Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?

by Ilana Garon

  It’s a week into the new semester. Today I had to preemptively break up a duel involving plastic utensils just before thirteenth period. (I figured everything would have been fine until someone got hurt, and then all hell would have broken loose.) Immediately afterwards, I had to bring my thirteenth–fourteenth period class down to the auditorium for an assembly on discipline and security, during which several of them managed to land themselves in detention for smarting off to the deans. I was embarrassed.

  Upon returning to class, I had the kids read the poems of the Harlem Renaissance and discuss the relationships between black and white people during that time. Then we played the music of Tupac Shakur and Jay-Z (both rappers who talk a lot about the plight of African Americans in the ghetto) and discussed whether things have changed since the Harlem Renaissance era. The discussion was heated, and the students were enamored of the fact that they were allowed to listen to rap music in class.

  I told the boys (our class is mostly male) that if they were good I would give them free reign over the boom box at the end of class. They turned on this song “Heya” by Outkast, which they all knew the words to, and started dancing around the classroom, singing along.

  1t was one of those moments wherein I realized why I do this: here I was in a school in the Bronx, surrounded by fifteen-year-old disciplinary nightmares who were leaping, dancing around me, singing at the tops of their lungs as I cleaned the classroom. These little men were jubilant, and it was only Thursday! One of the deans heard the commotion, looked in and said, “God, I wondered if they killed you!” and I said, “No, I allowed this,” and she laughed and we looked on as they jumped and sang. Several of them came over and hugged me while simultaneously bouncing up and down and rapping. It was overwhelming, hilarious, and kind of adorable, and I was filled with this sensation of “How on earth did I get here?” but in the happiest way the thought could be phrased.

  I feel lucky to have a job like this; it’s exhausting, frustrating, and makes me worry to death sometimes, but it never gets boring, and is often inspiring.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kayron

  Here is one cardinal rule of being a teacher: You’re not supposed to play favorites, let alone out-rightly dislike your students, especially if you’re working in the kind of inner-city school where 98 percent of the student body is on subsidized lunches. You’re supposed to feel sympathy and chalk up their problems to “the system” that has failed the students at every turn.

  Easy enough for most teachers, perhaps; they didn’t have Kayron.

  He appeared innocuous at a glance, a short, pudgy Jamaican kid with long, feminine eyelashes. Other than a perplexing propensity for wearing cargo shorts year round, even when the weather called for his black NorthFace parka, nothing seemed amiss; he was even one of the rare ninth-graders who cared enough about getting a good grade to complete his work (doing the bare minimum, mind you, but still doing it) and to turn it in close to on time. That alone was usually the mark of a “good” kid.

  But his teachers knew better.

  “Poor you—you have a ‘Kayron class,’” teachers would say to me sympathetically, looking at my attendance roster across the table in the faculty lounge.

  ______

  “Kayron, you know you have a lot of potential,” I told him one day.

  “Oh, I know, Miss,” he assured me without taking his eyes off the Gameboy that I had asked him to put away at least ten times.

  “And, you know, you do a lot more homework than many of your classmates do . . .”

  “Yeah, they don’t really have much going on up here.” He pointed to his head.

  “So, you’ll be happy to know that I’m giving you an 80 in my class,” I told him.

  “I know, Miss.”

  “How do you know?”

  He sighed, turning to his friend Leslie and rolling his eyes. “Sometimes I really wonder about her . . .” he said. Then, as if I hadn’t heard his aside, he told me, “Miss, it’s obvious. Would you look at the amazing work that I do in this class?”

  ______

  Kayron’s work was not nearly as amazing as he thought it was.

  We were studying Romeo and Juliet. I had asked the students to make a poster advertising the play. “Juliet is the rose, that without sunlight, or Romeo’s love, will wilt like a flower and die, and the rain is the nourishing party that makes their love come alive,” wrote Kayron on poster-sized paper. He proceeded to draw some pictures of roses and sunlight in bright Crayola tones, with rays that said things like “hope” and “joy” streaming out of the poster at every edge.

