by Ilana Garon
“What is it you like about her?” he finally asked.
I thought about it. “I don’t know. She’s just so funny and cute. And so smart. I sort of see her as a little sister, I guess. I’m only a little bit older than she is, when you think about it, and we certainly have . . . well, had . . . a different kind of relationship than I have with most students.”
He smiled.
“I’ve never counseled a student like Felicia either,” he said. “She has this knack for creating drama. She’s crafty: She’ll ask me to tell teachers this, to tell the guidance counselors that, pit them all against each other to get everyone on her side. She’s a nice kid, but she’s a master manipulator. This is something it’s important to know about her.”
He paused and looked at me sympathetically.
“You have to be careful not to get too involved with kids like that,” he said. “It’s easy to do . . . all of her teachers have, basically. She’s really good at luring adults into blurring boundaries.”
I thought about that for a while. I was the adult here—how could I fault her for any of this? She was a really messed up kid; that was basically all I would cop to.
Besides, I still felt like a snitch.
“I’ll stay away from her, ignore her, whatever she wants,” I said. “But please tell me one thing: Will she eventually stop hating me?”
He smiled sympathetically. “You know I can’t tell you that. We’ll just have to see.”
______
I waited her out. I kept my door open, like the other English teacher had said, and I put the situation out of my mind. It was easier to do than I thought it would be. I became wrapped up with the class of all boys. I taught them Sex Education during Advisory that term, which was, weirdly, the event that finally bonded us all, despite their lingering sadness over Claus’s departure. They were surprisingly eager to learn what I had to teach them and earnest about it. They really wanted to know about women. It was sort of sweet.
I took an old plastic box that had formerly held Twizzlers and cut an opening in the lid to the container. “Here’s where you can put in any questions you have about sex that you’re afraid to ask out loud,” I told them.
The questions that came in the box were mostly along the lines of “Ms. Garon, will you marry me?” But it wasn’t horrible. Spring came, the end of the year was in sight, and I started feeling happier again.
And apparently, around that time Felicia started to feel happier, too.
______
It started small. Some of the kids were going on about how I was a snitch. Three full months later. They remembered everything, except their class notes on test day.
“Whatever. I’m over it,” Felicia said to them. The history teacher told me about that later. And then another time, “It wasn’t her fault. She had to tell. She was required by law.”
(That’s my smart girl, I thought privately when I heard.)
I still kept my distance. Felicia started asking me questions. Not to me directly—through other teachers.
“Felicia wants to know if you have more books she can borrow,” her math teacher told me. “I said she should ask you herself, but then she just ran away.”
A few weeks later, another thing happened. This, too, was told to me by the math teacher. Felicia came up to her after class and said, “I’m cool with Ms. Garon now.”
“Well, that’s great,” said the long-suffering math teacher. “But does she know this?”
“I think so.”
“Are you sure? Have you told her?”
“No.”
“So how is she supposed to know?”
At that point, Felicia looked embarrassed again, and did what all adolescents do when they run out of things to say—rolled her eyes and stalked off.
______
The math teacher asked me to help her chaperone a field trip. “Felicia’s going to be on it,” she told me.
I was hesitant. “Is it cool if I come then?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t have asked you if it weren’t.”
“But Felicia . . .” We still hadn’t spoken in months.
“Yes, it’s fine with her. I already asked.”
I went to meet the kids after school, and Felicia ran up to me and threw her tiny arms around my waist, as if nothing had ever happened between us. “Miss!” she said, in her usual slightly bossy, conspiratorial tone. It was good to hear her voice again. “Your outfit is so last year. We have to do something about this. Now, let me tell you all about this drama I’m having with this boy named Jesus. . . .”
I guess that’s fourteen-year-old speak for “I’m sorry.” I certainly never pressed the issue. But just like that we were “cool.” A few days later she called me on my cell (I had given it to her many months ago for her to call me if she was having problems) and left me a voicemail saying, “Miss Garon, this message is ridiculously dorky. ‘At the beep, do your thing?’ What the hell does that mean? You have to change it. Right now.”
Summer came, then fall, and we were all back. I was teaching in a different school in the same building. But Felicia would occasionally come visit me to say hi, and tell me what was going on in her life. She told me that she had started to pick up her grades. We were not as close as we had been once, but I think that is the inevitable side effect of my teaching a different group of kids from year to year.
The last time I saw her was a couple of months at the end of her junior year. I was walking to the subway when I saw her goofing around with some friends a few blocks from the campus. She seemed, somehow, more grown-up than I had ever seen her: Her hair was straightened, and she had applied silver makeup flatteringly around her eyes. I was struck by how beautiful she had turned out to be. She ran up and hugged me, and said, “Are you dating that fat guidance counselor, Miss? Yeah, I saw you talking to him. What’s going on with you two?” Then she cackled at my protestations.
I don’t know that I have ever been as attached to a student as I was to her, and I don’t know if I ever will be again. Perhaps it’s healthier that way. But I still miss her.
