I can hardly believe it. My mom might go to the beauty parlor on her own, but not if she can get someone to go with her. I’m curious now, and I take a peek at the books on Sara’s bed. I don’t know what to make of them. They are not romances, not thrillers, not titles from the high school reading list.

“Is this what they read in crip-pled school?”

“This is what I read in crippled school. Most people in my crippled school can’t read; it’s not exactly expected. These are from the library at my father’s college.”

I pick up the black book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, and drop it in my lap. Sara launches in. “This is by a terrific Marxist historian, and he’s explaining how we came to look at the world the way we do. Like, you know, the idea that politics should reflect the choices of individual people, that contracts define relationships, markets distribute goods, the state’s job is to protect property. All that shit.”

I turn the pages with my knuckles and try not to crunch the soft cream paper. On some pages, the footnotes take up more space than the text. It looks excruciatingly boring. “Why are you in-ter-es-ted in all that?”

She leans forward on her folded legs. “Mainly because I’m trying to figure out being crippled. Why are we the dregs? Why are we the outcasts? Because we deserve it? I don’t think so. It’s because of injustice. It’s a failure of capitalism. Capitalism wants individualism, self-reliance, competition. If you can’t compete, you starve. None of those things work for us.”

I shouldn’t encourage her, but I’m a little curious. “Are you say-ing we can ne-ver fit in?”

“Not truly. But in not fitting in, we’re like the vast majority of people under capitalism. They don’t fit in, but they don’t know it. Marx talked about the alienating power of capitalism, which means most people become misfits, foreigners in their own countries. We try to fit in; we think we can fit in by imitating those who control things, but it’s an illusion. False consciousness.”

“Say what?” Denise teases. She’s just walking in with Margie, fresh from the showers.

Sara won’t be deflated. “Listen, it’s real. We come to accept the views of our oppressors. We think there’s something wrong with ourselves. It’s like black people thinking they need to change the way they talk, lose their culture, get more white. They’re fooling themselves. They need to ask why they can’t be black AND equal.”

“‘You can’t put a square peg in a round hole,’” Margie says. “You seen that on TV?”

“Yeah, Margie, you got it!”