Class

Our friendship is a mime smacking their head against the somber wall of the many digits your savings account holds over mine and the heavy silent body of wealth sliding between us excusing itself over and over its guilt a casting of the conversation we grow around

My teacher wrote my name in chalk and I watched the dust of it fall like the ghost of a bird. Class, she said, meaning us, meaning the hour we sat in rows learning to raise our hands as if surrender were a subject. I passed notes shaped like planes that never left the desk. Now I know class is the coat my mother pressed, the accent she buried, the fork she held wrong on purpose so the rich girl wouldn't feel alone. We were dismissed. We are still being dismissed.