Part One: Six Months In

Six months in, I’m the only new hire who hasn’t quit yet. I’m feeling pretty good about myself, till a frail twelve-year-old named Ruben M. gets beaten senseless. The day before, I see him standing in front of the nursing station waiting to pick up his meds. He’s smiling as usual, wearing a white T-shirt that fits him like a dress. It hangs draped over khaki pants so baggy, I barely notice his feet. He asks me what I think of his new kicks and that’s when I first spot his Nike Cortez shoes. They’re faded black hand-me-downs, maybe a few sizes too big for him.

“Can you walk alright in those?” I ask.

“Come on. You know I got this,” he says, with a heavy lisp that I’ve come to love.

He struggles to walk in his shuffle-step sort of way. I watch him for a few seconds before he turns and looks up at me with a smile. “See? Still rollin’!” he says, with some swagger.

•

Ruben’s positive attitude and general toughness lift me up every day. It’s easy to appreciate every other trait he has through that lens. I smile as he shuffles back toward me. We slap hands, bump fists, and twist into the one-arm shoulder hug that’s everyone’s standard greeting at the school. “If you can walk safe, they’re probably cool,” I say, nodding at him.

He comes in for another fist bump and hug as usual. In the middle of that hug, I start to second guess my own words, but the moment passes. More than anything, I know Ruben wants to just fit in. As a result, I can’t help but want anything less than the exact same for him. I want to assume

his outfit is no big deal, simply because it’s Ruben. All the other foster kids who live with Ruben in the group home know he’s special needs. They would never hurt him ’cause he’s geared up in gang attire. They’re the ones who gear him up, ’cause it’s their way of trying to take care of him. They know he copies their style and habits ’cause he loves them. They know he gets a pass on it all because of their protection. But the brand-new arrivals from Juvenile Hall never seem to know anything. When a couple of them ditch class together on their first day, they spot Ruben alone on a restroom break. Right away they want to know what he’s claiming. Later on, they’ll say they clocked his shoes before they shouted him out. They’ll say Ruben smiled before throwing up the gang signs he learned from his group home bunkmates. It’s not too hard to guess what happens next. The two new kids jump him, then kick him on the ground till he goes unconscious.

Everything starts to move in fast-forward at that point. A paramedic truck shows up. Ruben gets wheeled off on a gurney. The group home kids start threatening their classmates to find out who did it. It gets ridiculous by release time. A scuffle breaks out ’cause some confused kid won’t say what he didn’t even see. By the end of that first day, I keep wishing I could rewind back to what happened earlier. I could take Ruben’s shoes off him, give him mine; say something other than what I did. But there is no rewind button, with everything humming in fast-forward again by the next morning. Right after first period starts, we get a call from Kaiser. They tell us they’re gonna keep Ruben under observation a few more nights. It’s vague news, but it only makes things more tense. What’s worse is that just before lunchtime, word gets out about who did what. Inside the cafeteria, D’Andre R. stabs one of the J. Hall kids in the gut with a stolen pair of scissors. The various fights and threats that follow pull in more and more students each day. By Friday at release time, we’ve gotta admit defeat and call the cops. After the dismissal bell rings, a primer-gray minivan circles the school too many times. The van slows to a crawl, while a kid in a Dodgers cap flashes a gun at us from the passenger window. We make the call, but we’re struggling to clear the area as it loops around again. A lit cigarette goes flying out the window, along with a litany of insults. Dodgers cap is posing his fingers into still more gang signs when we hear the sound of sirens in the distance. He spits at us before the van chirps out and speeds off.

It’s not the cops who make things safer for us long term, though. It’s only after the squad cars arrive, as a Kaiser shuttle makes a careful right turn onto our street, that the overall mood changes. When it parks in our loading zone, the students begin to walk toward it and shout. By the time the automatic door swings open, the staff have gathered outside it too. With his social worker in tow, Ruben ambles his way down the steps and holds up a plastic bag. “Yo, I got us ice cream. Still rollin’!’” he says, with his usual swagger.

