Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?

by Ilana Garon

  “What?” he replied, instantly enraged again. “I spent all period on that note!”

  “Right. And you should have been following along with the reading.”

  “What the f—! Stupid white bitch, f—ing me over! I’mma f— you up, you hear me?” He stepped up close to me, shuffling on his feet in some sort of wrestling stance and yelling in my face. “White bitches is always f—ing me over!” Then he reached toward me.

  I was caught off guard by his fury and stood frozen in place. One kid, Michael, suddenly stepped between Alfredo and me. Michael was a tall kid with a perpetually angry look on his face who would snarl at me whenever I tried to show him the place in the reading.

  But now, Michael’s behavior could only have been described as quasi-religious. “Alfredo, my man,” he said, in a voice so calm it would have persuaded a gunman to release hostages, “Chill, my man. Be cool.”

  I stepped around Michael, who had now placed his hands paternally on Alfredo’s shoulders. Alfredo was staring up at him, awed. I ran out of the room just as Alfredo came to and resumed his tirade, following me out into the hall: “F—ing white bitch! She stole my note! I’mma f— her up, that bitch!” This time security heard him, and the principal, Mr. Carver, came out of his office.

  “What happened?” he asked me.

  “Alfredo freaked out because I took away a note he was writing to Stephanie,” I told Carver. I stuck the folded letter into Carver’s shirt pocket. Then I ran off to class.

  ______

  Because Alfredo had both threatened me (“I’mma f— you up!”) and employed a racist epithet (“Damn white bitches!”), the charges were doubled. The school decided to seek a superintendent’s suspension of sixty days, like the one Alfredo had received for his previous teacher-threatening escapade.

  To do this, there had to be a Board of Education hearing, which, in what the principal told me was a clear effort to get the charges dropped out of sheer inconvenience, was called for the day of parent-teacher conferences. The hearing ran like a miniature trial. There were witnesses, evidence presented, a lawyer for the defendant (although I am told that was unusual), and a judge, who was an old retired superintendent with a huge white handlebar mustache. The courtroom resembled a conference room with everyone seated around a large elliptical table - the judge, our principal, our dean of security, another teacher who had witnessed Alfredo’s behavior, Alfredo’s mother, Alfredo’s lawyer, Alfredo’s lawyer’s assistant, Alfredo’s witness, Alfredo, and me.

  The witness was Alfredo’s now ex-girlfriend, Stephanie. The day before the trial, Alfredo had apparently called her a “stupid ho” and told her that he did not respect her. For this, she had slapped him in the face and said, “We’re through.” Yet, she was still here, dutifully supporting him. She would not meet my eyes.

  At the beginning of the hearing, we went around the table and everyone introduced him or herself. When it got to my turn, Alfredo’s lawyer immediately piped in, “Your honor, could you please ask Ms. Garon to speak up? My client is deaf in one ear!”

  Alfredo’s hearing was just fine with the hearing aid, and everyone knew it. Also, I was sitting directly across the table from him. It was a clear play on the judge’s sympathies, calculated to fluster me.

  I said my name very clearly again and looked at the judge. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alfredo smirk.

  The lawyer had, I believe, learned everything he knew about the legal system from watching Law & Order reruns. He came prepared with a lengthy opening statement, the gist of which was that our school had fabricated the entire charge because we had a longstanding vendetta against Alfredo. When the lawyer finished his speech, he looked pleased with himself. Then he turned towards me.

  “Ms. Garon. You look very young; how long have you been teaching?”

  “I’m twenty-five, and this is my third year,” I told him.

  “Where were you on the date in question?”

  “In Alfredo’s class. Fifth period.”

  “And what happened in that class?”

  I proceeded to recount the entire incident, from my first effort to get Alfredo to put the note away, to Alfredo’s threat.

  “And what happened after that?” the lawyer asked. I wondered where this was going.

  “After that, I left the classroom, passed Mr. Carver—our principal—in the hallway, gave him the note, and went to my next class, sixth-period English,” I responded.

  “And what was the lesson plan that day?”

