Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?

by Ilana Garon

  “I can’t write good for nothing. I like video games, art, and being lay-z. I can draw really good but not as good as I would like to draw. So I don’t really show my pics off. My life is a little weird because I live with my mom and my mom lives with the landlord because he’s her boyfriend but the boyfriend’s X had no place to stay so she lives with us also and the boyfriend’s X has a little girl because it’s the boyfriend’s kid and the kid is with him because he does not pay child support. Anyway here’s everyone who lives in my house: Me, my mom, broter, sester, dog, step-dad, step-dad’s X, a tertule. We had two tertules but one just disaperd. So that’s just liveing with my mom . . . my dad is a hole nother story. PS --I can’t write good becuase I’m left handed.”

  “How are you doing? I’m fine just chillin’. Today is the 2nd day of school and it’s aight, I’ve seen mad chicks its a wrap this year. My summer was mad wak, I’m hoping this winter is going to be poppin’. Really I have nothing else to say.”

  My ninth-graders try to be bad-asses, but they just aren’t convincing. For starters, they’re very small; they came in yesterday complaining that the big kids were pushing them around in the hallway. And they’re so clearly still kids that you can’t help thinking they’re cute. Yesterday afternoon several of them ran up to me in the hallway (I’m their homeroom teacher) all flustered and upset because they didn’t understand their schedules for the next morning. Once I pointed them in the right direction, they resumed their usual swagger, pants hanging down, boxers exposed, contraband do-rags on heads.

  All for now—must plan lessons.

  On Friday, I stashed my students’ books in a locker in the classroom. I came in Monday to get the books, only to find that the combination lock will not open. I tried a million times, to no avail. The students came in to find me banging my head against the locker, frustrated because my entire lesson plan was dependent upon these books. The students all said, “Miss, let me try!” They all tried. No one succeeded.

  I decided we needed to get down to business as best we could. This was a double period class (although we’d wasted some of our time trying to get the damn books out of the locker), so I still had over an hour and no materials. The book we were supposed to be reading is about a teenager who went to prison, so I said, “Okay, who has impressions of prison that they’d like to share?” All the hands went up, but the main thing everyone wanted to say was that you shouldn’t drop the soap in the shower. Very original. They all cracked up laughing.

  I invented a makeshift lesson about prison (a topic about which I know next to nothing), asking the kids to brainstorm about impressions of prison based on movies, personal experience, books, etc. We talked about how it might feel to be in prison as a young teenager. We talked about getting beaten up, eating bad food, and of course being raped in the shower (which seemed to be a subject of serious interest to them). Students shared their own experiences of having family members who had been to prison.

  Midway through the class, half my students who I had thought were absent wandered in. Turns out they’d just come from some meeting with the head discipline guy, and they’d all been suspended for a few days. Terrific. (Naturally, they had no idea why.)

  With five minutes left in the period, I ran out of prison-related things to talk about, so I told the kids to just chill out. Meanwhile, I went to work on the locker again. One of my students said, “Hey, Miss, there’s a sticker in the back!” We looked at the sticker. It turns out I’d remembered the combination wrong. The bell rang just then. Go figure.

  So, the bell rings after ninth period, and I allow my students to go out for a water break since I have them for tenth period as well. The door to the classroom is open, and I’m sorting papers when I hear two voices yelling at each other. A crowd forms around them like magnets—where did all these kids come from?—and then there’s the unmistakable noise that indicates someone has just thrown a punch: the hallway roars. It sounds like a bomb going off. Everyone starts screaming, the crowd of about one hundred kids (and more streaming in every second) starts stomping and yelling . . . all hell breaks loose. All of this takes place in a matter of seconds.

  My room is right next to the social studies office. The assistant principal of social studies is a friendly man named Mr. Gjoni; sometimes he and I chat between classes. Now we both sprint down the hall, straight into the throng. We’re not supposed to break up fights (our teacher’s health care doesn’t cover injuries we might sustain), but Mr. Gjoni goes right at the fighters and starts pulling them apart. Meanwhile, I spread my arms as wide as I can and push all the spectators against the wall to make sure they don’t get caught in the crossfire (we’re supposed to do this in case someone whips out a weapon or something), and to clear a path for the security guards, who come running in about ten seconds later.

  One of the “suspects” sprints through the crowd I’ve just cleared and down the hall. A couple of security guards turn and follow in hot pursuit. Pandemonium continues to ensue, with kids yelling and screaming and all clamoring to give their version of what happened.

  After about two minutes, the floor is swarming with administrators and school safety officers, and everyone is yelling for the kids to go back to class. My students race into the room because they all want to talk about what happened, except for two girls who beg to be let out again because they never managed to get through the hallway to the bathroom. I figure we won’t get anything done until we debrief, so everyone talks about the fight for five minutes, and then we get back to our work.

  CHAPTER 1

  Carlos

  The student I remember best from my first semester of teaching is Carlos. A freshman, he was nearly sixteen, and a handsome kid—five feet, eight inches with close-cropped, black, curly hair, dark skin, and luminous, almost black eyes. He was added to the roster of my English class about two weeks into the school year. For the first month or so that I knew him, he never said a word; I took his silence for lack of interest and wrote him off as a slacker. Then we read Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, a book about a teenager on trial for murder, and Carlos approached me at my desk after class. He waited patiently for the other students to leave.

