Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?

by Ilana Garon

  Derrick was undeterred. The boys, Tony included, had recently taken to wearing pink polo shirts with matching pink laces, in an homage to prep school fashions that I couldn’t help but find ironic. That said, I thought they looked handsome in their polos, and I told them that I was happy they were dressing so nicely for school. So Tony was by no means the only guy sporting pink—but he was the one Derrick had decided to start up with.

  “Yeah, those white shoes with pink laces—they be mad gay!” he said pointedly.

  Tony jumped out of his seat and swung around to face Derrick in the top of the amphitheater style seats.

  “That’s it!” he screamed. “That shit makes me tight, you stupid mothaf—ah! And I love being tight, because then I can whip your sorry ass! You know what? I’mma lay my homies on you, and we got bigger knives than you, and bigger guns than you! You dead, mothaf—ah! You dead, you hear me?”

  He started towards Derrick. Jermaine, a relatively small boy, looked from Tony to Derrick, and immediately jumped out of his seat to try and stop the impending showdown, grabbing Tony by his arms from behind using a wrestling hold. He held on with all his might, even though Tony was thrashing towards Derrick.

  Derrick, for his part, was sitting in his desk looking confused.

  “Derrick!” I screamed, while pulling on Tony’s shirt to help Jermaine, “Apologize to Tony! Right now!”

  Derrick stared at us.

  “Say you’re sorry, Derrick!” I turned to Tony, and said “Tony! He’s being an idiot! Just ignore him, okay?”

  At this point, Tony shook himself, shrugging off Jermaine and me. But instead of hitting Derrick, he turned, walked down the amphitheater steps, and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  ______

  Meanwhile, in Anita’s class, rumors of her condition spread. Though pregnancy was hardly unusual in their circles, the students still found it to be gossip worth repeating. Cooper, a slow basketball player whose stated aim in life was to pick up his average to a 65 so that he’d be eligible for the team again, decided it was fodder for class amusement.

  “Yo, Miss, some people in this class be getting pregnant,” he said loudly during group work, looking pointedly at Anita.

  No one knew exactly what to say. Anita either ignored him or didn’t hear, but a couple of kids snickered uneasily. Bolstered by their reaction, he added to this proclamation:

  “Yeah, there’s some sluts in this class, is all I’m saying.”

  At this, Anita stood so quickly that she knocked over a desk, reached over several desks, and smacked Cooper dead across the face. The smack made such a noise like out of a movie. It must have been painful.

  Cooper stood in shock for a moment. Then he lost it.

  “You f—ing bitch!”

  “F—you, you piece of shit! How you gonna be talkin’ about my business like that in class?”

  “Suck my dick, you stupid fat slut!”

  And they went at each other, kicking, punching, and screaming obscenities at the tops of their lungs. Cooper wasn’t a huge guy and probably didn’t outweigh Anita by that much; she was a formidable opponent for him, as for anyone else who tried to keep her from him. The other students and I found it relatively easy to pry Cooper off of Anita: “Get me away from that psycho bitch!” he yelled. But it was more difficult to get Anita to cease and desist: “F—ing asshole, I’ll teach him to be getting up in my business in class!”

  Just as the students and I had succeeded in separating them security burst in and cuffed both of them. “You have to calm down,” one of the guards told Anita, who was screaming and thrashing in her cuffs as she was lead out the door. Cooper, for his part, just looked sheepish.

  “He started it,” I said lamely to one of the guards, as I wrote up a statement that tried to reflect Anita’s ferocity in a light of justified indignation.

  The guard looked at Cooper and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we’ll sort it out in mediation,” he told me.

  ______

  That same month, Derrick managed to piss off Jesus.

  Perhaps the Sunshine Class’s most charming and handsome member, Jesus had olive skin, brown eyes, and a dark brown Afro that he would spend hours combing to perfect fluffiness, usually in the middle of class. The girls liked him. The boys found his antics—particularly his ongoing efforts to sneak alcohol into the school in various creative ways—wildly entertaining.

