I know she doesn’t stand a chance in the college admissions game.
She’s using a yellow ID card as a bookmark, and no college has admitted a third-tier student for at least a few years, according to Malcolm’s latest dinnertime report.
“Hi,” she says, catching my eye when I reach the door.
“Hi.”
“I was top in my class two years ago,” she says. “Numero uno. Gave a valedictorian speech and everything. I mean, it wasn’t the best school. Kids from my neighborhood don’t go to the best schools. But still. I figured being first would count for something.”
I’m so late. But I let the door swing shut and stay. “It’s hard now.”
She closes the Barron’s bible with its lists of statistics for everything—admissions, average SAT scores, demographics, nearby bars, number of athletic fields, all that quantifiable shit. “What do you do?”
“I teach.”
“Oh, yeah? Where?”
“Davenport.”
The girl sweeps her eyes over me, taking it all in. The suit, the strappy heels, the calfskin purse slung over my shoulder. “Figures. You look like one of them.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She laughs. “White. Rich. Perfect. Bet you have a super-high Q.”
“It’s okay.” Actually, it’s 9.73, but I don’t want to tell her this.
“Anyway. I’m trying one more time for college. After that, I don’t know what. Used to have a job here, but, well, you know.” Her hand moves in a game-show-hostess gesture. “Lost it a few months ago. I still hang out, though.” She points at the books. “Reading’s not a real popular hobby in my hood.”
There’s a lull while I wait for the right words to come to me, and another lull when I realize there are no right words for this girl or this situation. I blurt out a lame “What do you want to major in?”
“Math,” she says, closing the book. “I’m wicked at math. Go ahead, ask me anything.”
My phone pings. It’s Rita from school. “I’m sorry—I’m really late this morning.”
She looks at the coffee in my hand. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it in all the ways, knowing she doesn’t believe me, and I open the door.
Outside, the automated street sweepers suck leaves and twigs and debris from Thursday-night college kids off the pavement on the other side of Wisconsin Avenue. The two cars whose owners forgot about street-cleaning day get tickets. Not paper tickets, but in a few minutes one hundred dollars will move between bank accounts for the green Jeep, and another hundred for the yellow Mini Cooper with racing stripes. The parking enforcement drones and meter maid trons move on, up Wisconsin, in search of their prey.
All this automation makes me wonder where they’ll put the yellow school kids in another few years when the last of the grocery stores switch to self-checkout and the little Amazon delivery drones buzz up to front doors, plopping their parcels on the porches. Click, buzz, plop. It’s supposed to be progress, and I guess we’ll be seeing more of it. Who knows? Before I retire, they might even automate teaching.
“Competition,” Malcolm says during his dinner-hour updates, almost always for Anne’s benefit. “You work hard, you study, you succeed, you get a job.”
The problem here is childishly simplistic: The jobs are disappearing and the people aren’t. When I pull into the underground parking garage and let another machine scan my car’s decal, greeting me with a sunny, if electronic, Good morning, Dr. Fairchild, I wonder where all the yellow school kids will be in another ten years. I wonder what we’ll do with the people who aren’t necessary anymore.
NINE
The high school where I teach isn’t very different from the high school I attended almost a quarter of a century ago. There are rooms, teachers, books, and students. It’s the students, I think, as I set up books and attendance sheets on the desk in my classroom and pull the blinds up to give us a view of something green, who are too similar. Far too similar to each other and to what they were in my day.
Back then, the autism spectrum wasn’t so much a spectrum