Summary

This story centers around the intersecting themes of education and racial identity. Merci is a young girl who dislikes school, as she struggles with traditional education and envies her older brother Roli’s extreme intelligence (and his tendency to make that intelligence known). Nevertheless, Merci is clearly a bright young woman. She has big dreams for her father’s painting company, and fantasizes about things like her future business cards and how she will improve the organization’s corporate structure. Still, her mother wants her to succeed in an academic sense like Roli, and chooses to send her to Seaward Pines, the fancy school he attends.

When the group arrives at Seaward Pines to paint the gym, the siblings’ different attitudes towards the school become apparent. Merci is suspicious of the school’s very bourgeois nature. When she meets Mrs. McDaniels, she is...