Q

by Christina Dalcher

  “No. Of course not.” This is one hundred percent true. I spend half my time at school on weekly reports, prepping for the test, compiling results, and contacting parents of what we call “borderliners”—any student who scores below an A on the previous week’s practice tests or who might be in danger of sinking below a Q of nine for other reasons. I’ve heard of teachers in the green schools, like the one Freddie attends, who lose sleep over the numbers. One-tenth of a point makes all the difference.

  Freddie’s geometry teacher explained it all to me at our last meeting.

  “It gives them a chance, at least,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “And if they don’t have a chance, it gives everyone in the family time to deal with it. They can spend their last weekends together going on picnics, taking a final trip to see the grandparents, riding a roller coaster at the Six Flags park. All that shit they haven’t been doing for the past few years. That way, when the Q sinks below eight and the yellow bus comes, they’ve had some quality experiences. Memories.”

  It wasn’t always this way.

  In the first wave of the tier system, the yellow schools weren’t much different from the green and silver schools. They were farther out of town, of course, and they weren’t equipped with state-of-the-art science labs or staffed with teachers who had strings of letters after their names. Still, the kids came back home every afternoon.

  Until last month, when Madeleine Sinclair made the decision to move the yellow schools. To change the system.

  “It’ll be better this way,” Malcolm said after the girls had gone to bed. We sat on the sofa like bookends, a bowl of popcorn keeping us at a distance. The remote was balanced on my lap, and Malcolm reached over to turn up the volume so we could hear Madeleine’s press conference.

  “You really think that’s a good idea?” I said between handfuls of popcorn. It was the unbuttered kind, the no-salt, no-fat “light” version, because Malcolm liked that better. Me, I wanted the extra grease and salt, but you pick your battles.

  “Sure it is, El. You have any idea how crowded those schools have gotten? Not enough teachers, either.”

  “They’re only crowded because the pass rates have dropped,” I said. I didn’t know whether the tests had gotten harder or what, but I’d suddenly been losing a student every few months at the silver school, and I’d heard the same from my colleagues.

  Madeleine, dressed in her usual blue power suit, paused before answering another question. “The fact is,” she said, smiling at the press audience, “we’re facing overcrowding at our third-tier institutions.”

  Institutions, I thought. What a fucking word.

  That voice, that smooth educator’s voice, continued, louder now that Malcolm had upped the volume again. “We’re running out of real estate in the urban areas.” Madeleine shook her blond bob. “No. That’s not entirely true. We’ve run out of room.” She silenced an interruption from the audience with a flat palm. “Our cities are overpopulated. Our suburbs are overpopulated. But”—now a smile unfolded on her face—“there’s a bright side to everything. A solution.”

  One of the younger reporters asked what that might be.

  “Farmland,” Malcolm said, nodding next to me.

  “Our farmland,” Madeleine answered.

  Malcolm tossed another handful of popcorn into his mouth. “That was my idea, actually.”

  I looked at him. “What was your idea?”

  He shushed me with a wave of his hand. “Listen. She’s about to explain it.”

  A close-up of Madeleine Sinclair, now the secretary of education, filled the screen. “We’ve decided the best route forward is to give our children—all of our children—the room they need to grow.”

  I let her drone on, talking about how the new yellow schools would have more space, more amenities, more activities, more teachers, more everything. The way Madeleine put it, they sounded more like vacation-lands than schools.

  The only downside was that they wouldn’t be close to home.

  “Families will adjust,” Madeleine said, fielding another question from the press room.

  I moved the bowl of popcorn to the table and stood up, blocking the television from Malcolm’s view. “They’re boarding these kids? Where? In Iowa?”

  Malcolm stared at me. “Well, yeah, El. And other places around the country. Wherever there’s room. Think of it as a kind of Outward Bound. Get the kids out of the crowded city and into the fresh air. They’ll thrive.”

  “More like Downward Bound,” I said, not holding back my sarcasm. “Anyway, what you mean is wherever land is cheap, right? And you’re telling me this was your idea?”

  I went to bed early that night, hoping I’d be asleep before Malcolm came in.

  Seven

  I put Malcolm and Madeleine and the whole stinking Department of Education behind me, and now I’m back on what used to be Sarah Green’s neat brick path. It looks like a land mine went off.

  “You said she was doing fine,” Sarah screams. “Fine! Every single report we got said her Q was almost perfect.”

  “It was perfect, actually,” I said.

  “Well, it isn’t now. For some reason. Now she’s on her way to fucking Kansas?” She laughs, but it’s not a funny laugh. “Kansas. To a state school with a year-round schedule.” Every one of her words is the verbal equivalent of screaming caps. I don’t even try to interrupt.

