Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan Page B

are Hispanic. The school day is divided into six periods, or “slots,” a day, and the school year is divided into four ten-week cycles. One of Satellite’s purposes is to help students catch up. They are able to accumulate sixteen credits a year—four per cycle—rather than the ten per year they can accumulate in schools like Flushing. The six slots at the Jamaica campus don’t include gym (there is no gymnasium), study hall (a frill), or calculus (few students spend more than two years at Satellite, and even those who do rarely manage to complete ninth- and tenth-grade math). Satellite’s teachers consider the most important part of the curriculum to be Family Group, in which groups of between fifteen and eighteen students sit in a circle two or three times a week to discuss personal problems and school problems. For Family Group, the students are given credits in English. In the past, they were also given credits for holding part-time jobs and internships and for doing independent study.
    Crystal preferred Satellite to Flushing. It was smaller, her teachers were more lenient and casual (students addressed them by their first names), her peers were more congenial—and it was easier to cheat. Students who had an English test in thefirst or second slot would give the test questions and answers to those scheduled to take the test in the third or sixth slot. Crystal wrote down the questions and answers on her hand, or on a piece of paper she slipped into her blouse sleeve, or underneath the desk, or under the “test-exam.” Students caught cheating weren’t necessarily dismissed; they were just given zeros. The teachers were there because they had chosen to work with adolescents who had known trouble. Crystal’s counsellor, a Princeton graduate and former case-worker, would follow her to the girls’ bathroom, where she often went to meet a friend from another class; he would knock on the door and encourage her to return to the classroom.
    Crystal didn’t do well at Satellite during her first year. She hadn’t changed her ways: she was excessively absent, late, and high. In January of 1988, several days before her eighteenth birthday and the end of her first semester, she considered dropping out—almost fifty percent of Satellite’s students fail to graduate—and spoke of settling for her G.E.D. Her counsellor at Satellite and her social worker at St. Christopher’s prevailed upon her to stay in school.
    Crystal’s eyes—hazel if she is wearing her contact lenses, brown if she isn’t—gleam with remembered joy when she looks back upon her eighteenth birthday. Diamond had appeared at the group home with a Gucci bag and a pair of Gucci boots, three silvery balloons printed with the words “Happy Birthday, I Love You,” and a bouquet of flowers. “Everyone’s face lit up with jealousy,” Crystal says.
    Federal and state laws require child-care agencies like St. Christopher-Ottilie to offer family-planning services to children twelve years of age and over. Since her entry into the group home, Crystal had been using birth-control pills. In August, 1987, she had a series of stomach aches she attributed to the pill. The doctor she had been seeing regularly was on vacation. Another doctor recommended that Crystal stop taking the pill to give her body a rest. In February, 1988, she discovered that she was pregnant—“I guess because we done it so much,” she says. Crystal told Diamond she was going to have an abortion: since she had one child in foster care, it struck her as wrong to have a second child. Diamond had no children, but he accepted Crystal’s decision. He gave her an enormous white stuffed bear for Valentine’s Day. Several days later, she wrote the following note: “I Crystal Taylor, Resident of St. Christopher-Ottilie, is writting letter to confirm that after talking with my social