push The teacher’s clothes hang off her. She is what the girl’s mother calls a “Skinny Minnie.” Even the girl’s sister dresses better. She gets her clothing from Lerner’s, which has not yet become New York & Company . When the sister is away at work, the girl slides the magazines out from her sister’s hiding place and stares at the models, especially the two black ones. The women are lovely in a way the girl didn’t know black women could be. Her mother is not beautiful, neither is her sister, though her sister probably could be if she tried a little harder. When the teacher calls her back after releasing the class into the schoolyard, which is a parking lot for the teachers in the morning (they have to clear their cars out after lunch to make room for the kids to play at recess), the girl does not fully grasp that she has done something wrong. The teacher lets all the other kids go and then says, “Not you.” “Did you push Colleen down the last flight of steps on the way out of the building?” Mrs. Greenberg asks in such a way that the girl Push | 65 thinks it entirely possible she is merely curious. After all, the stairwells are painted a deep dark green, which makes it hard to see. The girl wears thick neon laces in her Adidas and she follows her laces down the stairwell, using them as a light to keep her from crashing into the kid in front of her, unless she wants to. Colleen’s place is right in front of her. They are both five feet two inches, but the girl has more hair, which makes her seem taller, so Colleen gets to stand in front. This is size order. Nothing about it ever changes. The girl thinks that nothing ever will. All day long there is a small wooden chair to sit in, with one bolt missing and one edge torn away so that whenever the girl wears tights, which is only on picture day or when her mother forces her, she gets snagged to the chair. There is always the small metal desk with the fake wooden top. It doesn’t lift the way the desks do in the old movies, where the kids come to school with lunch pails and apples and where the boys attach mirrors to the front of their shoes so that they can look up girls’ skirts. (Okay, the part about the mirrors and the shoes isn’t from a movie. The girl’s mother’s boyfriend has told this story more than once, claiming it was something he’d done in his boyhood days, and the girl believes him. She has seen a picture of her mother as a schoolgirl, with a bright clean face and mischievous eyes, and has come to think that the kids in her mother’s day were probably all up to something. In any case, she likes the mother’s boyfriend, whom she has been trained to call Uncle. He is her favorite of all of the mother’s boyfriends she calls Uncle, and she is willing to believe anything of him.) Back to the teacher and the question now, yes? Yes. The girl sometimes has trouble paying attention, but this happened at a time before kids started coming down with adhd the way they used to come down with colds and flus. The girl goes undiagnosed , undrugged, and is merely scolded by parents and teachers to pay better attention. [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:59 GMT) 66 | Push See what I mean? The girl decides that the truth is to be used only as a last resort . She says, “No, Mrs. Greenberg. I didn’t push Colleen down the stairs.” “I have a perfectly good set of eyes,” the teacher says. “I saw you do it.” “Okay,”thegirlsays.Thoughsheiswillingtolie,sheisequallywilling to capitulate. It all depends on her mood and where it takes her. “Okay?” the teacher says. “Is that all?” “Okay, I pushed her,” the girl says. “It was an accident.” The two of them are still standing in the schoolyard, where kids loiter and teachers look out of place. There are games of jump rope, skelly, freeze tag, and double Dutch going on. The girl watches kids run and then stop as if paralyzed. One boy is tagged in midstride. He freezes with one arm pumped...