Free Early Decision by Lacy Crawford Page A

unfair to Sadie, though Anne couldn’t put her finger on what. Sadie had so much. And she’d probably leap at the chance to help another girl. This weekend she was serving as a volunteer camp counselor at a Head Start program in south Detroit. From her e-mails it seemed that neither of her parents had been able to join her. Her father was in trial. Her mother was leading a workshop on positive empowerment at Canyon Ranch.
    The battered high school building where Anne did her own good deeds was surrounded by hurricane fencing topped with razor wire. Its two-story gate was unlocked at eight by a security guard who then returned to his van in the parking lot and spent his time until noon sipping from a set of coffees on his dash. It had been explained to Anne that Cicero North straddled a gangland boundary: half of the building was in one territory, and half in the other. Three magnetometers guarded the low steps. When the school’s big metal doors slammed, the entire building shook.
    Still, just after 8 A.M. students came trudging in for the Excel program, a voluntary Saturday school meant to guide them to tertiary education in the absence of a true college counselor, since the school had eliminated that office for budgetary reasons some years back. Twenty or so routinely showed up. Their diligence was offset by their reticence, a learned shyness that led them to sit quietly even when they did not understand. They never failed to turn in their work, but if they hadn’t understood the assignment, their pages would be blank. For some, particularly the girls, Anne suspected the hesitation was cultural, but for others it was the result of years of being ignored. They were accustomed to not understanding. They did not feel they deserved to know. Even more than the gaps in their knowledge, it was this passivity that drove Anne crazy: a more virulent form of the lassitude that infected her rich students, whose feelings of entitlement at least caused them to get their backs up on occasion. Her Cicero North kids sat in their plastic chairs quiet as cows. Their slaughter was nearing completion. They’d graduate with few options, or none, and their entrée into the world was through a gate topped with razor wire.
    She started the year as she always did: by asking them to say good morning in their native languages. One year they’d gotten to thirty. She might have tracked geopolitical upheaval by the languages that cropped up in her ammonia-scrubbed classroom: English, French, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Syrian), Arabic (Pakistani), Bosnian, Russian, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Xhosa, Angolan Portuguese. One of two girls wearing abayas, both sitting in the far back corner, had four languages with English a recent fifth, but her voice was so soft Anne had to walk back to her desk to hear her speak. The girl sat huddled beneath her draping. Anne realized that her fantasy of lifting it off and squaring the girl’s shoulders was inappropriate, though it was not unkind.
    Following their Pentecostal greeting Anne unrolled the morning’s Times for her usual opening exercise. She handed it to the closest student. “Pick any article and start reading,” she asked him.
    â€œBig one or little one?” he asked her.
    â€œYou choose. The bigger headlines are the more important stories, but they might not be the most interesting. See what looks good.”
    The boy hung his head low to the paper. He droned: “Senate Republicans met yesterday to consider changes to the passage of—”
    â€œOkay, good,” Anne cut him off. “So who are they?”
    â€œThey work with the president,” said another boy.
    â€œDo they?” Anne asked.
    â€œOne of two houses in Congress,” said a third boy.
    â€œWho is?”
    â€œRepublicans.”
    â€œWell, yes, you’re right, but that’s unfortunate and it’s not by design,”