Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?

by Ilana Garon

  I couldn’t have been more thrilled, which is probably why that was the moment everything went wrong.

  I was in the teacher’s lounge calculating marking period grades when the gym teacher said, “Well, so much for Destiny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her pregnancy—she has this note saying she can’t participate in gym.”

  “What?!”

  The gym teacher looked embarrassed. “Oh, no. I thought everyone knew! She came in with a note and everything . . . she asked me to sign it . . . shoot. Don’t tell anyone that I told you!”

  My first instinct was to go to Destiny directly, pull her out of class, and say, “Tell me it’s not true!” But that clearly wasn’t a good course of action, I realized. So I waited until she came into class the next day.

  I sidled up to her desk and asked, “Destiny, is everything okay?”

  “Yeah.” She looked at me quizzically.

  “Okay, so, is there anything you want to talk about?”

  “No . . . Miss, why are you looking at me like that?”

  I couldn’t get anything out of her. So I let it be—I kept her working with Martha and remained watchful from afar. Within a month or so, Destiny was starting to show, and I heard students talking about it in the hall, so it seemed safe to acknowledge the pink elephant in the room.

  “So, when’s the baby due?” I asked her one morning, trying to seem as though it were perfectly natural to bring this up, like it was something we had been talking about all along.

  She grinned at my attempt at subtlety. “August, Miss.”

  “Do you feel ready to be a mom?”

  “Yeah . . . my parents are really supportive, and they’re going to help me raise it, so I think I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, I’m really glad to hear your parents are helping you through this.”

  Neither of us mentioned Anthony.

  ______

  Around the end of the term, all the teachers were holding review sessions for finals and Regents exams. The review sessions were not mandatory, so not all the kids came. In a way this was good, because it meant the ones who did show up got plenty of one-on-one attention.

  One morning I showed up early. The kids were not yet due in, but a few of them, also early, were sitting around with the history teacher across the hallway. I wandered into the room to find Destiny being consoled by the history teacher, a middle-aged, motherly woman. Anthony and some other kids were sitting around on the desks.

  “Anthony,” the history teacher was saying, “I think Destiny would feel a lot better if you went to this appointment with her.”

  “Nawww, man, I got shit to do,” he said. “She’s always wanting me to do something for her.”

  “Well, I think you have to take responsibility for that, since it’s your child she’s pregnant with,” the history teacher said, with more patience than I could ever have mustered under the circumstances.

  “Yo, I gotta go to my job. Then I can put gas in my car.”

  I interjected, “What about taking care of the mother of your child?”

  His tone turned defensive. “I don’t got that much money, and she always wants me to spend it on her. When I get paid, man, I ain’t spending shit on her. I’m getting gas in the car, and a new iPod.” He turned to his friends for approval. They looked confused. “Man,” he continued, “During the year, I’m getting a job on Fridays. That way I can work three days a week, and have mad money. And I’m not spending it on you,” he said, turning suddenly to Destiny.

  “Your priorities are completely out of line,” I said acidly. “Also, you have class on Fridays. I don’t know how you think you’ll be able to have any kind of job then . . . but you’re mistaken.”

  “Shut up,” he said to me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I was too stunned to reply. In the history teacher’s arms, Destiny continued to cry.

  “Anthony,” the history teacher said, “Can you please consider how Destiny feels? She must be very scared, going for this appointment all by herself. Don’t you think she would feel better if you came with her?”

  “Shit, that bitch is always wanting something,” Anthony said, heading out. “I got important things to do.” He slammed the door behind him.

  The history teacher turned to Destiny. “Listen to me, sweetheart. This is what you need to do. Make sure you get his name on the birth certificate, and then you can sue his ass for child-support later on. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.” She grinned ruefully.

  Destiny sniffled and nodded.

  Later, the history teacher and I were talking. “He’s an ass,” she said. “But he’s got football recruitment scholarships coming in . . . in a way I think it would be better for Destiny, because then he would just leave her alone.”

  I had trouble seeing it that way—he had effectively ruined Destiny’s life, or at least severely limited its possibility, and now here he was getting rewarded with a scholarship.

  Destiny didn’t show up to my review session on any of the days it was offered. At one point, I found her in the hall waiting for a science review session. “Girl, what’s up? Why didn’t I see you this morning?” I asked her.

  Destiny sighed. “Anthony doesn’t want me to be talking to you anymore, Miss,” she told me. She seemed vaguely apologetic, but matter-of-fact; this was the situation. There was nothing to be done.

  I nodded at her. “Well, I’m always here if you need me.”

  “What can you do?” Alice told me, as I sat in her office for what would be one of the last times that term. “You can’t save them all. You tried. Give yourself a break.”

  I picked at the colored beanbag chair.

  ______

  In another review session, Ronald suddenly jumped out of his desk and shoved it away from himself, as if the desk itself were on fire. It clattered noisily across the room, crashing into other desks. Like dominos, the other kids immediately started jumping out of their desks and screaming.

