The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  She seemed embarrassed to be breaking the news to us after all our brainstorming. She finished with, “She’s the angriest kid in the school.”

  “Wow. So many are so angry. That’s saying a lot,” exhaled Sita.

  “We need to send a clear signal to the mother. I’ll send a certified letter today saying she has to contact the school within three days or else we will involve Child Protective Services,” Gretchen said decisively.

  Her idea worked. By the next week, the usual gauntlet of teachers and staff had been assembled for a parental intervention meeting. Since her mother had ignored the barrage of calls we made to her, we were ready to read her the riot act.

  We sat in the back of the dim and dingy school auditorium in a circle, where we first met alone with Mariah’s mother. Gaunt and exhausted-looking, Mrs. Wilks appeared a lot older than the other mothers I’d met, and she didn’t look much like her daughter. To our surprise, she was wearing a NYC School Safety Officer uniform. She must have known what it was like to deal with a building full of kids like Mariah. Knowing that she was pretty much in the same business as we were made her neglect seem even worse.

  Without waiting for us to begin, Mrs. Wilks started in, speaking in a soft voice: “I’m sorry things are bad with her. I know I’m not home enough, but it’s hard alone. I got two more at home, and, God’s truth, they aren’t much easier than Mariah.” She sighed. “I’m at Richmond Heights High on Staten Island. It’s an hour and a half each way from Upper Manhattan. And I work another job weekends, as a home health aide.”

  Shit from the old and shit from the young, I thought.

  Without warning, her voice became pinched, her tone indignant. “You all need to know something. If Protective Services takes my kids, it would kill me. And you know they would be worse off in foster care. I see it all the time in my school.”

  “Mrs. Wilks, no one here is talking about taking anyone’s kids away,” Sita reassured her. “Everyone is just concerned about your daughter. She’s in serious trouble in a lot of different ways.”

  “That girl, she just won’t listen. I try talking to her. Has a mind of her own. Always has. But I do my best,” Mariah’s mother protested. I could hear just a hint of the Deep South in her voice.

  In the course of three minutes, I went from feeling barely contained rage at this woman to utter sympathy for her. There were days before my teaching career when Sam and I would come home exhausted just from taking care of our relatively affluent, educated, and healthy selves. Even after the cleaning lady came and the takeout was ordered, we felt overwhelmed. And we didn’t have so much as a goldfish or an air fern to take care of. Who was I to judge this woman?

  Sita pushed open the auditorium door and gave a nod to Mariah, who shuffled in and plunked down in the only empty chair. She sat in her usual pose of defiance: arms folded like a bouncer, head cocked to the side, eyes glazed over. After Gretchen cited a long list of offenses, she didn’t say a word in her own defense.

  “What’s wrong, Mariah, why you actin’ like this? You know better than all this nonsense, baby,” Mrs. Wilks said, her tone maternal and comforting. She touched her daughter’s face. It was strange to see Mariah being treated so tenderly, so vulnerably. In the never-ending struggle with her, you could easily forget she was somebody’s baby.

  Mariah’s expression didn’t change a bit. But after a long while, slow, thick tears started crawling down her face. No one knew what to say. We waited for a long time; the cheery noise of dismissal rose outside.

  She shook her head and whispered, “I dunno, Ma, I dunno.”

  We ended the meeting with a list of promises and hopes—periodic check-ins, behavior contracts, and referrals to social services. Mariah’s mother blankly nodded at all of the ideas, but mostly she just seemed overwhelmed. I shook Mrs. Wilks’s hand and watched as she walked away with her daughter. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we would never see her mother again and that Mariah would continue to drift into harm’s way.

  The following week, we were on a field trip to a giant high school science expo in the Javits Convention Center on the west side of Manhattan. Thousands of kids from all over the city roamed the cavernous crystal palace, walking from table to table observing experiments and cutting-edge technology. Our kids were enthusiastic and rowdy. They guzzled experimental energy drinks by the quart and screamed at the Battle of the Robots like they were at a professional wrestling match.

