Adequate Yearly Progress by Roxanna Elden

Author:Roxanna Elden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2020-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24

KAYTEE’S MOTHER WAS calling from the kitchen, but Kaytee stood where she was, glaring at her father. “See? That’s what I mean. Why does it matter what color they are?”

“Hey, I can’t help it if they were black.” Her father reclined in his chair, hands up as if to show the situation was out of his control. “If it was a group of white kids skipping in line, cursing, and throwing popcorn, I would have said white kids.”

“Would you have?”

Silence.

“I mean it. Do you really think you would mention their race if they were white?”

“Well”—Roy Mahoney’s eyelids drooped as if he were expressing something so obvious it didn’t take much energy—“it so happens they weren’t.”

It had seemed like a good idea, at the time, to suggest that her parents see How the Status Quo Stole Christmas; some of her father’s favorite rants were about worthless unionized bureaucrats in the public sector, which meant the film promised a small patch of common ground for table talk at Christmas Eve dinner. Maybe it would even help her parents understand why she was so passionate about educational inequity—or at least why she couldn’t stand Mr. Weber, with all his union rhetoric in the teachers’ lounge. How could Kaytee have known, when she made the recommendation, that they would end up at a theater with a group of black teenagers who happened to be behaving badly and that this would loom larger in Robin and Roy Mahoney’s memories than anything about the actual film?

Then again, this proved her point exactly. “See what I mean? Imagine living in a country where every time you do anything wrong, your race is mentioned. You can’t just be a kid at a movie theater making noise or skipping in line. You have to be the black kid. And rather than make any effort to understand your worldview, those in the majority just write off your whole culture as—”

“Kaytee! I said come help me carry this pie.”

Kaytee gave an exasperated sigh as she headed into the kitchen. Her mother handed her a freshly baked apple pie, along with a hard stare that said all she wanted was to have a nice holiday dinner with Kaytee; Kaytee’s brother, Kyle; and Aunt Susan and avoid another scene like the one at Thanksgiving, and was that too much to ask?

“Sorry,” Kaytee muttered. “I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

Fine. She would try. Kaytee returned to the dining room and placed the pie on the table, smiling sweetly at everyone except her father. “Pie, anyone?”

But Roy, who had not been in the kitchen to receive his wife’s warning look, wasn’t done. “How about this: Maybe after a long week of rolling up my sleeves and breaking my back at work, I want to spend my hard-earned money on a movie and enjoy it. Maybe that’s my right. Or are people like me not allowed to have rights anymore?”

People like me, as her father used the term, were white men with white-collar jobs who used manual-labor imagery to demonstrate their work ethic.

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