More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It’s impossible to know what you would do to escape a shitty marriage and give your daughters a fair shot at success. Would you pay money? Trade the comfort of house and home? Lie, cheat, or steal? I’ve asked myself these questions; I suppose many mothers do. One question I haven’t asked, mostly because I don’t like the answer. Not a bit. I have too strong a survival instinct. Always have.
What an opening. I have been wanting to read this book, so I have high hopes.
Now we’re all used to the lines and the tiers and the different strokes for different folks. I guess, if enough time passes, people can get used to anything.
I haven’t lied to Freddie, though. I know she’ll do fine. After all, it’s supposed to be in her genes. The prenatal Q report I showed Malcolm confirmed that nine years ago. But that was another lie. I never went in for the test.
And then there was the chatter: “If they tell me its Q is one-hundredth of a point lower than nine-point-five, I’m getting rid of it,” said a pale woman behind her mask of painstakingly applied cosmetics. “Just like I did the last time.” “Thank God it’s so quick now,” said the twenty-something next to her. “Wouldn’t it be great if manicures were that fast?” They both laughed.
No one asks what happens to the kids who fall through the cracks—there isn’t a reason to. Yellow school graduates manage the local supermarket; they work at costume jewelry kiosks in the few brick-and-mortar malls that are left. They run 7-Elevens and flip burgers now that immigration quotas have been cut again. They do all those jobs no college graduate wants but that still need to get done. Let’s face it. Sarah Green is a snob. She’s no different from the Callahans and the Delacroix and the Morrises living down the street. These are families who have self-sealed themselves into a bubble of
...more
“Competition,” Malcolm says during his dinner-hour updates, almost always for Anne’s benefit. “You work hard, you study, you succeed, you get a job.” The problem here is childishly simplistic: The jobs are disappearing and the people aren’t.
The acronym is supposed to stand for Standards of Learning, an updated version of its former self, but I’ve been calling it the Shit Out of Luck test for a year now. Never out loud, of course. And never to Malcolm. It’s the Shit Out of Luck test because two months ago I stood in front of thirty faces. Today I stand in front of twenty-seven. The three empty desks are still here, though, scattered about. No one bothers to remove them, or consolidate them in the back of the classroom. Or maybe that’s the plan—to leave the empty desks, the ones that used to be occupied by Judy Green and Sue Tyler
...more
Most of the time, though, there’s only one way for a kid to go once she’s in a green school. Down. We aren’t supposed to look at it as “down,” per Madeleine Sinclair’s crowd. We’re supposed to view it in euphemisms: helpful, appropriate, child focused. “Money saving” never gets a mention.
When she’s out of earshot, I shake my head at him. “Anyone would think you were the one who had the umbilical cord sixteen years ago. Anyway, the yellow bus came today,” I say, peeling the wrapper from an egg roll. “Huh.” “That’s it? ‘Huh’?” He shrugs. “I thought I told you, El. There were some schedule changes. Memo went out a few weeks ago.” He takes the egg roll from my hand. “You don’t really want another one of these. They’re all grease.” What I want to say is, Get your paws off my fucking egg roll. Instead, I go back to the real subject. “Do you even care who it picked up?” “Who?”
...more