We’re in ninth period, and the kids are taking their seats. Bryant, a chronic pain in the butt, decides he wants to sit where Pablo, a small kid, always sits. So he shoves all of Pablo’s stuff off the desk to claim his territory.
Ian gets up and asks Bryant why he has no problem picking on small kids like Pablo, but won’t fight anyone his own size. Bryant doesn’t answer.
Ian touches Bryant on his chest and (lightly) sneers, “Pussy.”
Bryant slugs him.
The fists start flying, and the classroom erupts into chaos. Everyone’s screaming, running around, bumping into desks, trying to get out of the way of these huge guys who are slugging each other as hard as they possibly can. It doesn’t help that the room is on a slant—seating is amphitheater-style, and the kids are all falling down the steps and crashing into each other as they try to get out of the way.
I run in the hallway and scream “Security!!!” and, miraculously, five police officers are in the room a moment later, but not soon enough to avoid a couple of kids getting punched in the “crossfire,” among them David, one of my favorite students (he always takes attendance for me and helps me pass things out), who jumps between Bryant and Ian in an effort to break them up.
“No, David! Don’t go in!” I yell, grabbing him by the back of the shirt as security floods the room. And then I leap up on the desk for visibility and yell, “Everyone sit down and get out of the way! Now!!!” Meanwhile, the dean has busted in yelling for everyone to get down, shut up, sit at their desks, etc., and they listen to him. There are kids falling all over each other, scrambling to get out of the middle of the fight and into their seats, or cramming up against the wall to let all the guards come through. Within moments, the fight is defused, the two culprits escorted out in handcuffs (because they wouldn’t stop punching each other).
“David! Don’t try to break up a fight like that ever again!” I yell
, practically freaking out.
“Aww, Miss, he wouldn’t have slugged me.” (I’m not sure whether “he” refers to Ian or Bryant, and I’m definitely not convinced of his logic.) Meanwhile, security guards come into the classroom to interview various students, take statements from them, and at one point come in to take a poll from the students (“Now we really need you to tell the truth, kids,” they say.) about who hit whom first. Although most of the kids want to stand up for Ian, when they’re threatened with obstruction of justice they tell the truth: Ian actually touched Bryant first, although Bryant deserved it. We receive five separate visits by security during the first twenty minutes of class.
lt is during one of these visits that the assistant principal of my department and his sidekick, the literacy coach, decide to come in and make surprise “walk-in” to my class!
“Um . . . we just had a fight,” I tell them lamely.
“A fight?”
Then they see the security guard and say together, “Oh.”
l kind of hope they’ll take the hint to leave and come back another day, but they don’t. Instead they tell me “Don’t worry about it” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and make themselves comfortable. So I leap into teaching mode, praying that the kids will follow. I break them up into groups and have them finish working on some plays they were writing and then ask them to act them out. The literacy coach and the assistant principal wander around asking the kids questions about what they’re doing, what kinds of things they’re learning, etc. The kids are articulate and engaged.
“We acted white,” they tell me later.
Argh.
CHAPTER SIX
Anita & the Sunshine Class
Anita was bold and brassy, with a big mouth. She had a wide smile that revealed perfectly straight rows of large, almost square white teeth, and she habitually screamed the latest gossip across the room, perfectly content for the entire class to be privy to her conversations.
“Volume control, Anita,” I would tell her, motioning towards her with a calculator as though it were a TV remote.
“Don’t be hatin’, Miss,” she’d holler back in a mock warning.
Her pink pen was an ongoing source of contention between us. It had a huge magenta feather sticking out the top and wrote in bright neon pink ink, her huge bubble letters scrawled on both sides of the page so as to make the entire thing illegible. Every time, I would write “BLUE OR BLACK PEN PLEASEH!” in angry capitals all over her homework assignments. When I returned them to her, she would just laugh. I threatened to deduct points, a threat she correctly realized I would never make good on; her attendance record was spotty, her chance of passing the class was already in jeopardy. I wanted as many kids passing as possible.
“I’m going to go blind if you keep using that pen!” I told her. “It makes it so hard for me to read!”
“Miss! How you gonna be telling me not to write in pink? It’s, like, my personality,” she said, with exaggerated hand gestures.
I tried another tactic. “But I grade the papers in red pen. My corrections don’t show up well against the pink.”
“So grade me in green, Miss,” she said with her usual pragmatism.
She and a group of other girls used to braid my hair after class, when I would let them. One afternoon they stayed afterwards, attempting to give me cornrows.
“Owwww!” The sensation of pulling on my scalp was excruciating. I didn’t understand how the kids put up with this beauty regiment on a day-to-day basis.
“Quit crying, Miss! You’re so tender-headed!” Anita laughed, as she yanked one of the braids and pulled as hard as she could. (At least, that’s what it felt like to me—I couldn’t tell what was happening behind my head.) One of the other girls squeezed my hand.
Later that night, I removed the few braids they had gotten in before I had donned a winter cap and run off in terror—they were just too painful. When I sheepishly entered class the next day, hair still wavy from the aborted braiding attempt, only Anita noticed. She looked up at me, smirked, and shook her head knowingly.
