Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?

by Ilana Garon

  “Drink it, Carlos. Being drunk, or hungover—whatever you are at this point—it’s basically a very bad case of dehydration. I’m going to sit here, and you need to drink all this water.”

  He seemed to think about it for a moment, and then resign himself to the idea that it wouldn’t do any good to argue. He downed the water. I watched, wondering if it made me a bad teacher that I hadn’t turned him over to the deans on account of his extracurricular activities.

  “Now. You wanna tell me who was involved?”

  “Um . . . nah. I’d feel bad.”

  I didn’t pursue the issue; I told myself that he would be too loyal a friend to ever yield. This may have been true. Mostly, I was content to have made a half-hearted attempt to pursue this as a legitimate disci plinary issue, so that now I could go back to protecting him from the punishment he would have coming to him if I hadn’t intervened.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m letting you off the hook. But you need to promise me something. The next time they start drinking, especially before school—you are out of there, you hear me? Just leave. I don’t care what else is going on.”

  “Yeah, I know, Miss. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me! Just don’t put yourself in this position again, okay?”

  He looked down at the table and nodded once. I noticed he was fiddling with the empty cup.

  “So. Do you need me to write you a late-pass to Art?”

  “Nah. It’s my fault. I’ll just take the rap—she can’t do nothing to me anyway cause I’m there most of the time.”

  He got up and wearily gathered his stuff. Sitting on my desk, I watched him. He swung his backpack over his shoulder and came over to the desk. When he reached out his closed fist for a “pound,” I accepted; we had never greeted each other this way before, but now it seemed important somehow. We’re still pals.

  “I’ll catch you later, Miss.”

  “Carlos.”

  “Yeah?”

  He was standing in front of me. I reached up and took his little face in my hands, angling it slightly downwards towards me so that his eyes would meet mine.

  “If you ever come to school drunk again, I will kick your ass from here ’til next Tuesday. Do we understand each other?”

  He held my gaze and nodded. Then he smiled, though not in a conspiratorial “I know you don’t mean that” kind of way—more in an understanding “I am aware that you’ve just risked your teaching license for my ass” kind of way.

  He left the classroom. I watched him make his way down the hallway. There was a lump in my throat, though I couldn’t have said exactly why.

  In the four-minute period between dismissal from tenth period (my class) and the beginning of eleventh period, two of my students managed to fight so badly that they both ended up bleeding and with broken wrists/ fingers. Good grief. One of the warriors, Nora, I reported as an abuse case last week. The other is one of my top students, “Lisa.” The fight was over “Jeremy,” Lisa’s boyfriend. Apparently Nora has a thing for Jeremy, also. Lisa was standing around chatting with a group of kids, and suddenly Nora leaped upon her and started punching her from behind. Once Lisa got her bearings, the fight descended into hair pulling, scratching, beating, and all kinds of other brutality. It was relentless. Nora’s face was bleeding, and I was worried they were going to claw each other’s eyes out.

  I’ll preface the following by saying this: I know I’m not supposed to get involved. But I just couldn’t stand to see them clawing each other like that. “Go get security!” I yelled to the ten or so kids who had not yet gone to their next class as I tried to pry the girls apart. (They are pretty small.) No one budged. It was as if I were speaking Greek or something. Meanwhile, a group of on-lookers pooled, mouths agape, at the doorway. None of them went to get security either. The girls were still throwing each other around, knocking desks over in the process, and no one was coming. “Go get security!” I yelled again, in desperation, as I tried to push them away from each other. Jeremy, the boy over whom they were fighting, started (slowly) out of the room to get security, and Carlos came to his senses and helped me separate the girls. He grabbed Nora off Lisa and walked her away, gently, with his arm around her to calm her down.

  Just then the head of the UFT burst in, walkie-talkie in hand, and helped me get rid of all the extra kids who were milling around at the front of the room. I went downstairs to file a disciplinary report, and both girls were in the office receiving suspensions within the next two minutes, although I don’t think they cared much.

