“What would be the point? she thinks. We all have scars.” 

In the brief prologue, a teacher, presumably Benny, preps a student, presumably LaJuna, for her performance as Hannie Gossett in the class graveyard pageant. The teacher notices the scar on the girl’s wrist, a remnant of the student’s addiction to cutting. The teacher opts not to pursue the implications of the scars. This sets the thematic mood for the novel. Everyone is scarred, but the past cannot destroy the promise of the present. 

“If they are in your classroom, you are responsible for keeping them there.” 

In her crash-course introduction to the reality of a classroom, Benny tries to rely on these cliches from her education classes. Even as her class descends into anarchy her first day, she will come to understand the implications of this teaching cliché and will take to heart her responsibility to do more than move information in a classroom. She taps into a compassion that sees her job as motivating indifferent students to stay with their education. 

“Augustine reprises that crippling feeling of rejection. I smile at people here, I get stares in return. I crack a joke, no one laughs. I say, Good Morning!, I get grunts and curt nods, and, if I’m lucky, one-word answers.” 

The emotional journey that Benny undertakes from isolation into a community begins with her confessions here of the damage of her own past, her own vulnerabilities, her abiding loneliness. The conditions of Augustine and the realities of her first job, so alien to her, exacerbate her feelings of isolation and apartness.