  I wanted to say, “Is this really relevant?” but instead I looked at the judge, who had clearly thought the same thing, because he flared his mustache and said to the lawyer, “Please stick to the point, counselor!”

  “Ms. Garon,” said the lawyer. He had that same smug expression that he’d had when asking me to repeat my name. “You stated that Alfredo was writing and passing notes in class. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you stated that you confiscated his note to Stephanie, right?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  He looked incredibly pleased with himself now. I figured he must be coming to his point. “In that case,” he said, pausing dramatically and cocking an eyebrow, “could you really say he was ‘passing’ notes if you intercepted his note before he passed it?”

  Alfredo’s mother was sitting in the corner, having been moved from the round table for my cross-examination. She was at least six feet tall, extremely obese, and was scribbling furiously on a three-inch notepad. Now, she looked up at me and said “Mmmmhmmm!” as loudly as she could.

  I turned to the judge for help. He didn’t say anything, so I said, “Your honor—the point isn’t the semantics of whether or not he was ‘passing’ notes! He was off-task, the other students were distracted, he ignored instructions, and then he threatened me!”

  Alfredo’s lawyer now looked irritated at me. The judge remained impassive. He said, “That’s all for now,” and sent me out of the room, into the hallway, with instructions to send the principal in after me.

  ______

  I waited in the hallway for a good couple of hours, being summoned back into the room sporadically for a few seconds at a time to clarify things like whether I had spoken to the principal after fifth period or after sixth period.

  While I was waiting, the dean of security showed me some of the statements the students had made, which were being submitted for evidence. Half the students had apparently failed to notice the entire altercation or forgotten it the moment the bell rang. The other half had prepared statements that made me, as their English teacher, hang my head in shame: Alfredo be beastin’ on Ms. Garon, called her a white bitch. Why he be beastin’? I do not know.

  One statement stuck out from the rest. It was Stephanie’s. It said: Alfredo was doing his work like he was supposed to. Then Ms. Garon yelled at him for no reason. He didn’t do nothing.

  Her statement made my stomach tighten because I feared it might be true. I asked myself why I had felt the need to confiscate his note in the first place, why I had not left well-enough alone. He had not been harming anyone. Why hadn’t I just let him write the damn note?

  Of course, I knew the answer: Because the class had been watching. My hold on them was so tenuous already. I could not afford to lose face in front of the other twenty-nine students. And now, because of whom that thirtieth student was—a kid with an out-of-control temper who belonged in some specialized program—we were all here in Board of Ed court, missing parent-teacher conferences.

  Around 2 p.m., about five hours after we had started, the trial let out. We drove back to the school as fast as we could, in an effort to catch the last fifteen minutes of conferences. We would not find out the ruling until that weekend, but Mr. Carver was confident—he told us, chuckling, that in trying to prove how often Alfredo was unjustly barred from attending school, the lawyer had accidentally revealed the reason Alfredo had been suspended the year before.

  “That lawyer—what an idiot,
” he said, looking tired but pleased.

  The ruling was, as Mr. Carver predicted, in our favor. Alfredo would be gone for another sixty days.

  ______

  After the trial, I went to talk to the parent coordinator, a handsome middle-aged woman who had kids in one of the other small schools in the building. She was savvy and tended to be a helpful source of infor mation that might not otherwise be in the kids’ files—at least, not the parts I had access to.

  “What’s the deal with Alfredo, anyway?” I asked her. “Why is his mom so intent on keeping him in this school, even while he’s on his second sixty-day suspension?”

  She closed the door to her office before speaking to me. “You can’t repeat what I’m about to tell you,” she said. “Do you know what a Nickerson letter is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a letter from the school board, saying that they can’t provide the right services for your kid, so they’ll pay for you to send him somewhere else, like a private school.” She paused, and then added wistfully, “God, I would kill for one of those for my kids, you know?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “So, Alfredo’s mom has a Nickerson letter. They offered it to her after he hit and threatened that special ed teacher last year. She can send Alfredo anywhere she wants. That’s how badly they want him out.”