  Why did they have to fight like that, to turn from little girls into feral cats? I don’t get it. . . . I’m close with this group of kids (they’re my homeroom class), and so perhaps that’s why I am so angry with them, and more than a little bit disappointed. There was something upsetting about seeing them be so vicious with one another.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alex

  In the early evenings, my students—Damien, Alex, Anthony, Desi, Matt—and I would huddle our desks together in the center of the classroom. We were in that last period of the day—fourteenth, ending at 5:55 p.m.—and the abysmal attendance (those kids were the only ones who ever showed up) was a testament to how poorly this schedule was working out.

  There was something very odd, surreal even, about being in the school after dark. It seemed incongruous with my idea of what school was “like”—when I sat at home envisioning how my lessons would go with these kids, in my mind the sun was always streaming into a packed classroom. Months after I had been teaching fourteenth period, always the same five students, it still jarred me to look out the windows into the dark and see only the reflection of the flickering fluorescent ceiling lights.

  The room was drafty, cavernous with just the six of us inside. The kids often wore their hats and gloves at their desks. Outside, the hallway was so empty that you could hear the echo of a person’s footsteps long after he or she had passed by the door to our classroom. We left our door open, a silent encouragement to anyone who might be walking by and feel like stopping in. Sometimes, teachers who had had none of their students show up that period, or even sympathetic administrators, would enter and chat with us. We liked when that happened, especially if it was a cool young teacher, or even the deputy dean of security, who, unlike his supervisor, was easy-going and made good jokes: When one of the kids had said to him “You can’t take away my hat—you’re not my father!” He had responded, “Yeah? How do you know?” It relieved us from the unnerving sensation that we were the last people left in the building.

  The kids in that class were freshmen repeaters. Privately, I called them Super-Freshmen. They were anywhere from sixteen to nineteen years old and were having their second or third go at freshman English. By comparison, I was twenty-two. Far from being the slackers I had been assured they would be (and that they definitely were in some of their other classes), they worked enthusiastically, taking it as a point of pride that out of the thirty-something kids on the roster, they were the only five who would pass. Once, we had an interloper for about a week—his name was Brian. He was on the roster, too. He showed up midsemester, hung out for a few days, and then vanished as inexplicably as he had first appeared. For months, the remaining kids hounded me to make sure that I would not pass him: “Yo Miss, Brian failed, right? How’s he gonna show up for five days, and then think you gonna pass him? That’s whack!” Brian had expressed no such belief, at least not to me—but the kids were endlessly cackling over his presumed audacity.

  That fall, we were assigned to read It Happened to Nancy, which was essentially a cautionary pamphlet turned into a young adult novel. The book was written in faux-diary format, and the plot was simple: Nancy, an innocent white teenager from a suburban neighborhood in a flyover state, meets a hot guy named Colin at a Bruce Springsteen concert. They strike up a relationship, and Colin tells Nancy that she reminds him of his younger sister, who is dead from some childhood illness. This revelation causes Nancy to fall in lov
e with Colin. She invites Colin to her house, where he proceeds to drug her, rape her, and then vanish. Afterward, it turns out that Colin is actually in his thirties (not nineteen, like he told Nancy!) and a convicted child molester to boot. Also, he has AIDS. The rest of the book chronicles Nancy’s struggle with the disease and untimely death, much to the dismay of her unfailingly supportive, not to mention good-looking, group of friends.

  My students pronounced It Happened to Nancy the most preposterous piece of trash they had ever read. For starters, we all thought it was unrealistic that someone succumbing to late-stage AIDS would be healthy enough to be riding a bicycle through the corn-fields in the sunset and then chronicle it all in a diary. But beyond that, I think they were indignant at the perceived condescension. No way would any of them have invited a total stranger into their homes, they assured me—“That’s mad stupid! Miss, you asking to get raped and murdered if you do that! No offense, but white girls is whack!”

