’ll click it for you. The question is ‘Which word best describes the tone of Mercutio’s speech?’ What do you think the answer is—a, b, c, or d?”
I stare at the text and look back at her, a prickling heat creeping into my cheeks. “I don’t know.”
“Have you read the passage?”
“No.”
“But you’ve been sitting here for ten minutes.”
“I don’t know how,” I say.
“To read?”
I shake my head.
Her hands fall to her lap. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. This classroom is full of emergent readers. Why don’t you join us in the lesson space and listen to the story. And later we’ll get you started on some phonics exercises.”
I sit with the other girls and Miss Bailey continues reading. It reminds me of the days beside the pond with Bertie, the stories she’d bring alive with just her voice. I listen to the story and I don’t do any remembering for a long time afterward.
Chapter 22
The next day, during the strange lull that happens after classes and between lunch when everyone sits in their cells and keeps house the way they know how—organizing the photos tacked to their walls, chatting through the bars of cells like neighbors—a sudden cheer goes up farther down the cell block. Angel throws down her book and presses her face to the bars.
“Oh, no,” she says. “Not again.”
“What?” I ask, standing. Just then, Rashida and Tracy approach our cell, each carrying a battered cardboard box. Tracy looks away from our cell, absently touching the tiny metal cross hanging from a length of dental floss at her neck.