  Rules of any sort—school policies or laws—were irrelevant, as far as Jesus was concerned. Whenever he got in trouble, which was fairly often, he would always be far more interested in explaining to anyone who would listen (me, the deans, other students) what slipup on his part had caused him to “get caught.” He never defended himself; he also never seemed concerned about punishments.

  I don’t remember what Derrick did, but whatever it was, it must have been particularly annoying, since Jesus never seemed to get upset. It was near the end of class, and suddenly Jesus was standing on the top tier of the amphitheater seats, holding the stool that usually sat behind the science table at the bottom. It was a three-foot-tall metal contraption, designed to not go up in flames (unlike the wooden desks) if the room were to combust from some gas explosion. Jesus held the stool high in the air, looking at Derrick with mild irritation. As I watched, he reached his arms back behind his head, stool still in hand, and prepared to launch.

  “Jesus!” I cried. “Don’t throw the stool! Please!”

  Derrick stood across the room, mouth slightly agape.

  Just then, the door opened and the next period class—a sweet but rowdy group of boys, half of whom were in the Special Education Inclusion program—came into the room, cheerfully oblivious to the standoff that was going on between Jesus and Derrick.

  “Jesus. Come on. Do not throw the stool,” I called to him from the doorway, where I was trying to hold back the next class from entering. Derrick, for his part, remained frozen.

  Just then, the security guards—on time for once—came through the door. “Drop the stool, Jesus!” one of the guards said. In an instant, Jesus dropped the stool—it bounced down the amphitheater steps with loud clanking, knocking the desks off center. Jesus then sprinted to the window, opened it up, and jumped out. (In subsequent years, all the windows in the school were nailed so that they could only be opened about five inches, maximum—but back then, there was no such restriction.) We were only on the first floor, and there was a huge garbage canister outside, so it was an easy exit. I watched him run across the football field.

  The guards grabbed Derrick and dragged him out of the room. “Call us if Jesus comes back,” one of them said.

  I started my lesson with the next class. Fifteen minutes later, the kids were doing group work, and Jesus climbed into my room again through the same window.

  “Um, security’s looking for you,” I told him.

  “Hmm . . . okay,” he said, looking nonchalant. He walked calmly to the classroom door, left the room, and closed it softly behind him. The kids and I looked after him.

  ______

  Whatever equivalent drama might have taken place in Anita’s classroom after her historic showdown with Cooper was neatly thwarted by events beyond anyone’s control. Anita came to me at the beginning of class a few days later looking flushed and panic-stricken.

  “Miss, I gotta talk to you,” she whispered.

  “Can I take attendance first?”

  “No . . . now!”

  I walked her to the door, out of earshot of the other students. “Okay, what’s up?”

  “I’m bleeding.”

  She turned around and bent over a little bit, pointing for me to look. Sure enough, there was a tiny spot of blood pooling in the crotch of her jeans. She was having a miscarriage in the middle of my classroom. All things considered, she seemed calm. We looked at each other for a moment. And then, not knowing what else to do, I passed the buck—I sent her three doors down to the nurse. It was too late, and she lost the baby.

&nbs
p; ______

  The assistant principal, or AP, came to observe my teaching of the Sunshine Class. Jesus decided this was prime time to open a pack of cigarettes, light one, and start smoking.

  “Jesus, please put away the cigarettes,” I said, hoping the AP would take notice of how difficult this class was. The AP looked up at Jesus, but said nothing—apparently part of my evaluation would be based on how I dealt with this situation.

  Jesus looked curiously at me. Then he stubbed out the cigarette and stuffed it back into his pocket.

  The AP pulled out what looked like a palm pilot. He then unfolded it, revealing a small, flat keyboard attached to it. He began to type on it.

  “Cooool,” the kids all said in unison. He ignored them.

  I started my lesson again. Things were moving along at a good clip when the AP noticed that Derrick was not taking notes.

  “Who is this student?” he asked. Then to Derrick he said, “Take out your notes.”

  “Suck my dick,” Derrick responded.