  “Ahhhh! Oh my god! Oh my god!” they yelled, standing on their desks.

  Instantly freaked out, but without knowing of what, I jumped onto mine. “Jesus Christ, Ronald! What the hell happened?” I screamed, over the cacophony.

  “It’s a mouse miss! I swear! It just ran through here!”

  “What? Where?”

  “There—out from under the radiator, then under my desk, and then across the room!”

  “Eeeeewww!!!” I cried. This prompted several of the girls to start screaming anew.

  “Oh my god!” I yelled, pressing my hands over my ears, and trying to slow down my heart rate. “Stop yelling! Please! I have to think. . . .”

  The kids continued screaming and jumping on desks, and I stood on top of mine, frozen. Should I have chased the mouse? Would it come back? Was it my job to deal with this, too? Eventually, I came to. “Alright, alright, everyone’s had their screams, now let’s all sit down and finish reviewing,” I said, forcing calmness.

  “What if it comes back in? Ugh! I can’t deal with mice,” one of the girls said.

  “It won’t. Trust me.”

  “How do you know?”

  I pointed at the floor. “Because. You guys have been screaming at the top of your lungs for five minutes straight, and mice don’t like loud noises . . . their ears can’t tolerate them. They want a quiet situation, where everything is safe and in their control, and nothing big is threatening them. . . .” I paused. I was nearly hyperventilating. My student was looking at me strangely. After a second, she patted me on the shoulder.

  “Miss,” she said, “You’re thinking a little too hard about this.”

  ______

  In the middle of a stack of Regents exams that I was grading, I picked up one test. I looked at the name: Anthony Hall.

  I wanted so badly to flunk him.

  He got a 58. It qualified him for some sort of local diploma, for which you only needed 55. He would graduate and leave at the end
of the year.

  I am finding it enjoyable to teach these students because many of them actually do the reading. Granted, their average reading-level is low compared to students in many upper-middle-class high schools; the book To Kill a Mockingbird, which we just finished, was difficult for them in that it contained a lot of words they did not know (for which I then made them look up definitions and take vocabulary quizzes), although the majority enjoyed it towards the end.

  Despite academics being taken more seriously here, no day is short of reminders that I’m teaching in an inner-city school. This past week, for instance, one of the students in my after-school English class (for kids who need to make up the credit) was absent. This is a student who is always in and out of trouble—she has a terrible temper, curses out teachers, fights with fists, and has come close to expulsion from the program numerous times. (For some reason she never gives me a problem—but I think this has less to do with our personal relationship, and more to do with the fact that I only teach her two days a week.)

  When she came in the next day, the administration informed me that she and some other students had been involved in a fight at the Chinese restaurant down the block from the school. The fight got serious, weapons were drawn, and the student recounted to me that a loaded gun was put to her temple. Everyone involved is apparently standing trial now. I have to write a note to a judge on behalf of this student saying that she is well-behaved in my class, does her work, etc. Then, I believe they are going to give her a “safety transfer” to some other public school, which is what they do if you get jumped one too many times, or have other types of trouble in the geographic area where the school is located.

  I will sort of miss this kid, because she is usually friendly with me and we have no problems—but she’s caused so much trouble in this school that a safety transfer is probably good.

  Apparently our entire school has been exposed to tuberculosis. Last week there was an emergency faculty meeting, wherein a bunch of suits from the NYC Department of Health summoned the faculty of the entire building, handed out pamphlets, told us that there has apparently been an outbreak of TB among some students (they wouldn’t say who the carrying students were, except to say they were in “the Big school” as opposed to one of the campus small schools), and so if we were to find ourselves coughing up blood or anything, we should go get tested.

  Yikes.

  Wasn’t TB eradicated in the early twentieth century?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tyler

  “Holy shit, that girl is fine,” Tyler whispered to me, sitting on the front of my desk and swinging his legs. He was staring at Jade, one of the girls in my eleventh-grade English class. She was ostensibly doing group work, but in truth was gossiping, blissfully unaware of Tyler’s existence.

  I didn’t actually teach Tyler at this time of day, but he hated his math class and thus would appear in my room during that period several times a week. I would try in vain to send him back to math, reminding him of all the important things he might be missing.

  “Seriously, Miss. It’s either here, or I’m cruising the hallways,” Tyler would say.

  Now, he continued to ogle Jade from his perch on my desk. She was gesturing animatedly at her friends and clearly saying something amusing since they were all giggling wildly.

  “You and Jade together? I could see that,” I said, grinning at the image. Jade, a basketball player, was about five feet, eight inches. I doubted Tyler, at fourteen, was even five feet tall. Still, he would swagger down the hallway, flexing his admittedly impressive muscles at anyone who looked in his direction. I secretly found him adorable.

  “Oh my god, Miss, just leave us in a room together for five minutes, and I promise, something’s gonna go down,” he said with an exaggerated wink.

  I swatted at him with my attendance folder. “Big talker! So you need an introduction here, or what?”

  He looked horrified. “No, chill! You’ll make it mad awkward!”