  On the perimeter of the madness, I spotted Leon alone on a bench. He wore a button-down oxford shirt and sat with the perfect posture of a dancer. We were outside of school and none of his classmates were in sight; I thought this might be my opportunity to connect.

  “How’s it going, Leon?” I asked, sitting on the next bench on purpose to give him some space. I didn’t even look at him directly.

  “I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said indignantly, scanning the area for his classmates.

  “I didn’t say you were. I just asked how you are.”

  Nothing.

  I let a full minute pass.

  “Leon, you don’t have to talk to me about anything, but I do want you to know something. I know you are a really good kid and…”

  “You don’t know me.”

  I pressed on. “I know you are a good kid and those guys are giving you a really hard time. I’m sorry that is happening. We are trying to stop it.”

  He folded his arms and sank into a deep pout.

  Not a word.

  “I just want you to know I am here to talk if you ever want to.”

  “Leave me alone,” he seethed. He got up and started to walk away. I couldn’t help but want to throw him another lifeline. I continued, a little bit louder, “Don’t be afraid to stand up to them. But I don’t mean use violence. And…”

  He turned back quickly to me. “Leave me alone. I am not afraid to stand up to anyone.” He sounded convincing with me, but I doubted he could summon the same bravado in front of a bunch of ninth-grade bullies.

  As he disappeared into the crowd, I was saddened at my failure to help him. But in retrospect, I was probably even angrier at my selfish need to be an avenging gay hero. How cliché. Why did it matter so much to me to help the gay kid anyway? Lots of straight people had stood up for little gay me when I needed it. And there were other kids who would have welcomed a gesture like this. Why not put my energy there?

  I thought back to one afternoon during the dead of winter in my junior year in high school. I’d left English class and pushed my way through a swinging door into the bathroom, where I saw a group of guys beating up Max Mumford. Then, as now, there was “probably/passable gay” and “no-hiding-it gay.” I was in the former, and he was clearly in the latter category. Max and I had been on the swim team together the year before. A sweet kid with a campy sense of humor, he declared his love of the decorative and festive aspects of Christmas too loudly and paid the price. He looked, sounded, and even dressed sort of like his skinny suburban mother. If I didn’t know better, you’d think they went to the same hairdresser for frosted tips.

  Max kept trying to leave the bathroom, pretending his tormentors weren’t there. Trying to hold on to his dignity, he didn’t say a word; he wouldn’t even look at them. They just kept shoving him back into a corner, slamming him against the cracked white-tile wall. I would like to say I boldly intervened to help my gay brother and then alerted the proper authorities. But instead, I did what someone who was just one rung higher than Max in the pecking order would do. I took a pee, washed my hands, and walked out of the bathroom, thinking, Poor Max. When I got back to AP English, my classmates were parsing a scene from Macbeth where the old king rages about cowards and deserters to a young soldier: “Thou lily-livered boy…Those linen cheeks of thine are counselors to fear.” I was being described to a T.

  I winced at the memory as I looked out at the traffic whizzing by on Eleventh Avenue. As an adult, I was obviously more secure and willing to take action, but the end result
was the same: Gay kids were still being bullied, and I was no more effective in saving Leon than I’d been in helping Max.

  A few days later, we were in class preparing for a debate on the Hindu caste system. Even though I told them I thought it was silly, the kids insisted on forming boy and girl teams. And so, for once, Leon was separated from his usual giggly girl group.

  I was making my normal rounds among the groups, navigating the scattered clusters of desks. Leon sat there quietly, ill at ease among a group of first-rate bad boys—an untouchable among the Brahmins. Leon was by no stretch a scholar; he hovered between failure and low 70s all year long. But, by this point, I was at least used to his minimal output—a halfhearted sentence here or a completed multiple-choice question there. Today, his work sheet was totally blank. I knew he was going with the flow, but it ticked me off to see him stoop to their level.

