pressure that came in the form of leaflets with Do not hire this unfit parent! and No benefits for the antisocial! With enough Sarah Greens on your side, who needs laws?
I stand in the rain under my umbrella and watch Sarah, shoulders slumped under the weight of grief and confusion and hatred, go into her house. She turns back once to hiss at me, “Those yellow buses? They’re not supposed to come here, Elena. Not here.” The front door slams shut, and the lock clicks, telling me I needn’t bother taking those few steps onto the porch and knocking, so I walk back to my car, curse at the defogger for the tenth time this morning, and curse at everyone for taking all of this super-child garbage too far.
As I drive away, I look back one more time at the house. Somehow I don’t think there will be much of a garden in the Greens’ yard next year.
But then I think, Maybe she deserves it.
EIGHT
No one asks what happens to the kids who fall through the cracks—there isn’t a reason to. Yellow school graduates manage the local supermarket; they work at costume jewelry kiosks in the few brick-and-mortar malls that are left. They run 7-Elevens and flip burgers now that immigration quotas have been cut again. They do all those jobs no college graduate wants but that still need to get done.
Let’s face it. Sarah Green is a snob. She’s no different from the Callahans and the Delacroix and the Morrises living down the street. These are families who have self-sealed themselves into a bubble of privilege, whose favorite pronouns are We and They and Us and Them, whose theme song is “Not in My Neighborhood,” whose idea of school choice is best translated as I’ll make the choice for you because I know better. So what if some kid from the city gets shipped off to the equivalent of a vocational school, if a country boy from Nebraska doesn’t make the cut to his state university? These are things that happen to Them, never to Us. If I didn’t share a house and a bed with Malcolm, and if I didn’t worry constantly over Freddie, I’m not sure I’d even know they were happening. After all, how many people watch Madeleine Sinclair’s State of Education addresses? The president barely draws fifteen percent of the population for those big talks he gives, so I’m guessing Queen Madeleine gets next to nothing.
As I wind my car down the GW Parkway and cross the bridge into the city, I wonder if we’ve all been playing the old out of sight, out of mind game. I wonder if we’ll keep playing it until the game pieces start coming into view, shifting from Their playing boards to Our playing boards. Like they did this morning, when Sarah Green’s perfect teenager was demoted to a pawn.
I’m late anyway, so I pull over in Georgetown, hold my phone up to the meter, and pay for fifteen minutes’ rental of prime real estate parking. Ch-ching! All done. Somewhere in the radio waves above my head or the fiber-optic lines below my feet, fifty cents move from a bank account in one state to another account in a different state. No one even needs to empty the coins.
At Starbucks, my caffe latte is waiting at the mobile order pickup counter. Two-percent milk, half decaf, light foam, one sugar. Grande sized, whatever that means. The barista-robot chirps an automated Have a great day, Elena! Hope your drink is perfect! as I pick up the coffee. See you tomorrow morning! she says. Sometimes, the barista-robot is a he. They like to mix things up.
There’s a girl at the window, tucked up on one of those deep sofa things with lots of pillows, legs folded under her, reading. She’s almost young enough to be in high school, but she’s here in Starbucks, and she doesn’t look like a dropout or a truant. One of those career-guide bibles that’s supposed to tell you what you want to be when you grow up is open on the table, pages facing down, next to a pile of college guides and SAT prep manuals teetering by her coffee, partially obscuring her face. She has a brightness in her eyes, the kind I see in my best students, but