by Ed Boland
Whenever I needed a dose of inspiration or advice, I turned to Monica. After all, watching her teach a masterful class on the Italian Renaissance the spring before had convinced me to take the job at Union Street. Despite being twenty-seven years old, five foot three, and even whiter than me in both spirit and complexion, she commanded attention and respect from her students. She knew how to teach kids to read, formed a school singing group, and ran the Model UN. It seemed like she was at school daily from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. After graduating from Yale four years before, she could easily have worked for an investment bank or gone to law school; instead, she had been tearing it up in tough public schools.
Given my miserable results so far in our geography unit, I wasted no time trying her “100 for everybody” idea. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. What I thought would take a day or two at most turned into nearly a week of floundering. Over and over, my students misplaced and misspelled major swatches of the planet on their tests: “Afrika” (if only Dannisha were German); “you-rope” (not a bad start for Yerfrey, a kid fresh off the boat from the Dominican Republic who spoke virtually no English); and “Ass-ia” (from Merwin, probably confusing it with one of the “me so horny” Asian porn sites he endorsed so enthusiastically). On the first day of class on his getting-to-know-you form, he’d written under hobbies in his own unique spelling, “watching porm.” Byron, the class prodigy with a case of the mumbles, was blasé about receiving a perfect score on his first attempt. “Well, Mr. Boland, we did this very same assignment when I was in Jamaica,” he quipped, then, after pausing for effect, “in the third grade.” I cringed. How tedious all this must have been for him.
While it was true that this experiment had instilled some confidence in them, the kids were also bored out of their minds. So next I tried to get creative, thinking back to what intrigued me about geography as a student. I hit on an idea. When I was in middle school, our single, intellectually oriented, and probably gay uncle Bernie took my sisters and me to see Charles and Ray Eames’s short movie Powers of Ten. Made in the late 1960s, it’s a dazzling display of the structure of the universe at its most macro and micro. In magnitudes of ten, the camera zooms out from the image of a couple napping after a picnic on a blanket in Chicago to high above the city, the planet, and then to the outermost reaches of the universe. Then the action reverses back to the cozy couple and zooms in on the man’s hand, going ever deeper until we are at the cellular, the molecular, and then even the subatomic level. It’s an acclaimed work that asks deep questions about our place in the world. Besides, what kid doesn’t love seeing a movie in class?
With Sam’s help, I worked almost the whole weekend to find the movie online, illegally download it, buy software that could run it, secure a projector, and draft a work sheet of related questions. But I didn’t mind. I was sure it was going to be worth the effort, and I needed a hit.
That Monday I announced, “Forget longitude, forget latitude—this movie is going to ask you to find your place in the world in a totally different way.” My students chatted casually, ignoring me, like passengers indifferent to a flight attendant’s safety instructions. My words echoed off the drab orange walls. I clicked Play on my laptop.
Pacing restlessly at the back of the room as the film played, I was shocked at the silence. Were they bored or intrigued? Listless or lost in thought? Only two students seemed obviously interested. Predictably, one of them was good girl Nee-cole, who was always curious about everything, but I was shocked to see that normally dead-eyed Yvette was looking alert for the first time all year, secretly watching from behind her pink backpack. The kids stirred and stretched as I turned on the lights and asked for reactions.
I ignored the first guerrilla outbursts: “corny,” “mad old,” “terrible special effects.” I wasn’t too surprised. To this generation, even Jurassic Park seemed hopelessly outdated, but I pressed on.
Victor Rosario, a chubby boy with a shaved head and light eyes who had shown no signs of interest in class whatsoever, raised his hand.
“At first I wondered, Why they showin’ his hand so close up?” he said deliberately.
“Good observation, Victor. What did you conclude?” I asked.
He smiled widely. “Well, then I thought about it. They showin’ it cause…dude can’t stop beating off, can’t stop pulling it,” he replied, jerking his hand wildly and rolling his eyes.
Boys laughed. Girls scowled and cried, “Gross!”
“Enough, Victor. Who has a real question about the film?” I asked.
Silence.
I took a risk. “Yvette, anything you would like to say?”
“Mister, leave me alone!” she growled, every word louder than the last. So much for being intrigued. Her classmates catcalled her and she sneered back.
Yvette had been a mystery to me from day one. Tall and lithe, she wore the same pair of supertight blue jeans adorned with butterfly appliqués every day. Her raven-black hair was pulled back so tightly it looked like it hurt and was finished in a ponytail made immobile by what must have been handfuls of hair gel.