  “That’s very . . . creative,” I told him, wondering if he had, in fact, read the play.

  “I know. It’s the best. So we’re just going to put it up right here in the middle, where everyone can see it,” said Kayron. He took my roll of tape out of my hands and proceeded to post his paper in the middle of our class board, covering up several student essays from the other classes.

  Later that day, the tape became un-sticky, and one side of his picture fell, leaving it hanging lopsided on the board. Kayron raised his hand while I was in the middle of a lesson on grammar.

  “Miss Garon?” he said, and then repeated “Miss Garon! Miss Garon!” when he saw that I was doing my best to ignore him. I gave in.

  “Yes, Kayron?”

  “My poster. It’s lopsided.” At this, the other kids yelled “Kayron, shut up!”

  “Okay, we’ll fix it later.”

  “Miss Garon, you know this is the best work anyone in this class did.” At this, the rest of the class groaned. “You should be jumping up to fix it right now. What kind of a teacher are you?”

  ______

  I was giving a quiz on grammar. Not having paid attention during the lesson, Kayron was unprepared, and he knew this. I had just seated the students in rows when Kayron started inching his desk over toward his pal, Leslie.

  “Kayron, move away from Leslie.”

  “Why, Miss Garon?” he whined.

  “Because your desk is too close to hers.”

  “You see how she’s always picking on me?” he complained to Leslie, who giggled. Then he said, “Miss, I’m just sitting near Leslie so that I can get a piece of paper from her.”

  “Great, get your piece of paper and move your desk to the left.”

  I gave out the quiz. A minute later:

  “Kayron! Get up and move across the room.”

  “But Miss Garon, why can’t you be cool?”

  “Because you’re cheating off of Leslie’s paper.”

  “What are you talking about? Leslie’s not that smart—why am I going to cheat off of her paper? Hello?” He rolled his eyes. Leslie didn’t object.

  I went over to Kayron and dragged his desk across the room with him still sitting in it, much to his protests: “You’re so un-cool, Miss! And look at your clothes! They’re hideous!” He remained where I had put him, though for the next few minutes I heard him muttering “just mad about how she can’t afford designer jeans” and “damn teacher needs a push-up bra.”

  I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing sneakers, khakis, and a light green polo shirt. Do I need a push-up bra? I wondered.

  “Miss, I need to get out a notebook to put my paper on,” he piped up. He still hadn’t started the quiz.

  The other students groaned: “Miss Garon, can you make him shut up? He’s mad annoying.”

  “Kayron, you don’t need your notebook. Can you please take this quiz quietly?” I asked him.

  “Okay Miss, you won’t hear any more out of me, I promise.”

  A minute later, I caught him peeking into his notebook, which he had removed from his backpack surreptitiously. I took his quiz away and gave him a zero. However, some weeks later, when I would calculate report card grades, I would find myself unable to get below a 65 for that kid—and as a result, I could never justify giving him the “F” I felt he deserved.

  I still don’t get how he always managed
to pull that off.

  ______

  “Miss Garon, I think you’ve noticed that my behavior has improved lately,” Kayron told me after class one day, coming up to my desk and touching my shoulder fraternally, as he so often did when he was trying to butter me up. I instantly became wary.

  “You think so?”

  “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “Kayron, just yesterday you told Natesha that she should close her legs because the room smelled like fish. I don’t consider that an improvement.”

  “But Miss Garon, that wasn’t at you. It was at people in general. Why do you always have to be up in other people’s business?”

  “That doesn’t matter. You just can’t talk like that in class, Kayron,” I said with as much patience as I could muster.

  “But you noticed that I didn’t use any inappropriate words, right?”

  “The concept was still inappropriate.”

