The students depart in vans, Checker cabs, short yellow buses, and limousines. A forty-mile radius is their domain—leafy Palos Hills, low-rise projects, Howard Street tenements, Bolingbrook split-levels. It’s a complex enterprise, making sure these students are picked up and dropped off at home. There’s no other way to ensure that they’ll attend our “academy,” as they’ve all been kicked out of their regular public schools and they arrive here at the expense of their various districts.
The boys flip their caps backwards as they head down the hall. Freedom! They think they’re the only ones eager to go. After a seven-hour stint teaching language arts to some of the area’s most troubled middle schoolers, I’m as ready to see them board their rides as they are.
I hate bus line. I have to stand in the doorway, half in the classroom, half in the hallway, listening as Ms. Barry yells the fourteen different routes. My ten students use my compromised position to provoke each other. I look down the hallway, and when I look back in the classroom Karen’s writing her name on the chalkboard, Chris tells Teddy he’s so fat, he’s got a chicken wing hanging off his chin. Keith calls Krista “Foreheady Murphy,” and Cecilia sneaks up behind me to flash Latin King signs to a boy passing in the hall.
“Sit down!” I yell.
“Route 1,” Ms. Barry yells.
Of course none of the hellraisers are on Route 1. Instead, my quiet- est students, the ones I wish would hang around longer, are the first routes called: Nick, who listens to 50 Cent, writes I love Amanda on his folder; Pedro, who pages through his low-rider magazine (“I’m only looking at the cars, not the ladies, Ms. Favorite”). But this Friday I get lucky, and they all start to leave, the group home kids, usually the last called, leave before Maurice, a quiet sixth grader, who smells like funk and squints at pictures of wolves in his library book. He reads at the second-grade level, and when I talked to his social worker about his hygiene issues, she told me it was “a symptom.” Maurice has a sly smile and warm dark eyes, and he never gives me trouble, except sometimes he sleeps in class. He told me once that he roams his West Side neighborhood after midnight because that’s when the gangbangers aren’t around, unlike the hours right after school.
“Thank God, Route 5 is the only route left,” I say, walking back to my desk. I don’t need to stand in the hallway to hear Ms. Barry yell Mau- rice’s route. I can sit down, stack folders, take a drink of water.
Maurice comes up to my desk. I breathe through my mouth to avoid his smell: a mix of feet and armpits and a little bit of ass. It’s not hard for me to do this, though. “You know, Ms. Favorite, some things I don’t like about this school. Like they won’t let us play dodgeball anymore.”
“That’s a state rule, not an academy rule,” I say. He brings this up five times a week. Maurice was a lone-wolf star in dodge ball. He never threw a ball, but hung in the corners while the more aggressive kids got eliminated, then curved his back and folded his stomach to avoid being hit. He never won, but was always one of the last boys standing.
“Also, we can’t bring pops for lunch,” Maurice says. “That ain’t right, not bringing a pop for lunch.”
“That’s a state law too.” I wonder, not for the first time, how Maurice wound up here. Most of the kids have told me: “I brought guns to school, I beat up this GD, I threatened to kill my teacher, I set my mattress on fire.” I couldn’t imagine Maurice doing anything like that.
“Maurice, how did you end up at Hillfield?”
“Depression.” He pulls a pencil out of my mason jar. Somebody has bitten the metal eraser guard into a weapons-grade point. “But I wasn’t really depressed. I mean, I was depressed, but I wasn’t depressed about what I told them I was depressed about.”
Eileen Favorite’s novel, The Heroines (Scribner, 2008), has been translated into seven languages. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many publications, including, Triquarterly, the Rumpus, the Toast, Chicago Reader, Diagram, and others. She’s received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council for poetry and for prose. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Graham School of Continuing Liberal Studies at the University of Chicago. She’s a founder of the Chicago women writers’ business group Her Chapter.
