The History of the World

Shit. Read Dan Barry: Under a dreary sky the color of uncertainty, on a city block pocked by abandonment, a door opens and a girl of 15 steps out. With a black-and-blue book bag slung across her back, she starts walking to school, a high school sophomore of this country.
Her name is Janay Truitt, and she lives on the crime-rich and money-poor north side of St. Louis. She shares an apartment above a dry-cleaning store with two grandparents, two sisters, a brother and her mother, who leaves at 4:30 in the morning to drive a school bus. Her father lives elsewhere.
Janay sets out at 7:05 today for a city school system in which poverty, politics and mismanagement so closely conspire against the…