Misunderstood Ninja

Eleventh Grade

I live in what is quite possibly the whitest neighborhood ever. I'm not kidding. A local publication did this analysis of every neighborhood in my city, ranking them on affordability, diversity, those sorts of things—and mine ranked in the bottom 10 percent for just having so many white people. An elderly piano teacher (white, of course) used to live across the street and gave my mom lessons when she had her midlife crisis and bought a keyboard. She was the neighborhood gossip, and always had some tidbit of information to give my mom when she crossed the street to practice her scales. Being the un-diverse suburb that it is, where most of the residents are either eighty or eight, most of it was pretty boring stuff. Whose sister is in town, whose daughter going to what college—that kind of thing. But that didn't stop her from outfitting her entire front wall with glass just so she could see what the neighbors were up to. I've always wondered what she thought about the events of last fall when my family started to devolve in an extremely dramatic and public way. She moved away before I could ask her.