As we walk by the different classes—language arts, humanities, art, science, Latin—students fill each room. Lined up and orderly, all attentive while the teacher speaks. Part of me wants to join them. To be . . . normal, I guess. There are days I wish I fit in better and wonder what is wrong with me. It’s like I have this voice that wants to tell me I’m broken. All right, sometimes that voice sounds like Mrs. Horner. Then there are the other voices, like Ms. Erickson.

Ms. Erickson is who I would have for homeroom if I weren’t in Special Ed. Ms. Erickson is a math teacher. She always wears a huge smile on her face. She loves urging her students to talk in class. It didn’t matter what her lesson plan was if a good idea popped up for the class to discuss.

Mrs. Fitzgerald left her alone because her students performed extremely well on the same standardized tests Ms. Erickson hates so much. That’s the other thing about rules: success trumps everything. No one cares if you break them as long as you perform well.

Which is how Marcel flies under everyone’s radar.

Ms. Erickson’s class bustles with activity. The kids chat in noisy clusters, passing candy and money back and forth. Ms. Erickson perches against her desk like some grand, observant owl. She dresses like she finds her clothes at Goodwill. All her shirts have large, baggy sleeves. Whenever she walks between desks, all the boys perk up like prairie dogs trying to stare down them. Her hair bleeds from gray roots to darker hair to blond tips. She and Mr. Blackmon exchange a few words before he leaves. Ms. Erickson slides around her desk and punches my name into her laptop.

“Thelonius, you’re doing well in your work overall. Your actual class work is exemplary.” She has the melodic voice of a bird high on hope. “Too bad we have those behavioral issues or you’d be doing perfect. We’d love to be able to have you in class.”

“What are you guys doing today?” I observe the room while Ms. Erickson gathers my work. There are three or four centers of activity, each group congregating around a central person—Marcel Washington. She circles the room, checking in on each group, but not dealing directly with any of the activity.

In fourth grade, she experimented with the nickname Marcy, but it never suited her, so she gave up on it. Her dad, a black dude, is a scientist who often visits her class to talk about his work. Her mom, a white lady, is the president of the PTA who also bakes a mean batch of brownies come school fund-raising season. If Marcel came from money, she never acted like it. Marcel always received straight As. By all reports, she was the best-behaved kid in the class. But I know better. The quiet ones are the ones everyone really has to watch out for. You see, an obvious stickup thug might get a wallet or two. Put them in bankers’ suits and they were robbing folks for millions on Wall Street.