  The AP didn’t seem to know how to handle this remark. He stared at Derrick, and then began furiously typing on his tiny keyboard. I made a mental note to kill Derrick if my evaluation was anything less than satisfactory.

  Arben, a member of a local Albanian gang, was goofing around. I had seen him burn his own arm routinely with cigarettes; I also knew he had been to a court case earlier that year for hitting a member of a rival gang member over the head with a cinderblock. Compared to this, chatting with his neighbor during class seemed inoffensive.

  The AP was unimpressed, however. “You. Come talk to me outside,” he said to Arben.

  “Who is this f—er?” Arben asked me, pointing a thumb at the AP.

  “That’s Mr. Vasilios—he’s the assistant principal, Arben.”

  “What the f—’s he doing here?”

  Somehow the AP managed to get Arben to leave the room with him. Moments later they were back. “Fag,” Arben muttered under his breath. Either the AP didn’t hear him, or he chose to ignore it.

  After class, the AP informed me that I needed to do a better job instilling the importance of school rules in the students. “See, you saw how I took Arben outside and told him that we simply don’t use profanity in this school,” he pointed out. “You need to enforce discipline.”

  My observation report received a mark of “satisfactory.”

  ______

  “So I was supposed to take this pill, to make sure I didn’t have a miscarriage,” Anita explained to me in an offhanded manner when she returned the week after the in-class fiasco, “but I forgot to take it.” I wondered about the medical validity of what she was saying, but refrained from asking. “But it’s better that I’m not having the baby, anyway.”

  “Is that what you decided?” I asked her.

  She looked embarrassed for a moment, and then said to me, “Miss, I didn’t tell you, but that day when I talked with Zuleka and all that—well, I’d already told my mom about the pregnancy. And she told me if I had the baby she was going to kick me out of the house,” she said. “So, it’s good in a way that I lost the baby.” She shrugged. Then she bounced off down the hallway to talk to her friends.

  ______

  Jermaine was absent from the Sunshine Class for a week in the spring. His home phone line was disconnected, and calls to his parole officer went unanswered. Then one morning he returned, waltzing into class ten minutes before the end of the period. “Yes! There’s still ten minutes left!” he cried joyfully. He sat down and took his pen and paper out of his bag, ready to work.

  I asked him where he had been.

  “Oh, I got picked up by the police, Miss,” he told me. “They had me on breaking and entering, but I was . . . what do you call it . . .” He thought for a moment, and then his eyes brightened: “Falsely implicated!”

  In keeping with the fashion of the Sunshine Class, he was wearing a neatly pressed dress shirt with bright pink stripes. The buttons at his wrists were undone.

  “Can you help me with these?” he asked me, holding them up.

  I buttoned them for him. When I looked up, I realized the boys were watching us, silently, in something like fascination.

  “See Miss? We’re not so bad. At least no one in our class got pregnant,” one of them said. “And we didn’t get anyone else pregnant either,” someone else added. The others murmured in assent.

  “You know, that’s true. Good work guys,” I said. I straightened Jermaine’s collar for him. Then I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird and continued the day’s lesson.

  I can only tell this the way it happened. Today, out of nowhere, a group of black girls—Kristina, Danielle, and Erica—in my eighth-period class announced, “Have you ever noticed how we’re all black so we all stick together?” This should have warned me right off the bat that something was amiss, but I thought little of it. Then, when we were doing group work, they said, “You better put Silvana (who is Albanian) or Beba (who is Latina) with us, so they actually do work, because otherwise they just talk.” Naturally, Beba, Silvana, and their crew were offended. I remixed the groups, putting Kevin and Danny, two boys, into the group with the black girls, but then they started calling Danny and Kevin “fat lazy asses” and everyone else “low class”—a clear reference, in these circles, to their cultural or economic backgrounds—and then none of the boys wanted to work with them either.

