Heft by Liz Moore

mom has always been too impressed with Pells. When she was better she talked about it quietly, as if it were more important than anyplace else. When I was about eleven Newsweek named Pells High one of the ten best public schools in the country. It’s a large school with small classes. Two thousand kids and not a class over twenty. Good sports programs and teachers, labs with new technology, a huge impressive library. The day that article was published my mother came home and called her mother, who was still alive at the time and basically the only person she talked to besides me, and said: Did you hear the news about us?
    It made me ill.
    When she was still working her boss was Dr. Greene, the vice principal in charge of eleventh grade. To this day Dr. Greene sees me in the hall and asks me in a low concerned voice how my mother is, which makes me want to punch him in his mouth. She worked for him for a really long time. He has never once called her since she left two years ago.
    I knew everything about him and his life before I even met him. My mother used to come home and tell me all about the Greenes: Dr. Greene’s wife Marjorie, and their two sons, Brian and Brent, fraternal twins. I know he golfs on the weekends and plays poker on Wednesdays. I know he has a boat at the marina and that the boat probably comes from his family money or his wife’s money because he does not make that much. I know he reads voraciously, my mother’s phrase. For Christmas every year she used to give him something that she carefully picked out, related to one of his four hobbies, and he would give her something generic and edible, a fruit basket or a cheese-of-the-month club membership. I’ve met all the Greenes at one point or another, from being dragged to awards dinners or staff appreciation picnics when I was a kid. I always hated Brian and Brent, who are five years younger than me and truly horrible kids. They used to whine and try to make me play boring games with them like Go Fish. They’re little kids, my mother would say, so be nice.
    Dr. Greene drives a red convertible, which is a ridiculous car for a vice principal to have.
    This past Christmas my mother made him a card and asked me to give it to him, I’m not kidding, a homemade card. In crayon. I didn’t even read it. I threw it out as soon as I got to school. On my way home that day I stopped at a CVS and bought her a box of chocolates and a card and said they were from Dr. Greene.
    I am a senior now and have acquired invaluable knowledge of how to do things over the years. But on my first day of freshman year I had no idea. I showed up wearing red glossy basketball shorts past my knees, a plain white T-shirt that hung off my shoulders, and Nikes.
    As soon as we arrived I knew I’d gotten it wrong. I was slumped in my seat while my mother was driving. She kept saying Are you excited? Are you nervous? Are you excited? but I wasn’t speaking to her that day. She drove through the student parking lot and the first thing I noticed was that every car in it was nicer than hers. The second thing I noticed was a boy who was standing with his elbows on the roof of his BMW, watching us go by. Holt! Holt! someone yelled, and it was his name, and he whirled around and yelled back. He was dressed differently than I was. His cap was blue and ratty on the brim, a farmboy’s frayed hat with dark shaggy hair beneath. His shirt looked to me like a businessman’s, a blue long-sleeved oxford shirt that I could imagine a banker wearing. His shorts were plaid and fitted him. He was wearing flip-flops. To school. In Yonkers only girls had done that.
    What’s wrong, Kelly? my mother said, and I said Nothing, God, but everything was wrong. Who I was meant something different here than it did at home. At home I was in charge of all the boys at my school. I am not exaggerating, it was true. I was in charge of them as surely as if I had been elected. I told them things to do and they did them. I