The Fugitivities, стр. 5
He wasn’t afraid for himself. What he feared was becoming attached to a student who might lose their life, or spend years in prison, or who might never leave these same blocks that formed everything they knew, and that they might not want to. The fear was that he would fail to reach them, founder in showing them how to remain on the narrowest of rising roads, the slim chance that maybe, if they went against everything, the most powerful forces in society and the most intoxicating impulses of puberty, if they persevered with unwavering tenacity and a near-military discipline, there was a chance they might slip through the bonds. This fear could be crippling.
The infernal contradictions between his hopeful expectations and the downward spirals of aimless and angry students deepened. He was locked in a struggle, but against whom? It felt like it was against them, the students who went off like bottle rockets without warning, were fine one minute, spazzing out of control the next. But it wasn’t them, and he knew it. He told himself it was their parents. Or it was the administration; the school principal with her perpetually gleeful greetings and frizzy hair who had clearly decided she would rather be liked than respected. But that wasn’t the truth. Nor was it the brand-new Barnes & Noble Classics he had purchased that sat untouched on the “reading shelf” he had set up along the back wall. It was none of those things, and yet in a way it was all of them. Everyone knew the rot had reached the core. Knowing didn’t make a difference to what could be done. The acronyms, the tests, the teaching staff themselves; everything changed except for the thing they were all supposed to be achieving. The unspoken game was how to get credit for sweeping dirt under a rug. But then why should he have expected anything else?
From his pedagogical instruction, Jonah knew that he was never supposed to have a favorite. He knew it was unethical to think in those terms. But he did have a favorite. B., who usually came in with a hoodie, kept to herself, and pretended to be asleep at her desk. It had taken Jonah months to understand that she was too smart for the class. He hadn’t connected the dots until she turned in a free-writing assignment not long after the Christmas break. It was an essay about discovering her aunt’s fatal overdose. She wrote it in longhand with a glossy purple pen. Her prose was elegant and fluid. When Jonah handed her the paper and she saw the letter grade, she lit up. He told her it was exceptional, that she was talented, and he asked her if she had thought about going to go to college. She said she wanted to study fashion. He gave her a copy of If Beale Street Could Talk, and in the following weeks she would show up early to class every day and read alone at her desk, still wearing her puffer coat and cradling the book defensively like a treasure.
The possibility of her failing had never entered Jonah’s mind. So, when B. stopped coming to class around Easter, he was genuinely shocked. Was there something more he should have done? Had he done all that he could have? If he were doing a better job with his classroom management would she still be there? He tried to hold the students in his mind in a loosely individuated whole, a kind of buzzing abstraction. But when bad things happened to them—and they did with alarming frequency—their fragile lives suddenly became very real and singular, unbearably so.
As the weeks passed, the possibility of her recovering or making up assignments and getting a passing grade faded and then finally evaporated entirely. Jonah thought he might not see her again at all, and he was told by other teachers that this was something that sometimes happened, and that one simply had to accept it. But at the very end of the year, on a bright summery day with light streaming in through the corner windows, B. appeared in the doorway after class and asked to speak with him. She apologized for her absence and told him the outlines of what he understood was an account of sexual assault. It might have been exceptionally allowable to give her a hug, but he did not think he could, so he told her gravely and emphatically how sorry he was and asked her if there was anything he could do to help. She told him not to worry about her. That she was more confident in her future than ever before. She said she had suffered more than anyone would ever be able to make her suffer again. She said she was sorry to have failed his class. He told her she hadn’t failed. That so many people, and he first among them, had failed her. She told him not to blame himself. She wasn’t angry anymore, she said. She said nothing could hurt her now. “Don’t worry about me—Imma do for myself,” she said. He told her it was a brave thing to say, that he was proud of her resolve. She said she was going to make her own way in the world, like she always knew she would have to. She thanked him for the novel, and said that Tish was her, that she had