  “Miss,” he whispered, “I like this book.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that, Carlos,” I said. I was suspicious—my experience with summer school made me wonder if I was being set up.

  “It’s kind of similar to my life.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I did some time in ‘juvey’ a while back. . . .” Carlos paused, seeming surprised at his own revelation. “I was doing drugs, stealing . . . I got in trouble, Miss. Doing time in juvey made me think a lot about my life.”

  His honesty and reflective attitude surprised me. With the stunning discernment of someone who has been teaching for exactly three months, I concluded that this was the single most self-aware ninth-grader I would ever meet—and here he was, coming to me for guidance. All my teaching experience to date had clearly been preparing me for this point.

  “Carlos,” I said, “you’re missing a few reading responses. If you write me a page or two about how this book relates to your experiences, we could call it even.”

  “You’d let me do that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The next day, Carlos turned in a beautifully written piece about his experiences in juvenile detention center, his time on the street selling drugs, and the ways in which he wished to improve his life. The kid had a flare for writing; that much was clear to me. Moreover, I started to see him in a different light. He rarely raised his hand in class, but his eyes flickered with attention and intelligence, and I realized that, slacker or not, he wasn’t missing a beat. He would often come to speak to me after class about everything from his life, to the reading, to other students. “Miss, Chantal’s havin’ some problems with her man . . .” he would say. “I been talking to her about it.”

  The girls would turn to Carlos for advice about their love lives, knowing that he was
savvy enough to give good strategic advice, but sensitive enough to provide a listening ear. I would see him with his arms around girls in the hallway, almost paternally, as they cried into his shoulder.

  One morning in October, two deans burst into our classroom. “Obed Gonzalez,” they announced. “You’re coming with us. Get your stuff.” I would later realize these kinds of sudden and unapologetic interruptions were routine, but in my first few months they were still shocking.

  Obed, the kid in question, was a sweetheart; a talented math student (his teacher told me he made all A’s), he had never given me any problems. He looked surprised, but was cooperative. He gathered his books and coat into his bag.

  “Could you please tell me what’s going on?” I asked the deans. “Is Obed in trouble?”

  “Probably,” one of them replied in that same monotone as he slammed the door to my classroom behind him. Obed cast a forlorn look at me through the glass window of our door before he was escorted out of sight.

  The moment the bell rang, Carlos was at my desk.

  “I have to talk to you about Obed,” he said.

  “About Obed? Do you know what’s up?”

  “Yeah . . . I know why they took him out.”

  “You do?”

  “This guy pulled a knife on us yesterday outside art class.”

  I gasped. “No!”

  In response, Carlos shot me an exasperated look that I understood to mean something like this: Oh, for crying out loud, Miss, you know this type of thing happens around here. Pull yourself together, okay?

  “So how was Obed involved?” I tried to sound neutral.

  “Well . . . with Obed, it was all self-defense,” Carlos said. I was not sure what he meant by that.

  Then he looked away and said, “Miss, here’s the problem: If my parents find out about this, that I got in a ‘situation’ in school, even if it’s not my fault, they gonna take me out of this school . . . and I want to stay here.”

  He could get out of here? In a way, I wanted to call his parents right then and tell them, “Get Carlos to another school! He’s smart! He has so much promise!” Despite the fact that I had already met a slew of nice kids who were equally smart and promising, on a gut level I was still laboring under a certain misapprehension: that my role as an inner-city school teacher was, among other things, to identify “good” kids who didn’t belong in a school like this one and to get them out.

  Then I caught myself. If his parents could afford better, Carlos would already be there, I reasoned. And short of testing into one of the magnet programs—a herculean feat for any kid, let alone one coming from a non-English speaking background—there weren’t many other options. The other public high schools in the area were no “better” than this one.

  I returned to Carlos, who appraised me, waiting for an answer. “Carlos, you realize, if this comes to be an issue, you may need to speak out on Obed’s behalf, to say it was self-defense—even if it means leaving this school.”

  He sighed. “I know Miss. Obed and I are mad tight. I’ll do that for him, you know? But . . .” Then he bit his lip and said, “Yeah, Miss, you’re right . . . I’ll come with you to talk to the deans.”

  We went downstairs to the basement security offices. I barged in, expecting to argue. Lo and behold, there was Obed, but not in trouble—rather, he sat in a swivel chair leafing through a notebook of what appeared to be student mug shots. “Oh, hey Miss! Hi Carlos!” he called cheerfully.

  “Carlos? As in, Carlos de la Cruz?” the security guard asked, overhearing.

  “Yo, I’m Carlos.”

  “Ah, so you saw what happened. We have to take a statement from you.”

  Carlos looked at me with a note of pleading in his eyes.