  “What do you mean? There wasn’t a bad word in that sentence. It wasn’t like last week, when I said all those words like ‘c—t’ and ‘whore.’”

  He had me there.

  “Okay, if you behave well this whole week, I’ll write you a note to bring home.”

  “No, you’ll send it to the house in the mail.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Miss.” He rolled his eyes at me. “You know the letters that come in the mail are a lot more persuasive.”

  Two days passed. He was sedate the first day, but on the second he drew a picture on the desk of two people engaged in oral sex, and then pretended to find it and be shocked by it (“Oh my god! Look at this inappropriate drawing on my desk!”), thereby calling it to the attention of the rest of the class. Fed up, I opened my classroom door and summoned the deans, who for once came promptly to remove him.

  “You lying little fool,” he hissed at me, as two deans shepherded him out of the room, gripping his elbows in case it occurred to him to make a run for it. The other students giggled.

  ______

  Kayron came in several days later wearing an electronic device strapped to his wrist. “It’s a calculator-watch, Miss,” he told me. Then he sat down and proceeded to speak directly into it in a loud voice: “Danesha, can you hear me? What class are you in now?”

  “Kayron, put the walkie-talkie away, we’re starting now.”

  “But Miss, it’s just a calculator.” At this, the device crackled.

  “Then why are you talking into it?”

  “Miss, why do you have to be so un-cool?” Then he said to the “calculator,” “Danesha, my teacher is making me turn it off now. Meet me after class!”

  The next day Kayron arrived in class conversing into the walkie-talkie, and again tried to convince me that it was just a calculator. I marveled at how short he perceived my memory to be.

  “Kayron, we had this conversation yesterday.”

  “I told you—I need it to do my math homework.”

  “You’re not supposed to be doing math homework during English class anyway. Put it away.”

  He put it in his bag, grudgingly. Ten minutes later he went through his bag and found that the walkie-talkie was missing.

  I sighed. “All right, guys, who stole Kayron’s walkie-talkie? Can whoever took it please return it to him?”

  “See Miss? This is your fault! Now you have to pay for it!”

  “Kayron, you shouldn’t have brought it to class in the first place.”

  “Yeah, well I’m just going to go right now and get you in trouble with my guidance counselor.”

  This particular group of guidance counselors, fortunately for me, had proven to be an ineffectual bunch. This I knew from trying to enlist their help dealing with students on numerous occasions. Whenever I reached out to them, they were on a coffee break, so I figured Kayron wasn’t going to get any help from them, either.

  After a few moments, the walkie-talkie resurfaced. It turned out that Anthony—with whom Kayron did not get along since he had passed around a drawing of Anthony performing oral sex on another classmate—had stuffed the walkie-talkie into his own bag. The walkie-talkie was returned, I threatened to call everyone’s house (a threat I had little intention of honoring, since I’d never once gotten a response from either Kayron’s or Anthony’s parents), and at the end of class, Kayron approached my desk. I was about to say something about not bringing the walkie-talkie anymore, but he cut me off, pointed to his watch, and said in a patronizing voice, “You can’t afford this, Miss, so don’t even think about it.”

  ______

  A couple of weeks later, two other ninth-grade teachers persuaded me to help them plan a field trip to the Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier-cum-museum, with a lunch stop at McDonald’s. Due to severe budget shortages at the school, we were informed by the administration that each of us could only pick ten students to bring on the trip. The rest would stay at school that day with a substitute.

  “Whatever you do, don’t pick Kayron,” more than one teacher each told me. “There’s no way in hell I’m going on a trip with that kid.”

  I made an effort to be secretive with the kids who were chosen, pulling them aside after class (“You’re just talking to them because they’re failing, right?” asked Kayron suspiciously when he saw them grouped around my desk), and telling them not to discuss the trip with their friends. Naturally, the entire ninth grade knew almost instantly.

  Kayron was furious. “Miss! You know I’m the best student! Why didn’t you pick me?” he yelled out in the middle of class.