He gets mobbed like a hero. Everybody hugs him in spite of the scrapes and bruises on his forehead and face. I’ve gotta do my best to not get emotional, but the group home kids laugh and smile in ways I’ve never seen before. It’s like they’re happy little kids again. Not even the cops seem to annoy them. My coworkers just look relieved. Once I get home and sit down for a while, I start to come around to feeling the same way.

Later, on that same night, I have the dream for the first time. In it, we’re all there together. The kids and staff walk single file as a huge group, across endless, repeating sand dunes. We walk and walk, through a desert that stretches as far as the eye can see. We’re chained up at the ankles— moving as one in a long row—and little Ruben is up at the front leading us all. I’m right behind him, following in his wobbly footsteps. I watch his black Nike Cortez shoes flop and kick up sand as the sun beats down on us from above. Drenched in our own sweat, we march toward a gray blur of heat on the shifting horizon line. Nothing else happens, though. What’s strange is that the dream recurs for me over and over as the weeks and months pile up. I start to measure my time at the school based on the subtle changes I notice in it. Just like the job itself, I can’t figure out what it means, but I keep coming back to it for some reason, time and again.

•

Part Two: Know Well Enough
I decide to turn away, so I don’t have to watch anymore. If I watch, I have to face the fact that what we’re doing no longer makes sense to me. Down on the ground, a heavyset Latino kid with long, curly hair is being pinned to the concrete, face down. There are two much heavier adults on top of him. Both wear sky-blue collared shirts, their knees braced against his back and hip. I’m still listening to the kid being restrained, when a raven swings its head around to peer at me. It’s just as I turn away that I notice the raven, all shiny black and calm. The huge bird sits poised on a sagging telephone wire, even with my eye-line as I descend the steps from the second floor. It twists around to point its dark beak down at the kid, then readjusts its footing on the wire. There’s a dance it performs, some kind of watching and balancing act, until the kid erupts in a volley of sound. “Fuck you two bitches!” he screams, from somewhere beneath the grown men’s bodies.

The bird lifts its beak back upward, then turns its head at an angle to glare at me. It seems to know I’m paying more attention to its movements than to what’s happening down on the concrete. Maybe it knows a lot more than that. “You need to stop kicking. Now!” grunts an adult voice.

One of the blackbird’s watery eyes blinks at me and refocuses. “Fucking piece of shit asshole, get off of me!” shouts the kid.

“Raawwkkk!” says the raven.

“Raaawwwkk! Raaawwkk!” it goes on, and I find myself frozen to the spot I’m in, right there on the steps.

“Stop kicking, dipshit,” says the other adult pinning the kid to the blacktop.

The raven tilts its head at a different angle, but continues to stare at me sideways. The skin on the back of my forearms rises up. I can’t think of anything else to do but stare right back at it. I wonder what it thinks of me, of us. “Fuck you, motherfucker. You can’t say that,” mutters the kid.

“Say what? I didn’t hear anything,” replies one of the adult voices. The raven’s beak opens, but no sound comes out. Its wings unfold and it leaps away. Instead of rising high into the sky, though, the blackbird sinks fast. It has to work in a desperate way to avoid hitting the ground. All the effort carries it just high enough to clear a waist-high fence that borders our playground. While the bird struggles to stay airborne, I notice one of its wings is missing a large chunk of black feathers; evidence of some injury I hadn’t noticed till it was midflight. It flaps hard and heavy—gliding a few feet before sinking again—then flaps hard some more, trying to get further and further away from the school. I’m not sure what ravens tell each other. Maybe this one will lie, to say something nice about the humans. Or maybe not. Maybe it has no reason to lie. It seems to know well enough how pain works. As it moves off into the distance, I make a wish, a prayer, whatever you want to call it. Let’s call it a hope. I hope the bird isn’t flying off just to get away. I hope it’s going wherever it has to go to bear witness; to try to tell the others the truth about us. I hope I can do the same thing myself. I close my eyes and hold them shut tight; to turn my hopes into something more, something real. The raven’s silhouette flashes through molten purple across the back of my eyelids. It makes me feel calm somehow, as if I already know what lies ahead. I open my eyes wide again.