  “Why is he still here then?”

  “She won’t take him out. She says it’s because she wants to keep him near Elyssa,” the parent coordinator told me, rolling her eyes at the implausibility of this excuse. “But seriously, I’ve spoken to her about this.” She paused and then said conspiratorially, “I think she is literally waiting for something bad to happen with him involved, and then she’s going to try to sue the school for a million dollars.”

  ______

  After he left, the students seemed to forget about Alfredo. Supposedly, he was attending a program for suspended students. His teachers were supposed to fax him homework once a week, which we did. Then his mother was supposed to return it to us to be graded, so as to avoid Alfredo losing any credit.

  In fact, Alfredo got kicked out of the suspended students’ center for allegedly inciting a riot within a week of being there. This is what I heard, anyway. After that, he stayed home all day. The guidance counselor said she had called him to find out if he was actually doing his homework. According to her, he sounded stoned.

  Several months later, the dean of security came into the teacher’s lounge when a bunch of us were sitting around grading papers.

  “I have an announcement,” he said. We put our paper stacks down and listened. “Alfredo will be coming back next week, and . . . I just want to warn you all that, historically, we’ve had some problems—”

  He didn’t finish because we all started booing. “Aww, man! Whose class is he going to be in now?” someone asked.

  “Actually, we’re putting him into a ninth-grade special education track, with Liz,” said the dean. “He needs to make up the credits anyway, and the ‘plan’ is that we’ll be better able to control him in a self-contained environment.”

  What the dean neglected to acknowledge was that Liz, the special education teacher in question, was in her first year. Was putting him in the hands of the least experienced faculty member possibly part of the “plan” as well?

  Liz was understandably nervous. “Do you think he’ll be awful still?” she asked me. “I have to be in the room alone with him. . . .” She looked upset. I promised her that I would go hang out in her class and grade papers during my free period so she wouldn’t be alone with him, questioning all the while whether this would serve as a helpful influence or just the opposite.

  As it turned out, neither Liz nor I should have worried. Alfredo didn’t show up for class at all during his first two weeks back, preferring instead to loiter outside the school and in the hallways between classes. I saw him making out with several different girls, not one of whom was Stephanie, who seemed to be ignoring him with an almost fierce pride. Then, in his second week back, he got angry at a school police officer who had stopped him at scanning. One thing led to another and he ended up punching the cop. When he was flat on the ground with his wrists cuffed, a moment later, Alfredo reportedly said to one of the cops, who was chummy with the kids, “Officer Diaz—can you come here a minute?”

  “No Alfredo, you can speak to me from here,” said Officer Diaz.

  “No, seriously. Officer Diaz, can you come here?” he said again, jerking his head sideways in a “come hither” gesture.

  “Alfredo—what are you talking about?” The cops searched him and found an eighth of pot on him.

  I wondered, after the fact, why Alfredo thought Officer Diaz could get him out of that one.

  But apparently, all this only served to make Alfredo more attractive to the several different girls he was dating. Sometime after Alfredo was taken away in cuffs, this time not to return to school, a sign appeared in black magic marker on the wall of the girls’ bathroom, reading:

  Kara – Step off my man bitch! – Jazmyn

  Shortly thereafter, a reply showed up on the same wall:

  Jazmyn – Meet me in the hallway 7th period. Bitch! – Kara

  Seventh period came, and the hair extensions were flying. The hall was crowded with screaming kids. In the center, five different girls, two of whom were the aforementioned Kara and Jazmyn, were piled on top of each other. Rather than the boys, who would throw punches, the girls would hold each other in death grips, trying to slam each other into floors or walls and pull each other’s hair out. Their faces were greased with Vaseline, to prevent their eyes from being clawed by the inch-long painted fingernails of their rivals, and their respective handmaidens stood at the sides, holding their jewelry and sweatshirts patiently.

  The beleaguered cops pushed the crowds aside and separated the girls, cuffing them even as they still continued to swing at each other. As the girls were hauled off, cuffed, in different directions, one of them began leaping around screaming, “I love you Alfredo! I’mma fight for you! I’mma die for you, Alfredo!” The others joined, seemingly oblivious not only to the fact that Alfredo had clearly been unfaithful to all of them, but also to the fact that he was not present.

