Which she had misused seven times in a single English class. Mr. Vanderleun backed her up, and we had to go to the dictionary, and then because I was right Mr. Vanderleun got all purple and hush-voiced, and his stump waggled in fury, and by the time the whole thing was over the period had ended. For which I got an invisible wave of gratitude from everybody. Then came the assembly, which we were all looking forward to, because it would eat up another hour of class time. We were seniors, after all. And this was precisely why the admonitions from our teachers started coming. They had noticed a restlessness, a lack of initiative, a certain aloofness on our parts, and they wanted to remind us that, despite being seniors, WE WERE STILL PART OF THE KENNEDY COMMUNITY. It wasn’t phrased so explicitly. It never is, at Kennedy. We just got a general sense that our teachers were pissed, but also that they were too … what … spineless, I guess, to crack down on us. These admonitions against our laziness came compressed into the form of another college-preparedness assembly, which my entire class was forced to attend, a throng of unfamiliar black and brown faces.