  “Oh, right, they tell us we can come visit once a quarter. Do you have any idea how much leave David and I have to take to fly to Kansas four times a year? And that’s if we can get the extra time off work. That’s if we want to see our own Qs take a nosedive, which means Jonathan’s Q gets hit, and he’s already in a green school. For a day, Elena. One single day with our daughter. They used to send the kids home for Christmas. Thanksgiving every other year. Summer.”

  “You were on the board when the new schedules were approved,” I say.

  Sarah stutters and goes silent. Then, she turns and makes for her front door. Her hair is in wet ropes down her back, and the terry-cloth robe is as sodden as a drowned cat. She spins fast and looks at me, hard. “I guess you’ll have more time for your top two percent now, El. Good luck with them.”

  Her words hit me like a slap in the face, but it’s a reactionary slap, a quid pro quo return on the slap I’d just served her.

  I remember when the schedule changes happened. Another night on the sofa with Malcolm, another press conference with Madeleine Sinclair in her blue power suit and blond bob and that saccharine smile that makes you feel like you’re in kindergarten all over again and need shit explained to you in small words. I remember the reduction in vacation time being another one of Malcolm’s brainchildren.

  I also remember parents like Sarah and David Green supporting it.

  As little as five years ago, participation in the tier system wasn’t compulsory, not exactly. Instead, a guideline came from Washington. A suggestion that parents pay close attention to their children’s individual needs. This was followed by another, and then by another dozen, all of them coldly clinical and mathematical.

  Parents of children with Q scores below eight points are encouraged to consider yellow schools.

  Top-tier systems may not be in your offspring’s best interest. Don’t push them!

  A panel of two dozen experts has concluded that tier separation benefits everyone.

  Of course, there was pushback—PTA meetings where infuriated parents stood up and interrupted the barrage of suggestions, threatening to homeschool their seventh-graders rather than subject them to the constant pressure of tests. The opt-out culture of parents storming from assemblies and plucking their kids from school had started to take a tenuous foothold.

  But only in some neighborhoods. Not in ours. Not in Sarah Green’s.

  And then the PTA meetings were supplanted by board meetings. The guidelines became directives; the directives included fines for truancy, taxes disguised as penalties, trickle-down effects on siblings’ Q s
cores. Homeschooling requirements became more restrictive than gun laws, and the forms were ever-changing. A line left blank or a code entered incorrectly meant a red Declined—not subject to appeal stamp from the school superintendent’s office. I wonder sometimes where they found all that red ink.

  Women like Sarah Green had their own way, campaigning for a different type of pressure, pressure that came in the form of leaflets with Do not hire this unfit parent! and No benefits for the antisocial! With enough Sarah Greens on your side, who needs laws?

  I stand in the rain under my umbrella and watch Sarah, shoulders slumped under the weight of grief and confusion and hatred, go into her house. She turns back once to hiss at me, “Those yellow buses? They’re not supposed to come here, Elena. Not here.” The front door slams shut, and the lock clicks, telling me I needn’t bother taking those few steps onto the porch and knocking, so I walk back to my car, curse at the defogger for the tenth time this morning, and curse at everyone for taking all of this super-child garbage too far.

  As I drive away, I look back one more time at the house. Somehow I don’t think there will be much of a garden in the Greens’ yard next year.

  But then I think, Maybe she deserves it.

  Eight

  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 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. So what if some kid from the city gets shipped off to the equivalent of a vocational school, if a country boy from Nebraska doesn’t make the cut to his state university? These are things that happen to Them, never to Us. If I didn’t share a house and a bed with Malcolm, and if I didn’t worry constantly over Freddie, I’m not sure I’d even know they were happening. After all, how many people watch Madeleine Sinclair’s State of Education addresses? The president barely draws fifteen percent of the population for those big talks he gives, so I’m guessing Queen Madeleine gets next to nothing.

  As I wind my car down the GW Parkway and cross the bridge into the city, I wonder if we’ve all been playing the old out of sight, out of mind game. I wonder if we’ll keep playing it until the game pieces start coming into view, shifting from Their playing boards to Our playing boards. Like they did this morning, when Sarah Green’s perfect teenager was demoted to a pawn.

  I’m late anyway, so I pull over in Georgetown, hold my phone up to the meter, and pay for fifteen minutes’ rental of prime real estate parking. Ch-ching! All done. Somewhere in the radio waves above my head or the fiber-optic lines below my feet, fifty cents move from a bank account in one state to another account in a different state. No one even needs to empty the coins.

