Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?

by Ilana Garon

  As it turned out, my students refused to take the journal time seriously, preferring to stick pencils, paper balls, and half-eaten candy bars—anything small—into an exposed, open vent in our classroom that had powerful suction force. The thrill of the day would be holding the test-item loose next to the vent, and then releasing it so that it went flying into the darkness. Then they would scream with joy and dance around. During the time that they spent doing the journaling project, they actually had more disciplinary infractions than ever before. The experiment was a complete failure.

  Except for Chris.

  For some reason, he really took to it. He wrote a journal entry every single day, scowling at the kids who dared disturb him. Every single one of his journals was about cars: building cars, fixing cars, different color cars, racing cars, cars he would own when he got older, etc. His writing consisted entirely of simple sentences and declarative statements: “My favorite car is a Mustang. I want it in black. When I graduate high school and get a job, I will buy a black Mustang.” But it brimmed over with enthusiasm and tiny, detailed drawings of cars in the margins.

  “Chris, this is just great!” I told him one day midsemester, sitting in the desk next to him and looking over his journal. The other kids, though they were supposed to be journaling, were stuffing junk into the vent again. “You’re keeping a beautiful journal! I am so proud of you!”

  “Huh-huh,” he laughed, in a dead-on impersonation of Beavis and Butthead. I patted his head. His hair crunched.

  Despite barely saying anything, doing any homework, or participating in class, Chris’s near-perfect attendance and devoted journaling earned him a passing grade of 65 at the end of the first marking period. When I told him, he was clearly pleased—”Huh-huh, 65. That’s hot.” He let me give him a hug.

  ______

  Thrilled as I was with my own pedagogical ability, it took me a while to notice the changes that were occurring in Chris—specifically, the changes to his eyebrows. Chris started coming into class with little lines shaved in them, from top to bottom. That’s all they were—clean, thin little lines, where his skin was peeking through. First he had one little line. Then two. Then several.

  “Chris! What the hell are you doing?” I asked him point blank, recognizing the eyebrow shavings as a gang identifier. I knew this from my extensive perusal of FBI gang websites.

  He grinned. “Huh-huh. What?”

  “Your eyebrows! The shave lines—you’re joining a gang!” I said to him, and then I immediately backpedalled for fear of sounding too accusatory. “I mean, are you?”

  “Huh-huh. No,” he said, and grinned at me again.

  “Oh.” I blushed, flustered.

  I dropped the subject, because I did not know how to proceed. It struck me that I was faced with a peculiar problem: There is no polite way to ask someone if they are in a gang.

  A couple of weeks later, when I was marking the kids’ journals after school, I saw that Chris has written the word “Bloods” in stylized gang lettering all over his little red notebook. I called him to my desk the next day.

  “Chris, what is this about?” I asked him, pointing to one of the many “Bloods” insignias on his notebook.

  “Huh-huh. Miss, that’s my brother’s gang. Not mine.”

  Oh, terrific, I thought. Just what he needs—an older sibling to pull him in. “Chris,” I said. “I’m scared for you. The Bloods—they’re not a joke. They kill people. They’re really f—ing dangerous,” I told him, enunciating the swear word so he knew I meant business. “Please, Chris. Don’t get involved with them.”

  “Huh-huh. Miss, you cursed.”

  “I know. Look at me,” I sighed, realizing the absurdity of myself—a small, white, female teacher in khakis, a striped polo shirt, and Harry Potter glasses—trying to impress upon Chris the dangers of gang activity. “Are you listening to what I’m telling you?”

  “Yeah, Miss. Huh-huh,” he said. But he would not meet my eyes.

  It occurred to me that for all I felt that I’d connected with this kid through his journaling, I really don’t know the first thing about his life outside of school. An image of a bigger version of Chris, with more facial hair and more menace, popped into my head: He was surrounded by tough-looking guys, all with arms folded aggressively, bandanas, tons of eyebrow shaving lines, and guns hooked into the waists of their baggy jeans. I had no idea if this was how a gang would really look—and realizing the potential inaccuracy of this image just underscored for me how far away I was from Chris—and how powerless I was to stop him from joining them.

  Towards the end of the term, his attendance diminished alarmingly. I called his home but the phone line was disconnected. I made a note to the guidance counselors, but everything was chaotic with the approach of finals and Regents exams; whatever efforts were made on their part, Chris somehow got lost.

  In the next semester, the students were reshuffled into new classes to break up “clusters” who would urge each other towards mischief. I ended up with some of the same ones again, but Chris was no longer on my roster. I looked around for him, thinking that I would run into him in the hallway at some point, but it didn’t happen. When I asked after him, the kids look at me funny and said “Miss, he dropped out... Didn’t you know?”

  ______

  A month passed, in which I tried to make progress with my new students. This term, my room had no exposed vent for wasting candy and, to make it worse, I’d been assigned to teach three periods of English in a science lab again. Every day I would come in to find that the kids had turned the gas knobs to “on.” They were constantly milling around up at the front, by my desk, asking, “What does this knob do? How about this one?” I had serious concerns that the room would explode.