  “True,” I conceded. “Well, let me know if you change your mind—you guys would be a cute couple!”

  “Miss, any shorty’s cute with sexy Tyler by her side!” He grinned impishly at me, then rolled up his sleeve and flexed his bicep.

  ______

  Ironically, I first met Tyler when I was the one teaching his math class—back when he still attended. He was thirteen. He came with a sidekick, Shawn, also thirteen. I was told they were the two youngest (and, noticeably, shortest) kids in the school, having been skipped sometime in elementary school due to impressive test scores.

  Most of the ninth-grade boys were still pretty small; they wouldn’t hit their growth spurts until tenth or eleventh grade, at which point I would greet them in September to find that they towered over me. But it wasn’t just Shawn and Tyler’s stature that distinguished them. Both boys, Tyler especially, had a certain round, open-faced aspect that one associates with young children. For the most part, I was used to hulking teenage boys, or at least gawky, acne-ridden adolescents. The two of them seemed like an entirely different species.

  Shawn was quiet, but you couldn’t miss Tyler if you tried. He was one of the most sociable and confident freshmen I ever met, introducing himself even to teachers whose classes he didn’t have, and befriending students in all four grades. Moreover, it quickly became apparent that both of them had already learned every single thing I was teaching their math class. It was the Friday before Halloween, and half the student body was staying home to avoid fallout from the Bloods and Crips initiation that took place annually on October 31. The rites of the initiation were rumored to involve anything from pelting kids with rotten eggs to cutting total strangers with switchblades, and so despite the extra police force that were assigned to our school that day, attendance was low.

  To the half of the class who had shown up, I gave out a “holiday math challenge.” I had one for every holiday. This one was a permutation problem—the object was to calculate the number of different orders in which one could trick-or-treat at a given set of houses.

  “If you figure this out, you get candy,” I said, holding up a bag of Reese’s Peanut-Butter Cups. “Now work in pairs, and remember, when you get your answer, don’t tell anyone!”

  I began to pass out the papers. Bribery always worked well, and the kids who received their papers first got right to work. I wasn’t even halfway through distributing the papers when I heard a high-pitched “Yes!” across the room, followed by the unmistakable slap of a high-five.

  “Miss! It’s 120! We got it! We got it!” Tyler cried, jumping up and down and waving his paper in the air. Beside him, Shawn smirked.

  “Punk! I mean . . . sorry. Tyler!” As I spoke, I could already see the other kids scrambling to write down “120” on their papers. So much for group work. “Didn’t I just say not to tell anyone?”

  “Oh yeahhhhhh!” He had a momentary look of dawning comprehension and then yelled, “Yo! Just kidding, people! It was . . . 83!”

  I told the assistant principal that I thought Shawn and Tyler should be moved up. She nodded, said she would look into it, and promptly forgot. I’m not sure whether this was because she was so busy, or because I didn’t have any credibility as a math teacher; the original person slated for the job had left on day two after some students threw a stapler at her head, and I’d been given the position because I had some math classes under my belt from college. I was a stop-gap, in place only until a better solution could be found.

  I kind of felt bad for the kids who had me; as a math teacher, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing.

  So I attempted to compensate for this, at least where Tyler and Shawn were concerned. After school, when the two of them would invariably come wandering into my classroom, begging me to give them candy or write a note that would get them out of Football Study Hall, I would teach them new concepts and give them more high-level problems to solve. We called it “challenge math.”

  I thought it was a pretty good arrangement until
an outside consultant “math coach” came and sat in on my lesson. I was lecturing about variables, and writing problems on the board. The majority of the kids, having already been bribed, were feigning polite interest in the value of “x” when “y” was equal to four.

  Presently, a paper football hit the side of my head.

  “Oops! Sorry, Miss!” Tyler called. Then I heard a loud stage whisper: “Yo, Shawn, learn how to catch!” But it was too late—they had attracted the attention of the math coach, who sailed across the room and started interrogating the two of them about the contents of their math folders.

  “They shouldn’t be in this class,” he told me afterwards. “I’m going to see to it that they get moved up.” Both their names were removed from my attendance roster within forty-eight hours. I marveled at how fast you could get your roster changed when you weren’t a teacher.

  ______

  Parent-teacher conferences took place on a Thursday night in late fall. One of the awkward parts of the event was that, at best, only a third of the parents ever showed up—and they usually weren’t the ones you wanted to speak to anyway. Another awkward part was that the parents brought their children with them, sometimes with younger brothers or sisters in tow. It was difficult to critique a student’s performance in the class when the student in question—surrounded by several siblings—was seated right in front of you.

  “I have bad news: I’m afraid Charlene is failing math,” I told one parent, angling my grade book towards her to reveal that her daughter had turned in no homework and failed every single test.

  Without missing a beat, the woman turned to Charlene, who was sitting glumly next to her, and slapped her across the face.

  “Stop it! Don’t hit Charlene!” I cried, louder than I meant to. “Hitting her won’t help her to pass math!”