  I think my first mistake was one of omission—I should have sent everyone out for mediation rather than allowing this to escalate. But instead I tried to reason with Kristina and Co. that it wasn’t their business what kind of work anyone else was doing, and that they should stop being so incredibly rude and just start their work like I’d told them to. At this point, the black girls turned it on me, which caught me off guard—they said that I’m too “nice” with the class, and that no one does what they’re supposed to because I don’t “control them.” This hit a nerve, because I am often concerned about being perceived as a pushover. And that was my second mistake—I shouldn’t have let them engage me in any argument. Hindsight is 20/20, right? Instead, I tried to reason with the black girls and point out their rude behavior. They responded that they were just “speaking their minds,” and that everyone else is “too white.” During this time, other students were getting so offended they just got up and walked out.

  Nothing got done. And I was so upset that I didn’t know how things had spiraled so out of my control—I was just glad when the bell rang. A period later, the Albanian and Latina girls returned to the classroom, screaming. They were all scraped, bloodied, and black-eyed. I was told that the black girls accosted the Albanian and Latina girls in the stairwell, made some racial slurs at them, and then, when the Albanian and Latina girls wouldn’t fight, accused them of being “pussies” and threatened to poke their eyes with pens. A fistfight ensued. One of the Albanian girls, Silvana, shouted hysterically, “We didn’t do anything! They tried to push Beba down the stairs!” Everyone was crying, screaming, trying to get in his or her side of the story.

  By this point, enough people knew about the fight that the Latina and Albanian girls were concerned about someone waiting outside the school to “jump” them. So while the school police took statements, I called all the parents to let them know what was going on. The parents, of course, went crazy with worry; one came to pick her child up in a cab, and another called me back, crying, asking why there wasn’t better security in the school that would protect her child from being stabbed in the eye with pens. I had no good excuses to give her. I made several other calls, cleaned wounds, and finally left forty-five minutes late for my City College class.

  And here’s the icing on the cake. I opened my wallet to go buy coffee and found no money in it. I’d had $40 at lunch. During the scuffle, some student (I have a hunch that it’s my resident sociopath, but that’s just my suspicion) went into my purse, which I probably put down on the desk, and took out all my spare cash. And this, for me, was really hard to deal with.
I had a hard time keeping from crying; I think it was more hurtful than anything else, because you want to believe that your students respect you enough not to steal from you. And even if you know that the resident sociopath is, in fact, a sociopath—and have seen him do things before that make you firmly believe it was he who did the stealing—you still can’t help feeling backstabbed and betrayed because all you’ve wanted to do is teach him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chris

  Chris was the scariest-looking kid in my entire ninth-grade class. At sixteen, he was a foot taller than me. He barely spoke or interacted with anyone, even when spoken to. Instead, he cast a narrow-eyed scowl around the room at all times. Sometimes he fixed his stare on me, and I would have the uncomfortable feeling that he was plotting against me. His eyebrows arched steeply, and his hair was made into hard, dry spikes with gel. From the conical metal stud in his ear, to the acute angle of his small goatee, everything about Chris seemed sharp.

  I tried again and again to engage him in group work and class discussions; he would move his chair over to the group when I told him to, but then he would sit there doing nothing, much to his boisterous classmates’ confusion.

  Even the other kids found him menacing. “Yo, what’s up with that guy?” one of the kids whispered to me after a futile attempt at engaging Chris in conversation. I shrugged.

  Another one said to me in confidence, “Chris looks at you like he’s gonna jump you after class!”

  Initially I wondered if perhaps Chris was illiterate, or if English just wasn’t his first language. A discussion with his former English teacher cleared up both these misconceptions—he spoke only English and could read as well as any of them. Still, he didn’t do any homework and failed the first Romeo and Juliet test. Just when I was set on not liking him, citing his frustratingly indifferent attitude as a reason, something miraculous occurred.

  It began with my thesis project for my education degree. My hypothesis was that students’ behavior would improve when given the opportunity for reflective writing in class. To test this, I bought each student a pen and a brightly colored journal. This immediately led to fights, red and black being the most popular colors, but I remained undeterred. I instructed the students to do “journaling” (as it is called in our profession) during class, and every Friday I had them fill out a behavior survey tallying up how many disciplinary infractions they had had that week.