Master Class

by Christina Dalcher

The opt-out culture of parents storming from assemblies and plucking their kids from school had started to take a tenuous foothold.

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.

These are families who have self-sealed themselves into a bubble of privilege, whose favorite pronouns are We and They and Us and Them, whose theme song is “Not in My Neighborhood,” whose idea of school choice is best translated as I’ll make the choice for you because I know better.

All this automation makes me wonder where they’ll put the yellow school kids in another few years when the last of the grocery stores switch to self-checkout and the little Amazon delivery drones buzz up to front doors, plopping their parcels on the porches.

Far too similar to each other and to what they were in my day. Back then, the autism spectrum wasn’t so much a spectrum as a what the fuck is autism? question—as bright a blip on the high school radar as peanut allergies, celiac disease, transsexual restroom rights, and out-of-the-closet teenagers were in 1990-something. Changes trickled along, a drop or so at a time. I figured by the time my girls were teens, everyone would have joined in on the diversity dance. I was wrong. Diversity never made it past a slow, awkward shuffle.

session—they’re all the same. Straight, mostly white, athletic. And I’ve never seen such a thing as a trans-friendly bathroom.

I’ve seen the homework Freddie brings back every afternoon: stacks of heavy hardcover textbooks, instructions for the quarterly science fair projects, annotated bibliography assignments that would have made a college freshman back in my day start filling out course-drop requests.

One by one, the students take their seats. I hand pristine sheets of lined paper to them and supply each desk with a pencil and a pen. Then I recite my lines and start the slow march up and down the aisles. I hate this part, because it reminds me of touring a museum, shuffling along and shifting my weight, getting a good case of museum-foot. I’ll proctor four more tests before the day ends, and by the time I’m home my ankles will be swollen.

I want to say a million words, all beginning with F and ending with UCK.

They say time is constant, steady, always moving at the same pace. But that’s a bald lie. Any child knows time slows down in the days before Christmas; any bride knows time speeds up during a wedding reception. And any mother knows time flies in the years after she gives birth. Eight pounds become forty pounds become a hundred pounds.

You have to grow up in the south, or at least spend time there, to get the fact that “bless your heart” isn’t exactly a polite way of wishing someone well. Quite the opposite, actually.