“Yes, ma’am.”
Patrick bent down. His hand was unused to the pen; he gripped it too hard.
He wrote:
I’m Patrick.
“Okay,” I said. “Good job.”
We worked all afternoon. As I put on my coat and scarf to leave, I said cheerfully, “Ready to do your homework for tomorrow?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said quickly.
Patrick’s obedience made me sad, as if I had done something wrong. Who was I in his life—a person whose role it was to widen the world of things to be ashamed about?
“Look,” I said, “let’s make a deal. You keep doing your homework; I’ll bring you those cigarettes you wanted.”
At this Patrick lit up, astonished.
“Aw, for real, Ms. Kuo?”
I laughed. “For real.”
“You do that for me?” Then, perhaps afraid I’d change my mind, he said, “Get me them Buglers.”
“What? Where?”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “You ain’t never smoke a cigarette, Ms. Kuo?”
“Not really.”
“Like tobacco leaves, you know, you roll them. There’s a place right next to the Dollar General. Before you get to the Walmart, where my house be. If you go past Walmart, you gone too far.”
“Okay. I’ll get them. And give them to you. When you do your homework.” We smiled at each other.
—
PATRICK’S CENTRAL HIGH School transcript was a white space interrupted by a lone column—F, F, F, D, D, F—that represented, in total, one semester of high school.
I had wanted to see the transcript for myself, because he wouldn’t tell me what his grades were. I’d trekked to the school secretary’s office, thinking that perhaps he’d exaggerated and maybe even pulled off a B in his English class. Then I thought of all my other students. How, I wondered, had they fared? “Do you have the list of dropouts?” I asked the shrunken secretary, Ms. Smith. “For the year 2006?” This was the year I had left.
The printer was noisy and archaic—dot matrix, not laser. Its paper had perforated vertical ends, which as a kid in the eighties I tore off to form bracelets.
The document was titled STUDENT DROPOUT REPORT. But there was no report—just names. Because the sheets were attached to one another, the list unfolded like an accordion that extended to the floor. Unbelievable, really, that this list constituted only a year of dropouts.
Name after name I recognized. Tamir, Miles, Kayla. William, Stephanie. My stomach dropped, and I wanted to sit down. It was a shock. Who had lasted? Years ago, these names had been gathered in my grade book, in my handwriting. Now they were in cheap automated type.
Who is a person who changed your life?
Had I changed them? The paper in my hands told me no.
My face was warm with shame.
Next to each name was a number that designated the reason for dropping out. Some had been designated as moved; others, lack of attendance. But the reasons were not correct. The list stated a number of students, including the girls who’d gotten pregnant, as moved out of state. Patrick was listed twice: lack of attendance (correct) and moved out of state (incorrect).
“It gets worse every year,” Ms. Smith said in a raspy voice. “I just don’t remember anybody dropping out thirty-five years ago. Nobody dropped out. You quaked in your boots if you got sent to the principal.”
Ms. Smith explained the school procedure on absence. Each morning, teachers got a form where they marked a student’s status as P, T, or A: present, tardy, or absent. Under state law, after ten consecutive days of being absent, the transformation was complete: A student officially became a dropout. Ms. Smith’s office sent a memo indicating teachers could delete the student’s name from their grade books.
“Who looks at this?” I asked.
“You.”
It was terrifying. Students dropped out and that was it, game over. Nobody looked for you; nobody stopped you. Nor, it seemed, did people document, correctly, why you dropped out.
Ms. Smith showed me official reasons permitted for absences:
A doctor’s note
An obituary or funeral program for a death in the family
A court document
Proof of incarceration
Suspension
School business
A parent note approved by principal
Students were allowed fourteen unexcused absences, she explained. This included parent notes, in addition to any other unexplained absences.
“What a joke. They’re allowed fourteen days of parent notes—it doesn’t matter what reason, what excuse. What are they really doing? Who knows. I think they just don’t want to be here.”
As if on cue, a mother and her teenage daughter came in. The mother looked sleepy—she was wearing pajamas. “We overslept,” the mother said simply.
“You need a note,” Ms. Smith said to the daughter, ignoring the mother.
The daughter rolled her eyes.
The mother asked for paper.
Ms. Smith handed her paper.
The mother asked for a pen.
Ms. Smith handed her a pen.
The mother scrawled something and left. The daughter went to class.
Ms. Smith gestured at the clock meaningfully—the school day was nearly half over.
I said, “So if Patrick’s parents had written parent notes for those fourteen days, he could have come back to school?”
“Exactly.”
I looked stricken, which gratified her.
But we were thinking different things: Whereas Ms. Smith thought it was ludicrous that Patrick could come back, I thought it was ludicrous that his parents hadn’t tried to write a note to get him back in.
Helena employed one person whose job was to contact families and inform them that their child was a truant. But it would have made little difference for Patrick: Everybody in his family knew he’d stopped going.
—
“LORD ALMIGHTY, IT’S Ms. Kuo!” said Ms. Riley as she gave me a hug.
Now that Stars was shut down, she was in charge of ISS—“in-school suspension,” all-day detention—at Central. It had been tough to find her: The ISS room was isolated on the other side of a hill, like a hermitage. Ms. Riley was playing a computer game at her desk. The bell had just rung and her students had disappeared.
She motioned for us to go outside and I followed her to her car, so that she could smoke.
“Ms. Kuo,” she said, lighting a cigarette and getting straight to the point, “Stars be gone to the dogs. It be worse than a doghouse. They threw everything to the curb, all the new good books you ordered—they just threw it away. Or they left it down there like they was nothing. They just so wasteful.”
I thought of my students’ graffiti inside the covers, how they wanted other kids to know they’d read the books.
“I miss our children,” she said.
“What happened to them? It seems like most of them dropped out when they got here.”