Cool

This kid, a kid you’ve never met before, shows up at the coffee shop. She takes the stool next to you and wants to know what you’re doing. She’s genuinely interested.

You’re struck by her curiosity.

“I’ve always been a writer,” she tells you. That explains things a bit.

At one point she imagined a future as a makeup artist but that was before she walked into Room S105 where her high school’s newspaper is produced.

She immediately wanted in.

“Democracy can’t function when there are untold stories.” the young printer’s devil explains.

She’s currently writing about her school which is a mix of urban and suburban, poverty and wealth, a jumble of religions and languages. Her question is why students cluster in a self-imposed segregation.

Last year she caught the attention of the powers-that-be when writing about sexual assault — they hoped she would tone it down. Her stats were challenged by a few students who tore up their copies in protest.

“I don’t mind being controversial.” she admits.

She wrote about a district-wide dress code that got tangled up in race and gender; and about teenage use of marijuana for medical purposes (with and without a prescription).

On one of her early assignments someone grabbed the wrong photo of a classmate attending a testy, essentially whites-only country music festival. It was a painful mistake. “We can’t pat ourselves on the back.”

The sixteen-year-old who recently got a driver’s license, juggles advanced-placement work plus soccer and the newspaper. She allows herself a minor meltdown now and then and sorely misses having time to read for pleasure.

If you’re one of those people who disagree with the cost, or the very idea of public education, you should have a cup of the house blend with a kid like Rachel Krumholz.

Rachel is your tax dollars at work.

It’s too early to tell but it’s possible that cutting through fake news and alternate facts will be Rachel’s way to provide a return on our investment.

Beverly comes in to the coffee shop around noon. If there’s a spot next to the man in the window she often sits there. They’ve known each other for about a year.

Their friendship started when she kicked his power cord out of the wall several times over a matter of minutes. Even though he’s old enough to be her father, the two of them hit it off from the start.

She often taps him on the shoulder as they talk. Sometime she messes up his hair. They enjoy their rituals. Sometimes they don’t talk at all, especially when she finds something to read from the shelf where people leave books. Today it was a book about getting a good job.

Bev often asks the man if he’s married and he always says he is. So when she kisses him on the cheek it’s not meant to be romantic. Beverly lost her dad not long ago.

She lives in a residential facility where she shares a room with Sarah who is also very nice. There’s nothing wrong with the coffee at the residence, Bev says, but it’s important to be out and about.