Free The Untelling by Tayari Jones Page A

apartment. It wasn’t a lot and it wasn’t all for me.”
    And so they had gone around the room. Some girls spun elaborate tales involving boyfriends, addictions, abuse, and misunderstandings. They talked about their kids. Two or three just mumbled a charge and an apology. Many of the stories were as thin and translucent as rice paper, but a few weighed in with the thick heft of truth.
    Keisha watched her classmates as they spoke, nodding earnestly and rubbing gentle circles on her bulb of a stomach. She made sympathetic comments where there were pauses: “That wasn’t nothing but racism” or “That right there was just your lawyer’s fault.” She pointed at each girl when it was time for her to speak.
    When each person in the tight circle of metal desk chairs had introduced and explained herself, Keisha turned to me. “So, miss,” she said, “what about you?”
    I fingered the orange and green bookmarks and said, “Well, I’m originally from here. Got my degree at Spelman. I’ve been teaching literacy for four and a half years.”
    She rolled her eyes a little and glanced at her classmates. “Not résumé stuff. We want to know what’s really up with you.”
    I thought about Lawrence and his warning about “boundaries.” He’d lectured me during my orientation meeting:
Do not socialize with your clients; it’s inappropriate and counterproductive. And some of the people who will come through these doors are master con artists. The rest just want you to save them. Either way, it’s bad news and it’s the reason why you need to have clear and firm boundaries.
    I had tried to do it Lawrence’s way at first—avoiding lingering eye contact, offering no details about my personal life. If someone had asked me my zodiac sign, I’d have refused to reply. But then I had been working nights, teaching older students who just wanted to learn. They weren’t curious about my personal narrative and weren’t interested in sharing theirs. They just wanted to read well enough to get their GEDs or driver’s licenses. At Christmas they all chipped in to buy me a silver-plated desk set, and that was about as intimate as it got.
    But on the first day of this term, I’d been in the center of a ring of girls, their faces wide-open like ceramic bowls. The twelve of them had stared at me with almost tangible anticipation.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s really nothing to tell.”
    “Oh, come on,” Keisha said with the grit of annoyance and the sugar of pleading. “Tell us
some
thing. How old are you? Are you married?”
    “This is a little inappropriate,” I said in a voice that I hoped was clear and firm.
    The dozen young women had sighed in disappointed unison and had opened their textbooks.
    Now we were five weeks into a fifteen-week term and I’d thought back on that moment several times. There were only eight girls left out of our original twelve. Tomeika got caught smoking crack, just down the block from my house. As our in-class writing assignment we wrote letters to her. I didn’t know what to write, so I sent her copies of our reading assignments, poetry by Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. I hoped it might help somehow. Double-jointed Angelina and pretty Benita just disappeared. Lani said she was bored and dropped out.
    Each time I whited out a name from my roll book, I remembered that moment and their open faces and I wondered how much blame I should heap onto my plate.
    Lawrence tells me not to mourn. At least nobody died. Two people up in Reidsville had passed away on him already. On the first day of the term he had warned me that I should expect a few to recidivate, a few to vanish, and at least one to die. Some days, when my girls were quiet and hunched over their workbooks, I wondered which of them it would be.
    After class today, when I’d gathered all my things and left the building, I found Keisha sitting on the porch swing. She didn’t pretend not to be waiting for me. She used to do