In the Lobby of a Community Center in Watts

"How can art make a difference in the world? Should I give up writing and study something useful like medicine? How can I teach my students to take control of their own destiny? I love these students. What should I be doing to save their lives?....
I write about my students because I don't know what else to do with their stories. Writing them down allows me to sleep," - Sandra Cisneros, on working with disadvantaged teenagers in Chicago's south side before her first book was published.

The cuts on the inside of her left arm are fresh.

They look deep, 20 or 25 precise lines running parallel to her wrist, on the softest of skin, milky and moonlit. My eyes jump back and forth from her dusty eyes to the cuts, which start to look like thin red spider legs the more I look at them.

She is sucking on the ends of her dark hair, her legs folded beneath her on the couch in the lobby of this community center. She is a student in my Life Skills class, 17 years old and beautiful and loud and unsure of herself. My stomach and my heart turn painfully every time I look at her.

"Did you cut yourself at school?" I ask her softly. "Or was it at home?"

She shakes her head. "Nah, it wasn't at school. The teacher, she just saw it when I went to class. I did it Tuesday night."

"After you left here?" I ask. Jasmine comes here to class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, leaving the community center in Watts at 9 o'clock.

She nods, her eyes on the linoleum floor.

"Did something happen while you were here? Did we discuss something upsetting?"

Our topic on Tuesday was STDs and safe sex, and I skim through the minutes spent in class, trying to remember if she'd seemed unsettled during the lesson.

"No. It was something else. Before."

The man who drives her to and from the community center, a social worker who's older than me but has braces on his teeth, says she lives in a nice house. This makes me think of velvet furniture covered in plastic. Plastic flowers on the table. Framed watercolors of flowers on the walls. That's how most of the nicer house I visit are decorated.

Jasmine is usually like most teenage girls and never stops talking. Like a house on fire, the words leaping from her lips like flames. She comes into class in tight tank tops and brightly-colored bras and she talks about school and boys and teachers and dances. But today it seems hard to get much out of her.

"Before class?" I ask her. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

She stops sucking on the tips of her hair, shakes her head. "That's why I do it. Cuz I don't know how to like, talk about stuff that happens to me."

I nod. "What did they say at school? What does your social worker want to do?"

"They want to get me in a class. Like, a cutting class. With other people who cut themselves, too."

My mind keeps jumping back and forth between two things: the first, my Supervisor imploring me to separate myself more, to learn how to pull back from these youth I meet in my work. "You have to learn this skill," she'd said, putting her hand on my arm in her office. "Otherwise you won't be able to do this work."

The other thought is of Moss, a teacher working in a township in Cape Town. I was 20 years old when he taught me the Xhosa expression "Ubuntu" - people are people through other people. "This, Jenny, is what we had to remember after Apartheid, after all that pain," he told me then.

I look at Jasmine's arm and I ache.