  At Starbucks, my caffe latte is waiting at the mobile order pickup counter. Two-percent milk, half decaf, light foam, one sugar. Grande sized, whatever that means. The barista-robot chirps an automated Have a great day, Elena! Hope your drink is perfect! as I pick up the coffee. See you tomorrow morning! she says. Sometimes, the barista-robot is a he. They like to mix things up.

  There’s a girl at the window, tucked up on one of those deep sofa things with lots of pillows, legs folded under her, reading. She’s almost young enough to be in high school, but she’s here in Starbucks, and she doesn’t look like a dropout or a truant. One of those career-guide bibles that’s supposed to tell you what you want to be when you grow up is open on the table, pages facing down, next to a pile of college guides and SAT prep manuals teetering by her coffee, partially obscuring her face. She has a brightness in her eyes, the kind I see in my best students, but I know she doesn’t stand a chance in the college admissions game.

  She’s using a yellow ID card as a bookmark, and no college has admitted a third-tier student for at least a few years, according to Malcolm’s latest dinnertime report.

  “Hi,” she says, catching my eye when I reach the door.

  “Hi.”

  “I was top in my class two years ago,” she says. “Numero uno. Gave a valedictorian speech and everything. I mean, it wasn’t the best school. Kids from my neighborhood don’t go to the best schools. But still. I figured being first would count for something.”

  I’m so late. But I let the door swing shut and stay. “It’s hard now.”

  She closes the Barron’s bible with its lists of statistics for everything—admissions, average SAT scores, demographics, nearby bars, number of athletic fields, all that quantifiable shit. “What do you do?”

  “I teach.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where?”

  “Davenport.”

  The girl sweeps her eyes over me, taking it all in. The suit, the strappy heels, the calfskin purse slung over my shoulder. “Figures. You look like one of them.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  She laughs. “White. Rich. Perfect. Bet you have a super-high Q.”

  “It’s okay.” Actually, it’s 9.73, but I don’t want to tell her this.

  “Anyway. I’m trying one more time for college. After that, I don’t know what. Used to have a job here, but, well, you know.” Her hand moves in a game-show-hostess gesture. “Lost it a few months ago. I still hang out, though.” She points at the books. “Reading’s not a real popular hobby in my hood.”

  There’s a lull while I wait for the right words to come to me, and another lull when I realize there are no right words for this girl or this situation. I blurt out a lame “What do you want to major in?”

  “Math,” she says, closing the book. “I’m wicked at math. Go ahead, ask me anything.”

  My phone pings. It’s Rita from school. “I’m sorry—I’m really late this morning.”

  She looks at the coffee in my hand. “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it in all the ways, knowing she doesn’t believe me, and I open the door.

  Outside, the automated street sweepers suck leaves and twigs and debris from Thursday-night college kids off the pavement on the other side of Wisconsin Avenue. The two cars whose owners forgot about street-cleaning day get tickets. Not paper tickets, but in a few minutes one hundred dollars will move between bank accounts for the green Jeep, and another hundred for the yellow Mini Cooper with racing stripes. The parking enforcement drones and meter maid trons move on, up Wisconsin, in search of their prey.

  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. Click, buzz, plop. It’s supposed to be progress, and I guess we’ll be seeing more of it. Who knows? Before I retire, they might even automate teaching.

  “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. When I pull into the underground parking garage and let another machine scan my car’s decal, greeting me with a sunny, if electronic, Good morning, Dr. Fairchild, I wonder where all the yellow school kids will be in another ten years. I wonder what we’ll do with the people who aren’t necessary anymore.

  Nine

  The high school where I teach isn’t very different from the high school I attended almost a quarter of a century ago. There are rooms, teachers, books, and students. It’s the students, I think, as I se
t up books and attendance sheets on the desk in my classroom and pull the blinds up to give us a view of something green, who are too similar. 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. As my students come in for one last period of pretest cramming—what we’re supposed to call a final review, but what everyone knows is an umpteenth-hour cram session—they’re all the same. Straight, mostly white, athletic. And I’ve never seen such a thing as a trans-friendly bathroom.

  Testing days are both rushed and slow. This morning, we rush. I take my classes through their review, getting them ready for the SOLs. 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 and a ghost-pale boy named Antonio who kicked ass at chemistry but couldn’t hack it in number theory. Maybe the empty desks are here as a carrot.

  Or a stick.

  Some teachers have it worse than I do. Nancy Rodriguez, for instance, who teaches advanced programming, lost two students after last month’s tests. I’ve heard Dr. Chen’s chemistry class has dwindled from two dozen to a scant fifteen. Talk in the teachers’ lounge happens in whispers around them. Nancy’s kids better pass the lab module or she’ll find herself teaching in a green school. Chen is pulling her hair out because of the failures. And so on. As the students advance, the sieve gets finer.