  So, I went to the book closet to find a replacement. The pickings were slim. I brought them two books to choose from. The first, I can’t remember. The second was John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

  They went for John Knowles. I think it was because I said offhandedly, the day I brought in the two books to choose from, “This one might be too challenging.” I had read it with the summer school students before them, with little success—but somehow, my Super-Freshmen took to it. I would sit on top of my desk, Indian-style, in the center of that overlarge, cold classroom and read aloud to them, ten to fifteen pages at a time. They would group their desks around mine in a little cluster and follow along. Then we would discuss it.

  It was one of those days that I asked them, in line with the book’s flashback narration (which, we all agreed, was more effective than some fake journal): “Where do you guys see yourselves in ten years?”

  Damien, the oldest and my class clown, was the first to shoot his hand in the air. Before I could even call on him, he delivered his line: “I’m going to be a male prostitute!” The class burst out laughing. He pumped his fists in the air and grinned.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Someone else.”

  Desi looked bored—but that was just her way. She was our class’s old soul—and the lone girl. At sixteen, she had already had one abortion three years prior; later that year, she would have a second. She had bulging eyes that were heavily lidded, reminding me of a black moor goldfish, but somehow this made her seem more perceptive.

  “God, I just hope I’m out of high school,” she said, flashing a quick smile. Murmurs of agreement came from the peanut gallery.

  I looked at Alex. To me, he was the most intriguing of the five. He had a small, sculpted face, wire-rimmed glasses, and tiny cornrows. When we read anything complicated, he would wait until his peers all had their turns guessing at the meaning; then, he would raise his hand and illuminate everything. Though he was well-liked and recognized for being intelligent, he was never cocky. I would catch his eye across the room sometimes, and he would smile at me; we were in on something together, though I would have been hard-pressed to say exactly what.

  I knew Alex was affiliated with a group of kids who dealt crack. When I confronted him at one point, he told me that this group could pull in $6,000 on a good day. Though he had decent attendance to my class that term, he explained to me that the opportunity cost of going to school every day was too much when that kind of money was involved. I had a hard time arguing.

  Now he looked at me appraisingly. “Miss,” he said, “I’m pretty sure by the time I’m thirty I’ll either be in jail or dead.”

  There was a moment of dead silence, punctuated by my dropping the cap to the dry erase marker. One of the kids helped me retrieve it, and then I sat down on the desk and stared at Alex.

  “Why does it have to be that way?” I said. Then, forgetting to address the entire group, I blurted out, “You’re smart, Alex. You could do tons of things with your life, besides dealing. You have some control over this situation, you know. Couldn’t things be different?”

  Damien answered. He got up and sat on top of the desk next to me. “Miss, that’s the world we live in,” he said. His voice held no rudeness or sarcasm; if anything, it held sympathy. The other kids nodded, murmuring in assent.

  We sat quietly. After a few moments, I looked up at Alex, and he gave me a smile of such understanding I could have kissed him.

  When the bell rang, the kids pulled on their coats and donned gloves and hats if they weren’t already wearing them. As they bundled up for their exit into the cold night, I wanted to hold on to them, to keep them safe here with me.

  “C’mon, Miss. Smile,” said Damien. They each hugged me and filed out the door, shoving each other playfully, arms over each other’s shoulders. A picture of high school bliss, they seemed for that moment to be at ease in the world.

  I’ve been reading this book PUSH, by Sapphire, with my ninth-grade repeaters. It’s about a sixteen-year-old girl from the projects who, at the book’s beginning, is pregnant with her second child by her father. Yeah, it’s graphic and vulgar. It’s also a well-written and thought-provoking narrative. The kids are into it.

