Yes, I’ve heard of lessons, I want to hiss back. You ever heard of pre-foreclosure? Splitting a $3.99 cheeseburger from Burger King for dinner while your mom fills up on free soda refills?
I glance over at Zach, my other neighbor. Zach’s the captain of the American Prep swim team. He also happens to be last-chair clarinet and because I’m last-chair flute, we sit right next to each other. I’ll admit that’s one of the only reasons I like band. Unfortunately, we’ve never talked. And I’ve never cleaned his room. I’m not even sure where he lives. I think he might be a scholarship student too, like me and Ming.
Ming mouths to me You ready? from her seat as first-chair violin. I nod. She’s from China and here on a music scholarship, and she’s also my coworker, cleaning houses with me after school.
“All right, let’s take it from the top,” Mr. Rufus says, looking to Ming. The trumpets get their sheet music back out. The French horns put down their phones. As Ming lifts her violin, the entire string section takes their cue from her. I smile. It’s nice to see her leading the other kids, even if we secretly scrub their toilets.
After practice, Ming catches up to me. She’s carrying her black violin case, balancing it delicately on her slim shoulders. She hand-carried it from China, and even though the edges are frayed, she refuses to get a new one, kind of like me with my debate shoes. She told me once that when she was ten, she had a chance to be on China’s Got Talent but her parents couldn’t afford to fly her to Shanghai. So when Mrs. Mandalay, our headmistress, discovered her during one of her recruiting trips to China and offered her a full scholarship, Ming jumped at the chance to attend American Prep to pursue music.
“We walking over to Rosa’s after school together?” she asks. Rosa’s our boss at Budget Maids. I talked her into letting Ming work there, even though it’s not exactly legal—Ming’s on a student visa. But her scholarship covers only tuition and a tiny stipend for housing, so she needs the money.
“Can’t. I have debate training today,” I tell her. “I’ll come after!”
Ming sticks out her lower lip. “When are they going to announce who they’re sending to compete in the Snider Cup?” she asks.
At the mention of Snider, I suck in a breath. Mr. Connelly, my debate coach, has been training us for the tournament all year. My entire college admissions strategy next year is riding on Snider. All the top coaches are going to be there, including the coach of Yale, my dream school. Their team is undefeated this year.
“Soon, I think,” I tell her.
“You’ll definitely get picked,” she assures me as she starts heading out. “Mr. Connelly loves you.”
I smile, grateful for the words. My coach has been encouraging, though right now my most immediate problem is coming up with the money to pay for Snider. Flights and hotels aren’t cheap, and my mom doesn’t exactly have air miles like all the other kids’ parents. She works for Budget Maids too, scrubbing toilets to try to put food on the table. That’s what my grandmother did and her mother before her. I am going to be the first girl in my family to break the cycle. But first I gotta get into college.
I put my flute back in its case and wait around until all my classmates leave before returning the loaned flute back to its loaned-instruments cubby.
After school, I push open the door to debate training. As usual, Mr. Connelly greets me with a smile.
“Dani! How’s my Thunder Girl?” he asks.
I roll my eyes at the term. Ever since one of the judges at a recent tournament called my speech “thundering,” Mr. Connelly has been calling me that.
“You ready to go up against Heather today?”
“Yeah, Thunder Girl, you ready?” Heather jokes. I laugh and tell her I was born ready. My teammates, for the most part, are friendly. There’s an unspoken understanding that my situation is different from theirs, and so sometimes they don’t invite me to things, like if they’re all going to an expensive restaurant after a tournament to celebrate.
As he divides us into teams, Mr. Connelly reminds us that he’ll be looking closely at our performance in practice as well as in the next two tournaments to see who gets to go to Snider. As much as we’ve all been trying to avoid it, the simple math stares us in the face: there are ten of us, and only six get to go.
“So today when you debate, don’t hold back!” Mr. Connelly urges. He tells us the motion—“This house would eliminate tracking in schools”—and asks me to begin the debate.
I get up and walk to the front of the room, while my teammates pull out pieces of paper to scribble down responses to my opening statement.
“Close your eyes and picture your ideal audience,” Mr. Connelly says.
The ideal audience is a concept Mr. Connelly came up with. It basically means closing your eyes and picturing someone—could be a real person, could be fictional—who is patient, kind, thoughtful, smart, and who desperately wants to hear what you have to say. It’s kind of embarrassing, but my ideal person is Mr. Connelly. He’s been my ideal person ever since he pulled me aside freshman year and said to me, “You have a voice. Let me help you find it.”
I think about that first year, how he spotted my mom $20 because she was so behind on bills she couldn’t pay for a pair of Payless black pumps for me to wear to the tournament. And at the tournament, when he asked me why my parents didn’t come and I told him I don’t have a dad and my mom’s busy cleaning houses, he gave me a hug and said, “Well, you have me.” Yup, he’s my ideal person. I don’t even have to close my eyes.
I take a deep breath and smile at him.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin. “Tracking is a modern form of segregation. Kids are labeled from an early age based on how they do on a few tests and are then divided into separate tracks for the rest of their schooling. It’s based on the erroneous belief that we as human beings don’t change, that once ignorant, always ignorant. Once poor, always poor.”
I set forth evidence and examples, talk about systemic bias and racial bias and how it oozes into our subconscious and convinces us that we’re not good enough. I think about how people like my mom’s boss, Rosa (though I don’t say it), looks at my mom and says she shouldn’t be sending a child to private school. You are a maid. What are you doing sending a kid to private school?
“And so, I ask you to look in your hearts and ask yourself, what is the purpose of education? Is it to keep people in their place? Or is it to lift people up? I believe it’s the latter and so should you.”
“Bravo,” Mr. Connelly says. He stands up and claps even though he’s not supposed to. The debate’s not over yet. He’s supposed to wait. The fact is not lost on my teammates, and I catch a few eye rolls as I sit down.
Mr. Connelly leans over and whispers, “You’re going to be amazing at Snider, Thunder Girl.”
Later after practice, I’m putting books away at my locker, bending down to tie my shoes, when I overhear some of my debate teammates talking as they walk past.
“Did you hear him gush over how good her speech was?” Heather asks.
I freeze, hiding my face behind my locker. Are they talking about me?
“He’s just going easy on her because she’s a scholarship student,” Josh says.