  One of my sections was a tenth-grade Inclusion class, wherein roughly half the kids were special education students. There were thirty-three of them, all boys. To compensate for my being twenty-three years old and female, I was assigned to team-teach with a middle-aged male special education teacher. Unfortunately, he spoke mostly Tagalog. He was kind and well-intentioned, but as everyone in the class spoke either English or Spanish, he was rather ineffectual. When the boys would act up, which happened constantly, the teacher would yell in thickly accented English, “Class! You stop that one right now!” This would cause them to burst out laughing, and then they would continue punching each other, throwing things, or freestyle rapping.

  Truthfully, I often found them quite amusing, but nothing was getting done. When I complained to the principal about the unholy levels of testosterone, suggesting that perhaps the group should be reshuffled, she told me not to let my “sexist suppositions about boys override [my] objective view of the class.”

  Even the boys knew that an all-male class of thirty-three was not ideal: They kept complaining that it was “mad gay” and “a sausage fest.”

  Sometimes I would look at the all-boy class and think of Chris. I would ask myself if perhaps he would have done better in a big male group, where perhaps some bonding with the other guys might have kept him occupied with their brand of goofy behavior rather than bigtime trouble. It was hard not to wonder about him.

  One sunny Tuesday afternoon, the bell had just rung to begin sixth period. I was in the process of settling the kids down, giving the usual instructions to stop touching the gas knobs, to go sit down, and to take out a paper and writing implement. Danny, a little guy with curls sticking out of his contraband do-rag, asked, “Miss, can I go to the bathroom?”

  “Yes, but hurry. You don’t want to miss anything.”

  He left, and then a second later reentered the room.

  “I thought you were going to the bathroom,” I told him.

  “Miss, they said I’m not allowed to go . . . there’s a fire drill.”

  “A fire drill,” I repeated, looking at him for clarification. Generally, the teachers were sent memos about fire drills in advance. At that moment, an announcement came over the PA system tellin
g everyone to evacuate for an “unplanned drill.” I told the kids to gather their stuff, and we made our way outside.

  The sidewalks around the school looked like New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Kids were packed ten-deep, and a fire truck, along with several extra squad cars (beyond those of the NYPD unit that was permanently based in our school) were parked around the building. Police and fire department presence was not unusual for a fire drill, and we paid no heed. Within seconds, I had lost nearly all of my students in the crowd, but it did not matter. We were all so elated to be out of the classrooms on a beautiful day.

  Thirty minutes passed before I realized that we’d been out here much longer than the length of an ordinary fire drill.

  “Yo, what kind of fire drill is this? It’s taking mad long!” said one of the kids.

  I suspected a bomb threat. That was the only explanation I could think of for why this drill would be “unplanned,” and why we’d be out here for thirty minutes with no instruction. As if reading my mind, several police officers began walking around, telling everyone to back away from the building. The mob retreated, so much so that we were relocated a block from the exit by which we had left.

  A girl standing in a little group near me, whom I did not know, suddenly asked me, “Miss, you think it’s a bomb?”

  “It may be a bomb threat. But it’s not real,” I said hastily, looking at some of the students standing around us who appeared alarmed. “It’s probably just some guy who wanted to spring his girlfriend from class so that they can go see a movie.”

  The kids giggled.

  “Can we go get a slice of pizza, Miss?” they asked.

  “I didn’t hear you say that . . . so I absolutely would not know if you were cutting class,” I told them, covering my ears in an exaggerated gesture of “hear no evil.” They laughed. They were not even my students, so who was I to stop them? Especially since there was no sign of us being let back into the building anytime soon.

  “We’ll bring you one, Miss,” they said. “What do you like on your pizza?”

  “Uh . . . well, hypothetically, mushrooms.”

  Feeling irresponsible, I watched them as they went around the block and out of my field of vision. I expected that I would not see them for the rest of the day. But twenty minutes later they reappeared, pizza in hand. They even brought me a mushroom slice. Everyone was still standing outside.

  An hour and a quarter into our evacuation, the doors opened, and we prepared to return to class. But the lines through the entrances were not moving. We realized that they were rescanning all three thousand students upon entry into the building, although at least one thousand of them had probably gone home.

  “Nooo, what is this shit? How are they gonna scan everyone in again? By the time we get through, school will be done,” the kids complained.

  Sure enough, when we finally all got through, it was the beginning of eighth period, and only a few of my students remained. The mood in the school was tense. If anything, there were more cops than before. They were all walking around the building mumbling into walkie-talkies.

  Immediately after an announcement came over the PA saying that all lockers would be clipped that afternoon, the students surrounded my desk. “What’s going on, Miss?” the kids asked me, while I took attendance. “Come on. Don’t they tell the teachers what’s happening?” They look imploringly at me.

  “I know as much as you guys do,” I told them, palms outstretched in front of me, showing I had nothing to hide. “Come on, let’s get moving. Take out your memoirs.”

  We got working, and then there was a knock at the door. Several police officers looked into the classroom. They consulted a list. “Can we see . . . Muhammad Sulemane?” they asked, looking around the room.