  I read the book to them aloud in class, and now they’re doing projects related to it. They have the option of making a detailed poster to advertise the book, drawing a graphic rendition of it in comic book form (must be at least ten panels), writing an epilogue, or creating a journal from the point of view of a secondary character. They like this sort of thing because it gives them a chance to be artistic and creative (and some of them have a lot of talent).

  Oddly, the Board of Ed encourages me to have my seventeen-year-olds spend whole periods drawing in crayon. . . . They call it “visualization.” Whatever.

  In my view, this is a reward to them for having done a lot of good assignments relating to this book. They were able to connect it with their lives in a lot of ways, and they surprised me with the honesty and high quality of their writing. I was proud of them.

  However, one of the Special Education teachers feels that I’m corrupting their minds by letting them read this book due to its explicit content. “Am I giving you guys any ideas you haven’t thought of? Any curses you’ve never heard?” I asked. They rolled their eyes and one girl (she’s strong, brave, and really one of my favorites) said frankly, “Miss, I had an abortion when I was fourteen. Give it a rest.” Point taken. I asked my assistant principal just to be on the safe side, and he pointed out that if the book is in the library (which it is) then I’m covered.

  I planned a party for my students because it’s the day before Christmas Eve and only half of them are here, anyway, which makes it stupid to try and teach a lesson. Besides, it seems like all the other teachers are always giving their kids movies and parties, so I thought I would be nice for once. I made two special CDs titled “Miss Garon’s Party Mix Volumes 1&2,” which included all their favorite rap songs, with edited lyrics to get rid of the bad language. It also included the South Park version of “Oh Holy Night,” and by their popular request, the Adam Sandler Hanukkah song. I brought in peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, and graham crackers so that they could have a snack, but not be too sugared up for their next class. (Giving them candy is a bad idea, I’ve learned.)

  As it turns out, I’m an event-planning genius. The party was a huge hit . . . too much of a hit. Ninth period, other kids started coming in from other classes. At first, there were only one or two kids from my eighth-period class who had stayed over. Then more kids came. Someone wanted to go get more girls for dancing. A whole bunch of guys with do-rags walked in and sat in the corner, looking surly and intimidating. I did not know them.

  I was getting a little nervous. I opened the door and asked a security guard, “Is this okay that they’re all here?”

  “Are they bugging you?” he asked.

  “Well . . . no . . . not really. They’re just sitting around dipping graham crackers in peanut butter.”

 
; “So that’s fine then. Just call if you have a problem,” he said.

  The dean of security didn’t agree. Ten minutes later he barged in and asked for the IDs of every single person who wasn’t on my attendance roster. All the partygoers got their IDs confiscated, and now they have detention after the break.

  I felt so bad. I figured I was doing everyone a favor by keeping the stray kids out of the hallway. Instead, I got a huge lecture from the dean about not allowing anyone into my class who isn’t on the attendance roster. I was embarrassed. Definitely not a Christmas miracle, by any means.

  The students were apologetic. “Why didn’t you just ‘take him out,’ Miss?” they asked. Right, of course that’s the logical solution—just beat up the dean.

  They did help me clean up, though, after I instituted the “everyone pick up one piece of trash” rule. They also gave me gifts, including a Santa Claus mug filled with candy and a plaster casting of some angels praying. Perfect for a nice Jewish girl! It was sweet. As they were filing out the door, they all hugged me and said, “Thanks for being so nice,” and that kind of made up for the dean coming in and yelling at me. Meanwhile, my assistant principal thought the whole incident was hilarious, particularly the part about the graham crackers, though I don’t understand why.

  A testament to my success as an English teacher, or complete lack thereof, written by one of my students as an assignment for a typing class (exact punctuation and spelling included):

  Dear Miz Garon,

  You are the most coolest teacher at CCHS your not like those old hags in this school bitch about anything. Im glad I had you for my English teacher and not some old bitch who nags about everything.

  I will miss you dearly if I do not have you next term. I Promise I’ll come visit you all the time.

  Yours Truly

  Coralee Martinez