  I was standing in the doorway to my room with several of the boys from my class. As we stared at the floor of the hallway, now littered with straight braids, one of the boys turned to me, a look of awe on his face. He seemed to be searching for words.

  “Something on your mind, mister?” I asked.

  “Miss Garon,” he said in a reverential tone, “girls is crazy!”

  The week started out with this punk freshman interrupting me midsentence during a lesson on the distributive property to ask, “Yo miss. You not a virgin, right?” I said, without raising my voice, “That’s totally inappropriate, I’m calling your parents,” which I did, and then after saying “Oh no he didn’t!” a few times, they cancelled Christmas on him. Haha. He then wrote me a letter of apology explaining that he didn’t know what a virgin was. I have trouble buying that, being that he’s fourteen.

  Meanwhile, one of the other freshman, a little girl who daydreams constantly during math and always whips out her anime novels the minute I start writing on the board, said matter-of-factly, “Miss, you can’t call my home, because whenever you call my home I get whipped.” I said, “What?” She showed me her arm. Up and down it there were red welts and huge bruises. I said, “Are you serious?” She said, “Yeah, they always hit me with belts.” Poor kid was getting the you-know-what beaten out of her. I filed a report with the guidance counselors, who immediately called ACS. I was assuming she’d be terribly angry with me . . . most kids are after I do the mandated reporter shtick. But apparently she was incredibly cooperative with the guidance counselors, and when I had her for math the next day she acted like nothing had happened whatsoever.

  That same afternoon, a fight broke out in front of my classroom. Stephanie had apparently been “looking” at
Jazmine’s boyfriend. So Stephanie and Jazmine went at it, with hundreds of kids (where do they come from???) stamping and hollering in the audience. Presently, Kiara ran up in there and said to Jazmine, “What? You was too pussy to fight me, and now you fightin’ her?” and promptly joined the fight, offended over having been slighted in her opportunity for violence earlier. How stupid is that? The football players and I separated the girls, and then the cops come and handcuffed everyone, including some girl who isn’t even involved, but just wanted to retrieve her jacket from the general melee.

  A second fight broke out a couple of periods later: In an eleventh-grade math class for which I was subbing, Calvin had brought in some cookies, which got eaten. So Calvin tried to hold the entire class hostage at the end of the period saying, “No one leaves this room until I get my cookies back!” And this other girl, Josie, who happened to have her hair dyed bright red and braided into cornrows, said (rightfully), “Shut up you idiot! We’re trying to work!” And Calvin responded brilliantly, “Yeah? Go get some real hair!” Now them’s fightin’ words (just like derisive remarks about sneakers, coats, or mamas), so the two of them went at it, aided by various acolytes, until the school safety cops broke it up and everyone went to peer-mediation.

  But truthfully, I was rooting for the girl with dreads on that one. . . . The guy with the cookie issue (by the way, his cookies were quietly eaten by a third student who wasn’t even involved in the fight) is chronically truant, a slacker, a jerk, an idiot, has a mother who always makes excuses for him, and is generally a royal pain in my ass. Plus the girl with dreads is half his size, and I always root for the underdog.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Destiny & Anthony

  Destiny—despite her name—was small and quiet. She was in the tenth-grade class that I taught first period, which by all accounts was too early: kids were constantly coming in late, still buckling the belts they’d had to remove at scanning. Looking around the classroom, they would appear bewildered as to how they had gotten there and what they were supposed to be doing—“C’mon Miss, why you always asking me if I have a pen? You think I work at Staples or something?” Once settled in their desks, they would cradle their chins in their palms and stare off into space, only coming to when I called on them. One of the girls, Jessica, would even come in with a piece of blue cloth on which she had sprinkled Davidoff’s Cool Water fragrance. She would sit at her desk sucking her thumb, holding the cloth up to her nose so that she could continually inhale the scent.