______
Anita’s class, despite their ongoing interest in torturing me with the latest hair fashions, was not by any means my toughest group. This semester, a group that their exasperated teachers called “the Sunshine Class” had been dumped upon me.
The Sunshine Class was mostly male. It contained at least one kid who had been upstate in Ossining’s juvenile center, several who reported to probation officers, and members of both the Bloods and a local Albanian gang known as ABI. With a couple of notable exceptions, they all coexisted in relative peace, but seemed collectively uninterested in obeying any school rules. Teaching them involved writing almost daily incident reports. One day I confiscated a switchblade that one of the kids showed off. A few days later, a graffiti marker. By October, I had added a bottle of Dos Equis that they were passing around to my collection of contraband.
“Miss! Are you going to drink that?” they asked me gleefully.
“Please—after every single one of you guys’ germs are all over it? Nah, I think I’ll pass,” I said, pouring the contents down the sink. Our English class had a sink because we were in a science lab.
“Nooooo,” they all groaned in unified anguish as the alcohol flowed down the drain.
The bottle’s owner, Jesus—one of the kids to whose probation officer I would report every week—asked, “Are you going to tell Giordano?”
Giordano was the dean. He would storm into classrooms without knocking, write up any student who was wearing a do-rag for detention, and then slam the door on his way out. The kids hated him. The faculty didn’t like him much more.
“I’m supposed to tell Giordano right away. But, I’m going to make you a deal. I’ll keep this to myself,” I paused and looked meaningfully at Jesus, and then up at the rest of them, “so long as not a single one of you ever brings alcohol into my class ever again. Because if you do, there will be consequences.”
They looked somewhat abashed, and I thought I had gotten through. But the following week, Jesus was sitting in the back of the class drinking out of what looked like a bottle of Scope.
I went over and demanded that he hand me the bottle. He did. I sniffed it: vodka and what I assumed was green food coloring.
The kids were waiting in quiet anticipation to see if I would figure it out. I gave them an exasperated look. “Very creative,” I said.
They all burst out laughing.
______
Anita found out that she was pregnant around Christmas. She came to me and told me when I was substituting for another class, which had only two students—typical for the days just prior to vacation.
I was slightly surprised that she had chosen to tell me. If I had been told to name the students with whom I was closest, she wouldn’t have been one of them—we certainly liked each other well enough, but we had never talked intimately until this moment.
But now, here she was, sitting in front of me, crying. “How’s he gonna be asking me ‘How you know the baby’s mine?’” she sobbed, referring to her nineteen-year-old boyfriend’s request for paternity tests. “I know because he’s the only man I’ve been with this entire year! And here he is acting like I’m sleeping around.”
“So what did you say to him?” I asked, patting her hand.
“I told him, ‘Fine, I’d rather have you gone than have you be around without wanting to be in the child’s life,’” she said.
“Can you do this on your own?”
She shrugged and sniffled.
“Would you consider putting the baby up for adoption, or . . .?” I wasn’t sure what was appropriate for me to suggest. Thus far, my master’s program had offered nothing in the way of instruction that seemed remotely applicable to this situation.
“I’m Catholic—I can’t have an abortion,” she said with certainty, preempting the question I had been unable to articulate. That thought seemed to sober her somehow, and she wiped her nose.
“Whatever, I’ll figure something out.”
I later noticed Anita talking to a girl named Zuleka, who I did not teach but had spoken to on several occasions. Zuleka was a teen parent herself—I had found out from another teacher that Zuleka was living in a group home that offered babysitting services so the young mothers could finish high school.
“Did Zuleka give you some good ideas?” I asked Anita later that day.
“Yeah—she’s amazing. She gave me the number of her teen center and everything.”
I felt hopeful that something would work out, but I kept my distance anyway—I did not know how much I was supposed to pry.
______
In the Sunshine class, there was a kid named Derrick. He was a heavy-set kid with huge fake diamonds in both ears and long eyelashes. He was also inexcusably stupid. It wasn’t merely that he failed academically; he had a propensity for finding the toughest kid in any given classroom, repeatedly annoying this kid sufficiently so that fists would be about to fly, and then backing down the moment things reached fever pitch. Then the other students and I would be left trying to calm down a furious kid while Derrick cowered behind the sink in the science lab. This happened repeatedly over the time I taught him, both in my class and in other ones.
Then there was Tony, a kid who made me especially nervous which, in this class, was some feat. He had just been released from the youth center at Attica. He was smart—“All you could do when you were bored was read books up there,” he once told me—but had an explosive temper. “Yo, just shut up, mothaf—ah!” he would yell at kids who were annoying him. Then he would glower at them. I never once saw a kid disobey him. His long hair was in one tight braid at the back of his head—it resembled the spine of a stegosaurus, I thought—and he would sometimes wear sweat suits with pictures of handguns embossed in a colorful pattern all over them. He wasn’t the type of kid you wanted to pick on.
Unless you were Derrick, of course.
“Yo. Those shoes are mad stupid,” Derrick said to him one morning. Tony glanced up, saw that it was Derrick talking to him, and promptly went back to reading To Kill a Mockingbird.