The lowest rank were the favelos, poor people who lived by either stealing or begging. Nobody knew how many of them there were. Some people said that, in America, it was half the population.

The next step up were the Gaters, people who lived in gated communities. At first they just built communities with their own shopping malls and restaurants away from the inner cities, places you needed a car to get to. Then they started issuing special credit cards if you wanted to buy anything in their communities. And finally they put up gates and armed guards. My neighborhood, mi barrio loco, had gates even though no one had much money and the dried-up old men guarding them were mostly useless. Still, they wanted to keep the favelos out because they’d steal whatever little we had.

Mama worked two jobs to buy an apartment just for the two of us. I knew she was working herself to death. When she died, my family bought our apartment and gave me the little place I have now rent-free.

So there are the favelos, then the Gaters, then those invisible people who seem to have everything. The New Yorker magazine always has articles about how unfair it is for some tiny percentage of the population to own everything. But just knowing something doesn’t help you to do anything about it when you’re too busy trying to cover your own butt. You saw what was going on, and then after a while—maybe your mind closed down or something, I don’t know—you stopped seeing it.

Nobody saw the whole school thing coming. Well, maybe some people saw it, but I sure didn’t.

It started when the government announced that it was going to increase the educational opportunities for everybody and make the whole system fairer. Then we heard that everyone was going to get the new supertablets and individual instruction in any field you wanted. Free. That was, like, really great. All these trucks started pulling up and unloading boxes of electronic stuff and passing it out like it was free candy or something.

What came to my mind was that there were so many around that the favelos wouldn’t steal them. The tablets were good. They had all the connections you needed, but the apps were just so-so. If you knew what you were doing, you could fix the apps, and I did. There were also some weird things going on in the registry. They spooked me out, but I fixed them, too. What I couldn’t fix, what blindsided me, was when they closed the schools. I was almost fifteen.

What did you need schools for if the curriculum apps were available? You could go over and over the material until you got it in your head, and the FAQ sections were intuitive and generally on the money. I took advanced math courses and dug them, but I missed hanging out in school. The word on the street was that the higher-level Gaters were hiring private tutors. The rest of us were on our own. It was nothing new, once you thought about it. It just was smack up in our faces for the first time.