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.”

She’d scoffed at his advice, offended and horrified, but the years kept on, and with them budget cuts. Soon twenty-five students a class became thirty, then thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five. Thirty-five. Larger every year, and every year less money than before. Nothing she could do about any of it—not about the splotches of black mold growing on the bathroom ceilings, their textbooks ripped and outdated and never enough, winters with the heating system broken, students shaking from cold, from hunger, from fear of what awaited outside their brick walls, and every week came her colleague Mrs. Whither with her collection envelope asking for donations to pay off student lunch debt. Like clockwork she paused at each of the classrooms, searching for those who’d yet to turn their backs and lock their doors.

More dropped out. Mira learned their names and promptly never saw them again, replaced with new faces to remember, and each one gone, her failure. She sometimes saw the lost ones in the alleys near the school, lurking, avoiding eye contact before running down their neverland streets.

She should have known better than to say what she did to Javion, but this job, this work, was too much sometimes. She’d tried to ignore the way it was breaking her, but with every student absence, with every shrug and smirk, she harkened back to what Mr. Billings had told her. The administration conducted a formal review but he went back to teaching shortly after. Javion was suspended for a week but never came back. He was old enough to drop out if he wanted, and Mira assumed that he did.

Mira wanted to look away from the gang but couldn’t. Any other day she might have kept going, a quick glance before focusing her attention back to the road. She wondered what made her pause. What made her look this time, stare even, to notice what she’d before ignored?