61 pages • 2 hours read
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Yessenia Lopez—a 16-year-old, wheelchair-bound Puerto Rican girl from inner city Chicago—arrives at ILLC from juvie after violently assaulting her classmate in school. With absent parents and a recently deceased guardian (Tía Nene), she is explosive and struggles to get along with her peers. However, she develops friendships with a few of her roommates and caring adult employees, like Joanne and Jimmie. Though she hates ILLC and finds it to be demeaning, she has nowhere else to go.
Although Joanne Madsen is a wealthy white woman from Chicago’s North Side—paid handsomely by the Chicago Transit Authority for the bus accident which left her paralyzed—she decides to work at ILLC as a data-entry clerk to keep herself occupied. There, she learns about the young patients and sees how the institution are mistreats them. She starts a relationship with her coworker, Ricky, and together they strive to improve the quality of care for the youth.
Ricky is a large and handsome employee at ILLC, whose main role is to drive the patients around and to remove students from classrooms when they are being disruptive. He has a disabled aunt, and he empathizes with the struggles of the mostly poor adolescents from rough neighborhoods like him.
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