Okay, so I am always saying authors shouldn't have any sort of explanation before they post their stories and all, but here's my two cents. This is for a class, it's a piece of flash fiction and is currently sixty words too long. I'm struggling. These are characters I've worked with a lot so I especially need feedback on whether it all makes sense without the background knowledge I have, and feedback on what might make sense to cut, if anything. With that being said, edit away: (Also title needs serious help.)
Equity Blue had not written a single word for her high school
English class. Now she sat at the back of the class, notebook open to a
randomly selected page, brown curls hiding the blankness.
“I want a graduation poem,” Ms. Paige coaxed. “A poem of goodbye.
How do you feel about endings? Write about it.”
A collective sigh united the class
once more, besides Equity. She wanted to write. She wanted to explain how it
felt to meet Kyler, interested in the way she devoured her vanilla cone and
revealed the contents of her treasure box. She wanted to write about her
brother, Promise, two years older but graduating the same year, always shaking
walls with laughter but hiding deep sorrow. She wanted to tell the story of the
dirt smeared fourth grader, Anza, who couldn’t read and whose grimy face lit up
when Equity hopped the schoolyard fence and joined her under the metal slide.
She wanted to tell the way her mother’s blue eyes stuck to the yellow pages of
her dictionary and never saw her kids. She wanted to capture her grandmother’s complaints
that filled the house, and the way her grandmother had lost control when the
woman from knitting club called Promise a failure.
“I can wave goodbye into existence,” Equity wrote. “Make it
a person. Love and hate him all at once.”
Ms. Paige noticed from her perch at the front. She began to
cross the room. Her talons already reached for Equity’s words. Equity took a
deep breath, closed her eyes for three seconds, opened them and in one movement
shoved the notebook into her bag and pushed her chair to the floor. She ignored
the crack of wood on tile, ignored the gaping stares of her classmates, ignored
the fuming disbelief of her teacher, ignored everything and left the classroom
without looking back.
Hopefully you can now remove ten or so words. Good luck with the rest. 
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