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another electronic shout-out. “Mr. Cromartie? Mr. Cromartie, please come to the principal’s office. Mr. Cromartie?”
    He restrained himself from another wisecrack, infinitesimally but with great effort attempting to close down his nightclub approach to education; every positive change in his life, every minute increment in character, acquired more or less through shame.
    “OK, so, who are you guys?” Nodding to the chubby kid with the wrestler drawn on his binder.
    “Efram,” he said, sinking into his shirt collar.
    “Efram . . .” Ray waiting.
    “They know,” he shrugged.
    “Efram They Know.”
    “Last name too, Efram,” Mrs. Bondo said.
    “Bello.”
    “Efram Bello,” Ray said. “OK, so if Mrs. Bondo married Efram Bello, her name would become Mrs. Bondo-Bello, right?”
    Hands flew to mouths all around the table, stifled sniggers and gasps, the kids going all big-eyed, Ray thinking how odd it was that these projects kids, witness all their lives to such extremes in human behavior, would be so easily shocked by the slightest breach of teacher decorum. It didn’t take a genius to explain this paradox, but he was way too percolated to think about it beyond his initial observation.
    “OK, you there, young sir . . .”
    “Rashaad,” the boy said, then added, after glancing at Mrs. Bondo, “Macbeth.”
    “Rashaad Macbeth?”
    The boy’s long narrow face, high forehead, slightly bulging eyes and small startled mouth made Ray think of a newborn giraffe.
    Then the other five: Dierdre, Felicia, Myra, Jamaal and Altagracia; each name given quietly, no tongue-clucking, no peripheral eyeballing, no playing for the back rows; Ray so far having braced himself for nothing. The sobriety of the roll call could have been due to the close quarters of the seminar table, the presence of Mrs. Bondo, the unknown subject, or more astonishingly to Ray, they could simply be a bunch of nice fourteen-year-old kids.
    “OK. Let me ask you—this is creative writing. This is voluntary. Somebody tell me why you’re here.”
    “’Cause I got stories,” said Rashaad, his hand half-raised.
    “Yes,” Ray said almost gratefully. “‘I got stories.’ You all have stories, whether you know it or not. And here, right here, is where you’re going to give them up.”
    He reached into the shopping bag at his feet, pulled out seven of the ten red-and-black writing journals he had bought for them across the river in Chinatown and dealt them out like playing cards.
    “‘But Officer, I don’t
have
any stories.’ ‘Oh ho, indeed you do, my dear,’” Ray backsliding, doing voices once again, trying to get them to laugh, although he was too jazzed now to care if they did or didn’t. “You have crazy mad stories,
all
of you. Everybody here, if I go around the table and squeeze you a little? Each and every one of you can give me six great stories. That’s six times seven kids equals forty-two plus fourteen between me and Mrs. Bondo equals fifty-four . . .”
    “Fifty-six,” said Efram.
    “Fifty-six, thank you, stories. They’re about your friends, your neighbors, your families, most definitely your families . . . And these are very very important stories to you. Stories you’ve grown up with. The time my uncle got so angry that . . . The, the day my grandmother left her house thinking that . . . My parents, the first time they met, they . . . My brother, just ’cause that other kid dared him, I couldn’t believe it when he . . . Oh man, my mother, I’ve never seen her like that when she . . .
    “And all these stories, they’re up here,” touching his temple, “and in here,” touching his heart, corny but what the hell. “And we love them, because they’re ours. Because even if they’re not true, and believe me, at least half of these stories are not, they’ve set up house in us, they’re part of us, they
are
us . . .
    “Yeah, OK,” talking to himself now more than to them.