In default of a better, here the narrator remembers her time in junior high school, part of a “Special Progress” group, expected to do three years’ worth of work in two. Her teacher, she said, tried to shock them
... but it was far too late for that. Each morning, we pale, fragile, sticky-boned Special Progress students got to school unscathed only through cunning, avoiding the streets where the demurely blazered, crucifix-bearing girls of St. Ann’s lay waiting in ambush, to rip our clothes and steal our books, break our glasses, noses, teeth. We avoided the big school pens where the enormous boys of ninth grade, on average fifty pounds heavier than we and long gone in puberty, displayed their weaponry, smoked cigarettes and fought over women. We of the Special Progress classes were not men and women yet by any means; to the regulars we were white mice, snake food, and they shoved and jeered at us through the hallways. From time to time whole gangs would disappear from the play yard, having been sent to reformatories out of town, while we, coddled with poetry and offered the delectations of advanced culture, sat indoors and developed our minds.
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