  “Sir?” I asked. “Do you think we might be able to keep Carlos’s parents out of this? He’d kind of like to stay here, and his parents have threatened to remove him from school if he is involved in any violent situations . . .” I trailed off. I was embarrassed, but I wasn’t sure in front of whom: the security guard, to whom this request no doubt sounded childishly impractical? Or Carlos, who was counting on me for more than this weak stand?

  “No can do, we’re mandated to alert the parents,” the security guard said with finality.

  “Sorry, Carlos,” I whispered.

  “It’s okay, Miss,” he muttered bitterly. “It’s not your fault this school is wack.”

  ______

  But as it turned out, Carlos stayed in our school, and I didn’t hear from his parents one way or another. At one point I called them at home. I knew, from what Carlos had told me, that they spoke very little English; I managed to convey to them that their son was making excellent progress in my class, and they seemed bemused that I would bother to call them for this reason alone.

  When I asked Carlos about this, he told me, “They really only care if I’m in trouble or whatever, Miss.”

  “Do you want to tell me about that?”

  “I just feel like they don’t care about me, you know? Like, I can’t talk to them about nothing.”

  “I’m sorry. That must be lonely.”

  “Yeah . . . we don’t really get along right now anyway.”

  In truth, Carlos’s relationship with his parents sounded typical of any teenager—I could see myself having said the same thing at age sixteen. Perhaps it was this knowledge that we weren’t actually so different that endeared Carlos to me. Or perhaps it was just his nature I found appealing—that he managed to be wise and brave, but still a little bit fragile. I wanted to nurture him, to not let him slip.

  I made a mental note to check on him regularly. This turned out to be easy, since he often came to me after class to talk about his various “problems,” most of which were romantic in nature. I relished these conversations and the opportunity they provided for me to get to know Carlos; at the same time, I felt nervous that we would be misunderstood. A handsome, lovelorn student in search of guidance, a very young female teacher, still insecure about her role in the classroom . . . there were infinite potential pitfalls. I was always careful to leave the classroom door wide open, so that anyone could poke their heads in to see that nothing illicit was going on between us.

  One morning, Carlos came into class looking pale and sweaty, with red-rimmed eyes. He went straight to his desk—without saying hi, I noted—and put his head down. He didn’t look up for the rest of the period. I decided not to say anything until class ended. When the bell rang and all the students left, he stayed. So I went to where he was sitting, still with his head on the desk, and said, “Hey kiddo, what’s going on?”

  He looked up at me. His eyes were bloodshot. “Miss, I’m drunk,” he said, pressing his thumb and index finger against his sinuses and closing his eyes.

  This was hardly news. Sitting three feet away, I could smell the alcohol emanating from his pores.

  “Yes, I’ve noticed. You wanna tell me how that happened?”

  “Well, so you know how I’m on the late schedule?”

  Due to overcrowding, our school had two “schedules”—early and late. Eleventh- and twelfth-graders were on the early schedule; they had class from 7 a.m. until roughly 12:15 p.m. At the 12:15 bell they left the building, whereupon the ninth- and tenth-graders had their late schedule classes from 12:30 to 5:45 p.m. At that hour it was dark, leaving the youngsters to walk home in poorly lit gang territory. This would have worried me more if the kids had been inclined to stay that long, but most of them weren’t—they tended to leave school around 3:45 p.m. when their friends were let out of neighboring high schools, cutting their last two or even three classes on a daily basis.

  In the midst of my worries about their absence at the late afternoon, I had not even considered that the kids could get into trouble in the morning, between the time their parents left for work, and noon, when they started lining up at the front doors of the school for scanning. Now, Carlos was telling me that there had been a substantial amount of drinking going on dur
ing the unsupervised hours.

  “So no one’s home where you guys are drinking?”

  “Nope.”

  “And this has happened before?”

  “Uh-huh . . . but I usually don’t get like this.”

  “Why the hell would you be drinking at all before school, Carlos? You’re smarter than that!”

  “I don’t know, Miss. There were all these people, and I don’t want to seem weak.”

  It shouldn’t have been surprising to me that he had caved to peer pressure. For all Carlos’s maturity, he was still subject to the same laws that governed all sixteen-year-old boys. Yet, the fact that he was a normal teenager was somehow disappointing to me.

  There is only one adult here, I reminded myself.

  “Okay. Have you eaten anything all day?”

  “Um . . . I had a piece of bread for breakfast?”

  “Not good enough. No wonder the alcohol hit you so hard.” I went to my pantry closet and pulled out some graham crackers and a jar of Skippy peanut butter that were left over from a class party I had thrown a while ago. Carlos protested—“No. Miss, I’m fine! You don’t need to do this.”

  Ignoring him, I spread some peanut butter on a cracker with a plastic spoon, and placed it in front of him on a paper towel. “Here. Eat up.”

  He started to eat, slowly at first, but then devoured the peanut butter and graham crackers. I made him another sandwich. Then I took a large plastic party cup to the water fountain in the hallway and filled the cup to the brim. Thank god I don’t have a class right now, I thought to myself. I returned to the room, closing the door behind me.

  “You’re going to drink this entire thing, mister.”

  “Miss . . .” He groaned, and put his head in his hands.