Making It

I was coming up from the fitness room; she, down from the racquetball courts. Her eyes were even more impossibly enormous for the generous application of kohl, but I recognized her immediately. It was 'Ria.' A few years ago she was an 8th grader who'd somehow managed to appeal to everyone: teachers showered her with praise, other girls befriended her, the shy boys stammered and the bad boys flirted with her whenever they got the chance.

I got to be her teacher for a year, and in that year her reading level grew by 17 months, by dint of her own hard work (yes. I know in the last post I blasted exactly this kind of educational measurement. What're you gonna do.)

Thing is, she shouldn't have been so successful. She lived with her grandparents because both parents were in jail, apparently for many years. She had a significant reading disability, mostly because she didn't understand auditory input at all. She should have been failing everything; instead, she shone. Her father's an artist; she loved to draw, especially tattoo-like pictures of roses and pretty girls, which she gave away to anyone who asked. When she walked across the stage in the middle school continuation ceremony, I was one of many who jumped up to applaud.

I saw her again a couple of years later, and this time snapped a picture for my portrait series. It was a very different Ria. Her makeup looked several days old. Her clothes were ripped. I found her sitting in the hall, waiting for her little sister's teacher conference to end.

"My boyfriend's in jail now," she shared, elaborately casual. And then something about high school girls and fights in locker rooms. It was all very gang-like, and I thought, well, maybe she's getting ready to follow her parents' tracks. Maybe the next time I see her, she'll have a toddler in tow, and cigarettes on her breath, and the light in her eyes will be stolen by the crudity of her life.

I was wrong. Ria, this afternoon, wore skin-tight, shiny lime jeans and t-shirt. Her hair, still gorgeous but bound up, and her athletic shoes, were the only concession to the racquetball game. School was good, she said; next year, she'll start trying out different jobs to see what she wants to do and is good at. I knew about the program, I said; what is she dreaming of?

"I'd like to be a sign interpreter," she shared a little shyly, the way I'd have said, at her age, that I wanted to be an archaeologist. Only, her ambition was a lot more marketable.

"You'd be so good at that," I enthused, "you're such a visual person!"

"Well, we'll see. It depends on how I do on the English test."

She took my breath away, such a young lady, so mature. She's figured life out.