One bed, one dresser, one built-in closet, one chair, one lamp, a table where my computer sat, one basin, one sink, one small microwave oven. In the tiny bathroom there was another sink, a john, a medicine cabinet where I kept my toothbrush, baking soda, soap, and flash …
The window was open slightly, and the coolness of the night air felt delicious as it made the tiny hairs on my ankle stand up. Delicious because it was a feeling. It told me that I was still alive. Barely.
My name is Dahlia Grillo. I am sixteen. There was a time when I looked forward to being seventeen. My mother had me at seventeen, and I thought I would go past that age and become something great even though I didn’t know what something great could be. Perhaps a math teacher. I liked to imagine myself teaching little kids geometry and watching them discover things about triangles and the relationships between angles. When I was thirteen, and fourteen, and just getting comfortable with my period, I knew I had to be serious about life. But being serious about your life meant getting real with your dreams. Some of my friends wanted to be singers, or actresses, and I didn’t say much about that but I knew it wasn’t going anywhere.
All that changed in a friggin’ heartbeat. It was like there was a plan to have a surprise party for everybody—how weird does that sound?—and then, at the last minute, they decided to kick the crap out of everybody instead.
We had all known about the Central Eight companies. C-8 controlled everything, and some people were worried about just how much influence they had, but it was the way they screwed with your head that got to me. Like when one of the companies claimed that they could end world hunger within ten years and announced a quadrillion-dollar investment. The Internet was all over that saying that it would bring an end to war and an end to dictators and an end to everything bad except dandruff. The company brought out a whole new range of seeds that could grow anywhere and bugs couldn’t mess with them. But then they got a patent on the seeds, and before anyone knew it, they controlled all the food production in the world. And people were starving everywhere.
It was bad, but it wasn’t so bad if it didn’t reach you personally.
“The sun is always warm if your belly is full!” my mother used to say. Poor mama. After my father died, she worked so hard to find a better life. When things began to fall apart, when people started noticing which category they fell into, she even worked harder to keep us out of the lowest rank. That’s how we got to Fox Street in the Bronx.
The lowest rank were the favelos, poor people who lived by either stealing or begging. Nobody knew how many of them there were. Some people said that, in America, it was half the population.
The next step up were the Gaters, people who lived in gated communities. At first they just built communities with their own shopping malls and restaurants away from the inner cities, places you needed a car to get to. Then they started issuing special credit cards if you wanted to buy anything in their communities. And finally they put up gates and armed guards. My neighborhood, mi barrio loco, had gates even though no one had much money and the dried-up old men guarding them were mostly useless. Still, they wanted to keep the favelos out because they’d steal whatever little we had.
Mama worked two jobs to buy an apartment just for the two of us. I knew she was working herself to death. When she died, my family bought our apartment and gave me the little place I have now rent-free.
So there are the favelos, then the Gaters, then those invisible people who seem to have everything. The New Yorker magazine always has articles about how unfair it is for some tiny percentage of the population to own everything. But just knowing something doesn’t help you to do anything about it when you’re too busy trying to cover your own butt. You saw what was going on, and then after a while—maybe your mind closed down or something, I don’t know—you stopped seeing it.
Nobody saw the whole school thing coming. Well, maybe some people saw it, but I sure didn’t.
It started when the government announced that it was going to increase the educational opportunities for everybody and make the whole system fairer. Then we heard that everyone was going to get the new supertablets and individual instruction in any field you wanted. Free. That was, like, really great. All these trucks started pulling up and unloading boxes of electronic stuff and passing it out like it was free candy or something.
What came to my mind was that there were so many around that the favelos wouldn’t steal them. The tablets were good. They had all the connections you needed, but the apps were just so-so. If you knew what you were doing, you could fix the apps, and I did. There were also some weird things going on in the registry. They spooked me out, but I fixed them, too. What I couldn’t fix, what blindsided me, was when they closed the schools. I was almost fifteen.
What did you need schools for if the curriculum apps were available? You could go over and over the material until you got it in your head, and the FAQ sections were intuitive and generally on the money. I took advanced math courses and dug them, but I missed hanging out in school. The word on the street was that the higher-level Gaters were hiring private tutors. The rest of us were on our own. It was nothing new, once you thought about it. It just was smack up in our faces for the first time.
I don’t know what it was about hanging out with other kids in school that was so good. I learned as much about the subjects I liked from the apps as I would have sitting in a classroom. But when school actually shut down I felt terrible. Something deep inside of me was going crazy, as if I was having trouble breathing. A friend said it was just because we were getting older, that letting go of being a kid was hard. I don’t know, maybe she was right.
I used to look forward to being seventeen. Now it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. If seventeen happens, it happens.
Walter Dean Myers
1937–2014
Walter Dean Myers’s fiction and nonfiction books have reached millions of young people. A prolific author of more than one hundred titles, he received every major award in the field of children’s literature. He wrote two Newbery Honor Books, eleven Coretta Scott King Award winners, three National Book Award finalists, and the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. He also received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults and was the first recipient of the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was a 2010 United States nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and was nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Award numerous times. From 2012 to 2013, he served as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature with the platform “Reading is not optional.”
When asked about his readers, Walter would often say, “Young people are some of the best people I know.” In Walter’s short-story collections 145th Street and What They Found, he celebrates a community of people in a Harlem neighborhood. His novels Hoops and The Outside Shot appeal especially to basketball fans. Walter set On a Clear Day in the future and gave it a global context because “it’s never too soon for young people to bring their awareness and energy to the world’s problems.…[Ultimately] the teens in On a Clear Day want to make a difference.” In his most-beloved books, Walter explored the themes of taking responsibility for your life and that everyone always gets a second chance.
Walter Dean Myers, The Outside Shot
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