“Ms. Kuo, why are you bothering? You know they ain’t going to read them,” Coach Dodd yelled from his window, watching me lug a box to my classroom. Coach Dodd was the recently hired “guidance counselor.” An assistant football coach at the high school, he was sent to Stars because he needed a faculty position. If you asked him how he was doing, he always said, “Same crap, different toilet.”
I tried, like a matchmaker, to help students find books they might like. Demand grew, word passed quickly about which books were good, and my shelves were plundered. Pretty soon I saw these books clutched to chests and carried from class to class. The students guarded them like amulets. New readers pored over the books, whose inside covers gradually acquired territorial graffiti—This a good book, JG. “Who’s JG?” they’d ask, pondering. When they figured it out, they were often shocked.
“Jasmine loved it,” I’d respond briskly.
Worn and read, the books were gathering dignity.
Did the students know, I wondered, how they looked when they read? Concentrated, absorbed, serious. I took their pictures. This was before camera phones, so real suspense built as they waited for me to get my film developed. And when I brought the photographs in to class, they studied these unexpected portraits of themselves.
I decorated the walls with their pictures, which, like watchful spirits, seemed to encourage us. We finished one book after another, charting the number of pages read by coloring in rectangles on a grid hung on the wall. Silent reading became an institution in my class. Among the best qualities of silent reading, I was learning, was that it was impossible to guess who would be good at it. You could never know the quiet a person craved. Kayla, recently sent to jail for fighting, enforced silent reading most strictly. When a student disturbed the peace with whispering, Kayla stiffened and threw a piercing glare. Liana and May, the same girls whose fight Patrick had recently tried to end, curled up in adjacent beanbags, as if silent reading was a kind of cease-fire.
—
EVERY MORNING I AWOKE AT five. I prepared lessons, I graded quizzes, I drove to school at six-thirty and waited in the parking lot for the janitor to open the gate. I developed weird habits around food. At school I didn’t eat, and at home I was always eating. I gained a lot of weight; I lost a lot of weight. I talked to myself, in my head, all the time. How I’d screwed up or what I’d done well. Sometimes I found that I was talking to my students. I talked to them, by myself, out loud. “I know you know better,” I’d catch myself saying into space, or “This writing is beautiful.”
My notebooks were strange, filled with often-contradictory self-exhortations and resolutions. Be kind. Don’t be afraid to be mean. Sometimes the notes read as if I had joined a cult: Change is happening every day. No spiritual work is ever wasted. And there were notes from Dostoevsky that felt directly relevant: Work tirelessly. If, as you are going to sleep at night, you remember: “I did not do what I ought to have done,” arise at once and do it. On my less-frequent jaunts to Memphis bookstores, I found myself browsing the self-help aisle for books like Staying Positive or How to Unclutter Your Life, the latter of which I bought and subsequently lost under piles of papers, books, and clothes in my filthy house. I had neither the time nor the inclination to clean. When flies bred in the kitchen, I simply put up sticky squares of flypaper, which collected so many victims that they tumbled off the tape and onto the counter.
—
“MR. THOMPSON,” I said.
Mr. Thompson, the permanent substitute history teacher, didn’t turn around. He was playing Minesweeper. It had been nearly a year since the history teacher quit, and the school still hadn’t found a replacement.
During my free period, I sometimes tried to track down students who had been absent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Patrick and Miles on the computers, watching music videos, their large headphones like earmuffs.
“Do you mind if I steal Miles and Patrick to make up work they’ve missed?”
Frowning at the screen, eyes fixed on the numbered squares, Mr. Thompson was immobile, his index finger on the mouse the only sign of life. “Ms. Kuo,” he said, not moving, “you know you don’t need to ask me for permission. Take ’em all, if you want.”
Miles and Patrick followed me back to my room and sat at desks next to each other. I slid into a third desk and rotated it so that I faced them both.
I gave them their writing folders. Miles was angry that I had taken him away from his free time. He knocked the folder off the desk. Then he sneered.
“Don’t tell me I got an attitude,” he said. “I don’t got no attitude. What I got is nobody.”
Patrick, bent over at his desk, glanced up. “That ain’t no reason to disrespect everybody.”
Miles stiffened. He looked up to Patrick. Patrick never teased people, never bothered them—not about their appearance, not about who their family was, not if they struggled with reading.
Others looked up to Patrick, too. “Patrick don’t pick,” someone said. And it was true. He kept to himself. He seemed a lot older than Miles, even though both were now sixteen.
“We all got our problems,” Patrick said. “My uncle, he killed my great-auntie over some crack. Over some stupid high. How do you think that feels? But see, here, people around you just trying to help you. Ms. Kuo, people like her don’t come ’round every day.” They both looked at me, diminutive at my desk. “She ain’t trying to hurt nobody, she trying to help. You gotta take that help now, before they give up on you.”
Miles blinked.
Patrick continued, “Because they gonna give up on you in a few years. Trust me, I know.”
Miles looked down. Nobody spoke.
Patrick stared at the wall of windows, where the sun shone through our mounted pages of vocabulary words, each word distinct in marker—jubilant, diligent, grave. He had used that phrase again: give up. How had he put it before, when we were sitting on his porch, about the kids fighting? “Maybe they just ready to give up on life.” How did he know that feeling so well at sixteen?
But he seemed fine at the moment, and I needed time alone with Miles. I nodded at Patrick, gesturing toward the beanbags. That meant silent reading. He nodded back and went to our shelf to choose a book. I saw him touching spine after spine, trying to decide.
“Hey,” I said to Miles. His arms were crossed. “When you’re ready to write, just say, I’m ready, Ms. Kuo. And I’ll be right here.” Miles tilted his head down at the paper, at the blank spaces next to the simple prompts: I am, I feel. Perhaps, like Tamir, he honestly didn’t know how to finish these sentences. I took a risk and brought up his brother.
“You miss Brandon?”
He nodded, then turned away. “I can’t look at my mama in the eye, ’cause I know she thinking about her son. Thinking about all the shit he done, wondering if I end up the same way.”
“Do you think you’ll…you’ll end up the same way?”
“I don’t know the future,” he said tersely. “Only God know.”
Miles swallowed; he’d said too much. Now he was determined to say nothing. We each waited in silence for the other to speak. I broke.
“I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you write an ‘I Am’ poem for your brother?” I said.