When Brianna got the job, she brought in art posters, books, a globe, an entire set of encyclopedias. She purchased bright rugs and a ficus plant. She sought donations from local businesses, and she spent plenty of her own money, too, including her grandparents’ birthday check. And it was worth it. The classroom is now colorful and inviting, the girls are engaged in daily journaling and simple science experiments. She even negotiated a deal with the president of the community college to allow those girls who receive their GEDs before they age out to take up to five credits’ worth of classes. Brianna has created a safe and positive learning environment.
The Smart Starts! schedule is flexible, to allow for the necessities of feeding and child care. The curriculum, derived from research-based best practices, leans heavily on self-reflection, the idea being that this particular population could use practice in stopping to reflect. In the morning, the focus is on academics and GED test prep, two pursuits that often seem in direct opposition to each other; the afternoons are for parenting-and life-skills. It’s a student-driven curriculum, at least in name. Students give presentations on aspects of parenthood: early literacy, benefits of breast-feeding, introducing solid foods. Contraception. Today, Friday afternoon, class will end with their weekly Community Meeting.
The girls have surprised Brianna. She expected more behavioral problems, certainly problems more serious than gum-chewing and cell phone use. She expected these girls to be surly and oppositional. Espa?ola being Espa?ola, she expected heroin addicts （though many of those kids are referred to the city’s single overburdened addiction clinic）。 She expected, frankly, that since they were having sex so young, these girls had to be bad. But, with only a single, infuriating exception, they’re not. Brianna is amazed at how willing they are to engage in even the most inane group activities, activities that Brianna feels embarrassed even proposing, but that are part of the curriculum suggested by experts. Nutrition collages, for example: on the classroom wall are poster boards covered in examples of Always Foods and Sometimes Foods.
Their stories pain her, actually keep her up at night—the histories of abuse and family violence and addiction. Brianna doesn’t tell the girls about the studies that haunt her as she gazes over their carefully made-up faces in the classroom, showing that maternal stress can flood the bloodstream with hormones that poison the prenatal environment, making the babies over their lifetimes more prone to anxiety and depression, more likely to be born early and underweight and to die early and overweight.
So she teaches them meditation techniques. She drills them in power stances: legs planted apart, shoulders flung back, arms akimbo. She shows videos of the little monkeys desolate in their cages with their wire mothers and enjoins them to hold their babies, talk to their babies, sing to their babies, and the girls actually take her at her word. Just last week, from the bathroom stall, Brianna overheard Tabitha narrating her makeup routine to her belly.
She’s a good person, Brianna. She tries!
I believe every young person is capable and precious. Ha-freaking-ha, thinks Brianna now, as from the staff room window she watches Lizette Maes give a blow job to a banana. Brianna notes that Lizette has opted not to peel the banana before pleasuring it. Good, thinks Brianna, I hope the pesticides make her puke.
In the courtyard, the other girls surround Lizette, leaning in, spluttering over their juice boxes. Even through the closed window, Brianna can hear their boisterous laughter. It’s impressive, really, a full-body performance: the girl straddles the picnic bench and her eyes are rolled back ecstatically, big breasts heaving in a more or less convincing imitation of arousal. On the ground, from her infant carrier, Lizette’s three-month-old daughter Mercedes peers up at her mother with cross-eyed fascination. Up and down the length of the banana Lizette runs her tongue, encircles the black tip with languid caresses.
Brianna can’t stand this girl. As far as she’s concerned, Lizette is neither capable nor precious, and to be honest, Brianna can’t muster much sorrow for what the girl has gone through—incest, rape, poverty, god knows what other horrors—a fact that disturbs her enormously. Lizette is unpleasant and aggressive, with a sly gleam in her gorgeous, heavy green eyes. Mercedes, Brianna feels sorry for, but to be brutally honest, she’s even written off the baby as a lost cause.