  “Leon. Get to work,” I ordered him.

  “Shut up,” he replied, matter-of-factly and not very loud.

  “What did you just say?” I said, stunned.

  I could hear how shallow and quick his breathing was. Defiance was not his strong suit.

  “Shut up,” he said again.

  Shit. I was being told off in front of the class not just by a “good” kid, but by a gay sister no less. Why didn’t I just keep my mouth shut and let him do nothing with the bad boys? I supposed this was some kind of new low, but at that point I didn’t have enough energy to rank the humiliations.

  The group of boys around him were suddenly wide-eyed. “Leon!”

  Somebody gave him a manly, affirming backslap. I don’t imagine he’d had many of those in his life. His thin frame had a hard time absorbing it. Leon looked left and right for guidance from the boy posse and sensed they were pleased. He gave them a weak, uncertain smile.

  Jesús was elated. “You hear that, everybody?” He stood and announced to the whole class in a voice high with joy, “Leon just grew a set of balls! He told Mister to step the fuck down.”

  How did my gay-empowerment speech to Leon get turned against me? Why would he defy one of his few allies? I guess he stood up to one of the few people he thought he could. Maybe this was some kind of twisted progress on his way to self-empowerment. But mostly I was just livid. I wanted to call him a little bitch, and worse.

  I pulled out a futile response from my menu of reprimands: “Jesús, be quiet. You listen to me, Leon. You get yourself right and get some work done.” He bowed his head down.

  Even though I should have, I couldn’t bring myself to call Leon’s mother or write up a disciplinary report. I told myself I didn’t want to trouble or confuse her, but, at heart, I didn’t want to admit to her or anyone else that it had even happened.

  The next day was Saturday, and Sam had just finished shooting his feature film that week. There was much to celebrate and lots of friends to thank for everything from serving as extras to providing legal advice to baking brownies, so we spontaneously threw a big brunch.

  In quick succession, the buzzer rang and in rolled the bohemian gay-bourgeoisie and their affiliates: Josh, the brilliant, frenetic law professor; Ben, the devoted AIDS activist and media guru; his new boyfriend, Wilfredo, a perfectionist events maven; and Johan, a mad biochemist with a hangover. On hand for the lesbians were our closest couple friends, Karen and Kat; and Tracy represented the straight world. Over mimosas, we heard war stories from Sam about the last two weeks of film production. We laughed about his bribing a drunken building super to get access to an apartment and firing a clueless production assistant who was overheard calling one of the actresses a “twat.”

  About an hour into the raucousness, our friend Daniel, whom I hadn’t seen since the school year began, arrived right off a red-eye from San Francisco. With his long, flaming red hair, pink raincoat, and his one-eyed Shih Tzu in tow, his entrance was hard to ignore. Both he and the dog were in rare form, highly medicated on pills after the flight.

  He made his way to the table and looked at the modest offerings: scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee.

  “Are we at a truck stop?”

  “There’s cheese in the eggs,” I said defensively.

  He arched his eyebrow in concern and turned to the assembled guests. “The last time I was here for brunch you made duck jambalaya and lamb liver pâté. This is a cry for help!” He waved his hand over the kitchen table.

  “Are you okay, kitten?” he asked. I was quiet.

  He turned to Sam. “Is he okay?” Sam looked down, saying nothing.

  “Teaching’s been pretty exhausting,” I said.

  He turned to Sam again. “I gotta say, he looks like shit.”

  “I’m not sleeping very well,” I said.

  He put out his arms, “Come, tell Mama all about it.” The rest of the clan gathered around me on the couch. They had all been thinking these things for the last three months, but Daniel actually said them.

  I gave a grim recap of the year so far and, knowing that my audience would be particularly interested in Leon and Mariah, recounted their tales in detail. Our friends were saddened and riveted at the same time.

