Finally, having had enough, one day she told him to hold back after class. The school had instituted a new policy that students couldn’t carry their bookbags around, so he stood in front of her holding the mess of his binder and textbook, papers sticking out of both.

“I got to go to my next class. If I’m late I’ll get detention and—”

“It’s okay, I’ll write you a note,” she interrupted. “Look, Javion—” She stopped, and took a minute to think about what she wanted to say, how best to say it. “You’ve got to participate more. I’m trying and I need you to try too.”

He’d shrugged her off. Even after she was trying to reach out and help. He kept looking over her shoulder toward the door, shifting his feet, impatient for her to get this talk over with. “Is that it? Because, lady, I hafta go.”

Lady. His casual disrespect made her want to scream. “Have to go,” she corrected. “We just had a lesson on this. You don’t remember?”

Javion ignored her question. He was waiting her out, hoping she’d get through with what she wanted to say and then he’d be free. He was treating her as if she was someone meant to suffer through and not the other way around. “And no, that’s not it,” she’d snapped. She hadn’t meant to, but there was something about him—it wasn’t like he was the first apathetic student she’d ever had, but he unnerved her more than the others. Javion met her eyes and she thought the corner of his mouth upturned a little, into a slight smirk, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Don’t you want to be better than this? Do you care at all? Because from what I see it looks like you don’t. I want to teach students who give a shit about their education.”

“Whatever,” he said, and that was it. Nothing else. She didn’t know what else to do, what else to say, so she sighed and wrote him a note for his next class and told herself to forget it.

A few days later Mr. Billings called the police and she learned that Javion’s brother had been killed at the start of the year. That shouldn’t have mattered, but people needed the reason anyway. Couldn’t you see something was wrong? they asked. Why didn’t you see?

“How was I supposed to know?” Mr. Billings responded to them all, as if his ignorance was enough for his absolution, but the entire school ran on disavowal. During her first year, he’d pulled her aside. “Look, you’re doing too much. You’ll burn out,” he told her. “You can’t help all of these kids, especially the ones who don’t even want it. My advice is to wait it out. You’ll be left with the good ones, the ones you can help. Focus on who you know you can change. Education triage.”