smile,
"People are always asking me. 'Dr. Foreman, you were a successful and renowned college professor. Why did you throw away your classroom work, your publications, your lectures, put all your fortune into this school, and go off and surround yourself with the hardest sort of challenge: girls whom everyone has given up on, girls who would
easily end up in penal institutions?'
"Well, the answer is you, my dears," she
declared with her arms out as though she were about
to embrace all three of us at once. "you and your
awakening. Nothing is more satisfying to me than to
bring someone back from the dead." she continued,
her right hand over her heart. "for that is where you
are now, in some cemetery of your own making,
burying yourselves in your disgust, your fears, your
dysfunction,"
She grew stern looking again and took another
step toward the three of us.
"Within the next twenty-four hours, fourteen
hundred teenagers like yourselves will attempt
suicide, twenty-eight hundred will get pregnant,
fifteen thousand will try alcohol for the first time, and
thirty-five hundred will run away from home." She let those facts linger in the air between us
for a moment. I glanced at Robin and then Teal.
Neither seemed impressed nor seemed to care. "But not you. No, not my girls. To me," Dr.
Foreman said, looking up at the ceiling as if she could
look right through to the heavens, "you will all be like
Lazarus, rising from the grave."
"Does that mean you're God?" Teal asked, her
mouth dripping with sarcasm.
I thought I was brave and tough, but this soft,
pretty white girl who sounded like she had been born
with a silver spoon in her mouth was sure nasty and
unafraid, even after all that had been done to her, to