  Muhammad, an earnest kid with thick glasses and a buzz cut, looked nervous. He has probably never been in trouble before, I thought. He reluctantly rose from his seat.

  “Bring your backpack with you,” the cops told him sternly.

  They ushered him outside the room, and we all looked at each other. I made a half-hearted attempt to start the lesson again. Less than a minute later, Muhammad came back in, unescorted, stuffing his gym clothes back into his backpack and looking irritated.

  “Miss, they searched my stuff for no reason!” he fumed. “Isn’t that racial profiling?”

  ______

  Here is what I learned later: Sometime between 9:07 a.m. and 9:47 a.m., a student had entered the building with a handgun in his or her backpack and had then had the stupidity to put his backpack on the scanner. The scanner had picked up the image of a gun. The guards had been unable to figure out which backpack it was in. The administration had been trying to find it ever since.

  ______

  Between the zaniness of my all-boy class and the action-packed thrill-ride that was our typical school day, I had all but forgotten Chris. So I was very surprised when one sunny day, while I was falling asleep on the 2 train on the way home from the school, the doors opened and Chris got on. He was in need of a shave, and there were tired rings under his eyes, though he seemed alert; his eyes darted furtively around the train car before he spotted me and smiled. The conical piercings and spiky hair remained unchanged.

  “Miss! You remember me?” he asked.

  “Chris! Of course I remember you. How are you doing, sweetheart?” We hugged. The people on the subway glanced at us curiously.

  “Huh-huh. I’m okay. My mom’s kicked me out, so now I live with my girlfriend at Jackson Avenue,” he told me. It was the longest sentence he had ever uttered in my presence.

  “What? Why did she kick you out?”

  “Because I wanted to apply to, like, a trade school—for cars, Miss—and she wouldn’t sign the forms.”

  “So, you mean, then you left?”

  “No, then I got mad at her, and she hit me and told me to get lost, and then I left.”

  “Chris, that’s awful. I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said. Then, “Do you think there’s any chance we might see you back at school sometime soon?”

  He looked away. “Ugh, I don’t know, Miss.”

  “Awww, Chris, why?” I implored and instantly hated myself for whining.

  “Like, I’m having some trouble with the Bloods, Miss.”

  “Chris, please come to school. People can help you with that—you know Dean Markson, with that club he does for ex-gang members? The Council for Unity?” (The Council for Unity was a gang prevention program that one of the deans had started the previous year.)

  He looked at me warily. “Miss, it’s not like that.” He looked around again, then leaned over and whispered in a low voice, “You know those parking lots . . .” He named two cross-streets in the South Bronx that I hadn’t heard of.

  “Chris, I’m not sure . . .”

  He interrupted me, still whispering, “So there’s these two guys who got killed there . . . and my brother was involved.”

  My stomach seemed to flip. “Chris, don’t tell me this, please,” I said, putting my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to have to join the Witness Protection Program!”

  “Huh-huh. Chill, Miss, it’s cool,” he said. For a moment I was worried I had offended him, but then I saw that he was grinning again.

  A little while passed without either of us saying anything. The train trundled on southward.

  “Chris,” I finally said, “Did you know that someone actually brought a gun into the building a while ago?”

  “Huh-huh,” Chris chuckled. “You mean, that time everyone got let out?”

  “Yeah. How did you know about that?”

  “Miss, there’s lots of guns that get in that building.” He looked bemused.

  “Lots of guns? Chris—what do you mean?”

  “Kids sneak em in!” He said. He was now smiling broadly.

  “How?” I asked, my voice rising to fever pitch. “Tell me how they’re doing that!”

  “Huh-huh. Miss, chill. It’s easy—if you wrap
the gun in electrical tape, then wrap it in, like, a gym shirt, and then stick it in the bottom of your bag under mad books and shit—then it won’t go off on the scanner!”

  I ran this information through my head. It didn’t explain how the one gun I knew about had gotten into the school, as the scanners had picked that one up just fine—but I let it slide.

  “So, how many guns do you think have gotten into the building in the last couple of months or so?” I asked him recklessly.

  “I don’t know—four? Maybe five?”

  I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. I was stunned. Finally, I said, “Chris, would it be okay with you—like, you wouldn’t get in trouble or anything—if I tell security what you just told me about the electrical tape?”

  He thought about it for a few seconds. “Yeah, sure, just don’t tell em I told you,” he finally said. Then he realized we were at Jackson Avenue. “Oh, Miss, this is my stop. I gotta go!”

  He stood, and I stood, too. I stole another quick hug.

  “Please come back sometime soon,” I told him.

  Chris was already out the door, but he turned and smiled.

  ______

  That week, I ambushed the dean of security in his office and regaled him with my newly acquired knowledge of gun-sneaking protocol. He humored me for a few minutes, and then told me he’d look into it, before rushing off to break up a fight. During the remainder of that year, a slew of other weird instruments were brought in and used as weapons, but I never heard of another gun on the premises.

  All the while, I kept hoping to run into Chris whenever I was taking the train back into the city from the Northeast Bronx. I would look for him at the Jackson Avenue stop before the train went into the tunnel.