Even if TikTok didn’t save her, in two years, she would be out of this place. She would graduate and collect her diploma and take her straight A’s to Gallaudet, or RIT, or hell, even Ohio State or Wilberforce. Her goodbye to this place, to all of Colson, would be unsentimental, as unremarkable as the city itself. She would learn as much as she could and do whatever she could to dismantle all that she knew to be broken, brick by brick, by hand if she had to. She would keep the bricks, though. She would use them to build something new.
february found the emptying of the dorms before holiday breaks to be one of her more difficult tasks as headmistress. It was a chaotic affair, frenetic energy of students and parents eager to leave, their begrudging the security sign-out measures that slowed them down. Privately, February agreed with their frustration—she knew all her families by name—but the protocol had come straight from Swall, districtwide operating procedure post-Columbine–Virginia Tech–Sandy Hook–Parkland. Even the oldest of today’s students wouldn’t remember a time before.
Not everyone was in a hurry to leave RVSD, though. There were the good-naturedly late families—those with too much on their plates in the way of work or children, or Deaf clans like the Workmans, who ran on what the community called Deaf Standard Time, a reliable forty-five minutes late for almost any occasion. February scanned the crowd and saw no sign of the Workmans. Austin was probably still in his room, knowing better than to come out and stand waiting on the curb.
On regular weekends it was easier—kids who couldn’t or didn’t want to return home could get standing permission to go to a friend’s instead. But for a holiday, those permission slips were null, meaning students who hadn’t established a bus route with their districts had to be retrieved by their parents. No surprise that these children were also usually the school’s most vulnerable. Here were the screaming kindergarteners and first graders who had found language in the classroom and tantrumed ostentatiously at the thought of going home. February felt both protective of these children and an acerbic mix of pity and anger toward the parents, who looked at her forlorn, as if this was fate and there was nothing they could possibly do to change it. You could try! she wanted to shout, though she knew it was judgmental of her to assume they weren’t, in their way. The most she ever did was remind them of the school’s free friends and family ASL classes. But usually she said nothing, did her best to keep her head down and attend to logistics: directing traffic, dispatching deep-cleaning crews, or fondling her walkie-talkie in a performance of security.
Here were the foster children whose erratic placements meant no bus would come, waiting for some harried social worker to turn up. And then there were the “Malloys”—those who neglected or sometimes downright refused to retrieve their children. It had been years since she had seen the actual Malloys, but they had been the first such people February had encountered in her career, and the name had become her personal umbrella term for the kind of parent who would rather not have their kid. The original Malloys had a lovely, wide-eyed boy named Jamie, whose black hair stood on end—as if he needed another attribute to distinguish him from his fair and freckled family. The first couple of pickups, she’d thought it was an accident. It was not yet in her nature to assume that a parent did not have a child’s best interests in mind. But by the end of Jamie’s first year, when the Malloys had failed to materialize to collect their son and his belongings for summer break, February realized they were doing it on purpose. She’d called and called the numbers on his emergency contact card, waited until 5:00 p.m., long after everyone else had gone—it had been a half day. Then she called the police.
The deputy sheriff had turned up to take Jamie to the station, where the Malloys, she’d later heard, had been threatened with Child Protective Services before he was released into their custody for the summer. The next Thanksgiving it happened again. February watched helplessly while Jamie was foisted off on various relatives before finally applying to emancipate himself. She learned via the Deaf world’s gossip trellis that he now lived in Rochester and had become an electrician. By all accounts, he was happy. By all accounts, this was exceptional.
This year’s Malloys were the Schneiders, their daughter Emily pacing the length of the curb with increasing speed as the crowd waned, obviously nervous that she would be the last one standing, again.
Like the Malloys, the Schneiders had another kid, a hearing one, which made things worse for the contrast it provided. While Jamie had swirled through the foster system, his siblings stayed in the home. For her part, Emily was nearly always dressed in her older brother’s enormous clothes, which was no crime, of course, but it added insult to injury when combined with other persistent parental efforts to forget her. By 5:00 p.m., February was in a dark place, mulling over how the Schneiders’ propensity for neglect was particularly irrational given that Emily spoke well and was one of the most successful CI users at the school. As if these things were value-addeds. As if a child who could be made “hearing” enough was more worthy of love.
She pulled her cell from her back pocket and made the call to the sheriff, admonished the part of her brain that would even entertain the ranking of children. But whether or not she banished the thoughts from her own head did little to help Emily, or any of the kids whose parents’ affections were distributed on a sliding scale tethered to how well said kid could perform normalcy. By the time she hung up, her rage had cooled and soured into despair at the thought of what might happen to Emily, and all the others like her, next year, when her parents were forced to care for her full-time.
Come on, February said after a while. We can wait in my office. I’ve got cookies.
She heard sirens in the distance as she walked the girl inside. Though she had called the nonemergency line, she assumed it was the sheriff heading their way. Must be a slow day in Colson County.
i said, how was school? If I’m signing you can’t i-g-n-o-r-e me!
Charlie was a little shocked by how adept her father was becoming at sign language. His vocabulary was limited, but conceptually it seemed to come easy to him, and he got by on fingerspelling or talking around a word just fine. In their night class, he’d already surpassed a couple of the other parents who’d been at it longer, moms for whom the effort of learning a new language was obviously challenging. So Charlie was glad that her father was making progress, but also angry that he hadn’t tried to learn sooner. She wondered what he’d been afraid of—failure? his wife?—and what her childhood might have looked like if she’d had a bastion of language, however small, to which she could have run when she needed it.
Sorry, was thinking.
Daydreaming, you mean.
More like drowning in a pool of her own mortification, Charlie thought, the pizza outing’s events still replaying in her head. She’d been too cowardly to say anything much to Kayla about what had happened between her roommate and Austin, beyond apologizing for her own dearth of knowledge about Black ASL. Kayla had brushed her off, saying, Girl, you don’t know ASL either, and they’d both laughed a little, but that had been it. Charlie felt contrite on Austin’s behalf—after all, she’d been the one to cajole Kayla into coming along in the first place.