Free The Untelling by Tayari Jones

guy named Khafre who quit working at LARC in order to go to law school. Rochelle had just dropped out of Emory University, where she was working toward a Ph.D. in English. “It was just so esoteric,” she had told Lawrence when she met him at the NAACP job fair. They’d run into each other at the blood pressure machine. Later I found out that Lawrence went to the fairs but didn’t pay to set up a table. Instead, when he needed someone, he roamed the venue looking for the kind of person he wanted.
    Lawrence hired Rochelle that very day; he liked that she used the word “esoteric.” After he decided she was too valuable to be cooped up in the classroom all day, Rochelle was named “development coordinator,” but she taught one section of general literacy every other year. Her job was a little better than mine. Same pay but more prestige. She was the one who represented LARC at fund-raising luncheons. Rochelle made conversation with the donors, laughing at their esoteric jokes and making smart comments beginning with “actually,” while Lawrence and I listened politely and tried not to draw attention to ourselves or mispronounce anything. Rochelle was kind enough to never mention this invisible caste system, not even in jest.
    On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I teach GED prep to twelve teenage girls who are “under the supervision of the Fulton County Court.” This twist in the clientele is due to Rochelle’s flair for grant writing. She’s always proposing new classes in order to tap new sources. This prison thing has been a bonanza all the way around. Lawrence teaches two sections a week at the federal prison in Reidsville, sleeping over in a Days Inn in nearby Vidalia. Of course this means that some of our general literacy sections have been put on hiatus, but our numbers are up. This year we’ve accommodated thirteen percent more students than the year before.
    At first I had been a little apprehensive about taking on juvenile offenders. It wasn’t the offender dimension that upset me so much as the juvie part. After walking through the fire at six high schools in four years, I didn’t want to be even a
spectator
to adolescence. But here I was, three times a week in front of an eclectic class of unlucky girls. The youngest ones were fifteen, and the old ladies of the group were nearly twenty. Knowing how it feels not to be the teacher’s pet, I tried to treat each of my students equally. But I was partial to Keisha Evers—seventeen and just a tiny bit pregnant.
    Usually it takes about three weeks for the classroom dynamic to jell, but this term we had all found our places on the very first day. As usual I started class by asking each girl to give her name, age, and something that made her unique. Keisha did as she was told, then blurted, “It wasn’t like they said it was. He told me I could use his Discover to get me some clothes and everything. Then when the bill came, he let his wife call the law, saying I stole it when he was supposed to be mentoring me.”
    I looked at the roll to remember her name, then said, “LaKeisha, that is a little more information than I asked for.”
    “Well,” she said, “it’s what everybody wants to know. Don’t nobody care who in here is double-jointed.” She touched the knee of the young woman beside her, who had offered her deformed elbows as proof of her uniqueness. “No offense,” she said before going on. “I’m just saying that we should get to tell our side of the story. That’s all people want anyway.”
    “That may be,” I said, looking at the bookmarks I’d planned to give as prizes to the students who could remember all their classmates’ names and quirks. “But I don’t want to invade anyone’s privacy.”
    “It’s not like that,” Keisha said, turning again to her double-jointed neighbor. “Why you in here? What’s your name again?”
    “Angelina,” she said, picking orange polish from her cuticle. “They found drugs in my