Criminal Conversation

Начало книги

Luretta Barnes was the smartest girl Sarah taught. Rap as poetry, poetry as rap was a good concept. Luretta disagreed with it.

“Ice-T ain’t Allen Ginsberg,” she told Sarah. “No way you gonna compare Soul on Ice to Howl. No way, Mrs. Welles.”

A scholarship student, Luretta was the only black girl in the entire sophomore class. The only one now taking a stand against rap as poetry.

“You want to call it doggerel,” she said, “that’s fine by me. But poetry? Come on, Mrs. Welles. Callin’ rap poetry is like callin’ Michael Jackson Pavarotti.”

The other girls all laughed.

Luretta soaked it up.

Gorgeous fourteen-year-old with a smile like starshine, hair done up in ten thousand braids, little colored glass beads strung in them, could have been a model in an instant, wanted to be a lawyer. She’d somehow learned from one of the other girls that Mrs. Welles’s husband was a lawyer in the DA’s Office. One day, she stopped Sarah in the halls, asked if her husband could use a good assistant. Sharpen pencils, empty trash baskets, whatever, it’d beat her after-school job at McDonald’s. Sarah said she was pretty sure all such jobs were civil service, which meant taking an exam and so on. She said she’d ask her husband, though. Michael had confirmed it.

Читать дальше →