  “Why would you stay in that goddamn place another minute? I went to schools like that in Chicago. Get out. No need to be a martyr,” said Wilfredo.

  “So let me get this right,” Daniel said. “You have the baby lesbian terrorizing you one minute and breaking down in tears the next. And a gay-boy-in-training telling you off after you try to help him. That is messed up!”

  “So much for gay solidarity,” said Josh.

  Tracy sighed. “It’s so sad. Kids see anybody who’s different and immediately they start to bully.”

  Karen, who ran a youth service organization, jumped in: “No, I don’t think that’s it. It’s really about power, not about being different. The girl sounds every bit as different as the gay boy does, but they don’t bully her because they see her as powerful. The boys think being gay means you’ve given up the privilege of being a ‘real’ man. They’re punishing him for leaving the boys’ club and rewarding her for leaving behind the ‘weaker’ gender. It’s just another form of misogyny.”

  It made perfect sense. These kids had so little power, they couldn’t believe anyone would give it up willingly. “You’re right,” I told her. “In the school where I did my student teaching, there was a boy who was every bit as femmy as Leon, but he was a thug. And nobody fucked with him.”

  There was a long silence. It was all true and insightful, fascinating even. I used to love these kinds of conversations—in a college seminar or over a glass of wine with friends talking about a New Yorker article. But in less than forty-eight hours, I would be back at school and dealing with the ugly reality of it all. I felt dizzy.

  The crowd started to thin out. As they exited, each had a loving word of encouragement or a turnaround anecdote that they shared with me. Daniel was the last to leave, and he held me in a long embrace by the door.

  “Hey, babe, I don’t know jack about teaching, but I do know this: You will figure this out. And you are having a way more positive effect on these little shits than you know. Hang tough. I love you.”

  He cinched his colorful Guatemalan peasant pants, picked up his one-eyed dog, and sauntered out.

  I started to collect plates and pour half-finished mimosas down the kitchen drain. I thought about the week ahead, certain it would be another of chaos and cruelty. But Daniel’s words and the collective display of love from my friends stirred me. As I loaded the dishwasher, I reassured myself with affirming bursts in quick succession: It was still early in the year. I had fought uglier monsters in my life. They were just kids, just people with fears and needs like all of us. It was important work. It wouldn’t be easy, but I would rally and figure it out.

  Chapter 5

  Powers of Ten

  “LISTEN UP, EVERYBODY. I’ve got big news. On our next test, everyone is getting a 100.”

  It was only October, but getting my students’ attention had become nearly
impossible. That week alone I had resorted to shouting, flashing the lights, and, at the suggestion of Gretchen, our Buddhist-convert vice principal, clanging together brass temple cymbals. Nothing worked. This announcement, however, stopped their chatter cold.

  “Wha— What?” stammered Fat Clovis.

  “That’s because you are all going to take the test until you get a 100. You might get it all right on the first try, you may take it twenty times, but you are going to keep at it until you get a 100.” This unconventional idea was met with lots of suspicion, but among the chronic F crowd, who was going to argue with a guaranteed A? Despite their public statements to the contrary, every one of my kids hated failing.

  “Your assignment is to name and spell all the world’s continents and oceans.” A collective moan filled the room.

  “That shit’s for babies,” said a voice from nowhere.

  “For freakin’ retards,” added another.

  “Monkey retards,” a third.

  “Quiet!” I had grown so tired of chasing down these nonstop, quicksilver asides, I could barely muster a response. “Basic geography is something any educated person is expected to know.”

  I was following some much-needed advice from my unofficial mentor and heroic colleague Monica, whose tenth-grade history class I had observed a few days before. As her students diligently scribbled away at an assignment, we huddled over her old-school overhead projector and whispered.

  “These kids are so used to failing. Make it so they have to succeed at something, no matter how basic. Once they taste a little success, you’ll win them over, I promise.” The bluish glow of the projector illuminated her face and gave her an even more saintly aura of authority.