  “Kayron, I’ll talk to you about this later,” I told him, feeling the stares of the rest of the class upon us.

  “No, now!”

  The kids were doing group work. I pulled Kayron out into the hallway with me.

  “First of all, there was a limit on the number of students we could bring—”

  He interrupted. “It should have been me! You know I’m so much smarter than any of these people, like Megan and Leslie.”

  “You can’t talk about your friends that way,” I said, with as much patience as I could muster. “And besides, the choice wasn’t just based on grades—it was based on overall behavior.”

  “What are you talking about? My behavior’s great now.”

  Just two days prior, a teacher had stopped by my class to tell me that she had seen Kayron stealing school supplies from my desk drawer. Sure enough, when I had gone through my stuff, my stapler had been missing.

  “C’mon, Kayron. I know you took my stapler.”

  “No! You lost it! Don’t even try to blame that shit one me.”

  “Good grief, Ms. Medori saw you doing it! Okay, you know what? Never mind. The point is, you’re not going, and that’s that.”

  “What if your stapler turns up again?” he asked craftily.

  “It better, or else I’m telling security you stole it. Now get back in the classroom,” I told him, ushering him through the door.

  Ten minutes later, Kayron “found” my stapler on the top of the supply closet, a spot I could never have reached on my own without the aid of a chair. “See, what would you do without me? Now you have to let me go on the trip!”

  I ignored him.

  ______

  But he kept pestering me about the damned trip.

  “What if my mom comes with me?” he asked two days beforehand, in what he clearly believed to be a burst of inspiration. “Then can I come with you on the trip?”

  “Sure, if your mom comes—then she can be responsible for you!”

  Initially he seemed satisfied with this. But the next day, he came to me again. “So, what if my mom can only come meet me at the Intrepid? Can I just come down with you guys and then my mom will meet us there?”

  I had seen this one coming a mile away.

  “Kayron, I know what you’re trying to pull! You cannot go on this trip unless a parent is with you throughout the duration. There’s no way you’re going to trick me with this.”

  “But Miss! Why are
you so un-cool?”

  I tried a different tactic.

  “Kayron, why do you even want to go? You don’t give a damn about the Intrepid. You’ll have a substitute in English, so you can get away with not showing up. And you see these people every other day in school. Seriously, why does it matter to you?”

  “Because you guys are going to McDonald’s.”

  I burst out laughing. “So what? You can go to McDonald’s any day you want, on your own!”

  “But it’s not the same!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not there!”

  This caught me off guard. I was about to say, “But you can’t stand me!” and then I thought better of it. “Why do you want to eat lunch with me?” I finally asked.

  At this, he became utterly exasperated. “God Miss, you have nothing going on up here at all!” he fumed, pointing to his head. Then he stormed out, leaving me in his wake.

  ______

  Since he couldn’t be there, Kayron appointed spies among the kids who were going on the trip. He outfitted each of his PI’s with a disposable camera.

  At first I didn’t notice. I was distracted by one of the other students, an eighteen-year-old freshman named Damien who had confiscated a large bullet, a World War II relic that the tour guide was passing around to the group, and had snuck it into his backpack. We stopped the tour, and told all the kids to empty their stuff. The thief laughed, pulled the bullet out of his bag, and handed it over.

  “Damien!” I hissed, pulling him aside from the tour. “I picked you for this trip because I thought you would behave! I can’t believe you! This is a museum! How can you steal their artifacts?”

  “Miss, chill, it was mad small,” he replied, laughing, as if that cleared everything up. I couldn’t figure out if he is talking about the bullet or about the crime itself. Then he ran off to jump on his friends from behind.

  I became aware of clicking noises very close to me. I turned around. Leslie and Megan were angling Kayron’s disposable cameras for close-up views of my behind. I made some faces at them, which they photographed gleefully. Then I told them to cut it out and join the rest of the group.