In a daily ritual, she would use her hips to push empty desks into a fortress around her desk, and then practically hissed when anyone approached. The week before, she stormed out of the room in quiet rage rather than work with the group of girls to which I’d assigned her.
“Why you beastin’ us, mister?” Talia, the ringleader, had protested. “That ho Yvette don’t work with nobody and we all like it that way.”
I pleaded for respect and cooperation to no avail. “I hope no one ever talks about you like that, Talia.”
“If they do, they’ll walk out of here with less teeth, mister,” she said.
“You are a real charmer, Talia. By the way, I have a name, other than just mister. It’s Mister Boland.”
“Whatever.” She shrugged. My colleague Trey was so frustrated by the kids just calling him mister that he resorted to wearing one of those sticky name tags that read “Hello, My Name Is” and wrote in his last name. It still didn’t work.
Then Nee-cole raised her hand. “I think that movie was really cool,” she chirped. As happy as I was to have any kind of positive response, I knew she was going to catch hell for her comment, as she did for everything she said and did.
“What did you think was cool about it?” I asked.
Before she could get a word out, Talia piped up. “You think anything he puts up there is cool, you crusty-ass brownnoser.”
Everything about Nee-cole broadcast that she was different and more innocent than her ninth-grade classmates: the petite frame, the pigtails, the timid walk. But what really gave her away were her curious but cowed brown eyes, ever magnified by a powerful set of glasses. In a school where seventh-grade girls had multiple tattoos and wore T-shirts that said “Gold Digger,” “Hot Mama,” or “I’m Not Easy But We Can Negotiate,” Nee-cole wore the pink frilly clothes you’d see on a primary school girl. While most girls toted around makeup bags, she carried a cheap pencil case stuffed with a ruler, colored pens, and stickers. She was a teacher’s good girl from the get-go, dutifully scribbling down everything I wrote on the board. She spoke without a trace of ghetto and paid the price for it from her peers.
“She like it cause it got white people in it and Nee-cole like anything white,” Chantay added. That got an additional round of laughs.
The clock hit 3:00 p.m. The kids peeled out of the room with the jovial air of drunken friends leaving a comedy club. I apologized to Nee-cole, who sat staring blankly ahead.
“I don’t know why they always say stuff like that to me,” she replied.
“Ignore them, Nee-cole. You are just more mature than they are” was the best I could muster.
“Thanks for looking out for me, Mr. Boland. It means a lot.” She was one of a few kids who used my name.
I skulked out of the building, purposely avoiding the coworkers who had been so encouraging about my lesson. I wasn’t eager to share my awful results. My bike ride home,
which usually energized me, left me nauseated. At the dining room table that night, Sam and I drank beers as we both worked. He was finalizing his script as production drew closer, and I was correcting the assignments on Powers of Ten. Aside from the usually obedient ten or twelve students, few kids had bothered to hand in anything at all, and when they did the page was only spotted with a few hastily written phrases. Then came the real surprise: Surly Yvette had actually written full sentences—lots of them. In an elegant script, she wrote, “I see the Earth, it is sparkling, blue, beautiful, and so far away. The solar system looks like the atoms and the atoms look like the solar system. It’s all the same really. I know where those people on the blanket are, but where am I? This is an interesting movie.” She ended with an urgent plea: “PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE I WROTE THIS.”
I sat up, ramrod straight. The blur of my funk and the buzz of my beer evaporated. There was so much in that one freighted paragraph. She had let her defenses down and wanted to be seen as sensitive, intelligent, and aware. It was a faint vital sign: wounded, but not dead.
The morning after I showed the movie, I asked Tasneen, Yvette’s eighth-grade reading teacher, about her. “It’s a pretty bleak story. You sure you want to hear it? Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
I nodded, though I was unsure.
“In seventh grade, the kids were spreading rumors that Yvette was a slut. Then they started calling her a hooker. We tried to stop the harassment. We even called a class meeting about it, but nothing worked,” she said. The lush cadence of Tasneen’s voice made even tawdry high school gossip sound regal. “One day in class, I intercepted a note.” She paused and sheepishly looked at the bottom of her mug of tea. “It said, ‘Yvette blows old guys for a dollar under the Manhattan Bridge.’ We punished the girl who wrote it for spreading lies, but she insisted it was true.
“Well, not long after that we were contacted by Child Protective Services. They weren’t rumors. It was all true, even the stuff about the dollar. She was put into protective custody. We don’t think she is doing it anymore, but she’ll never outrun that story here. It’s no wonder she doesn’t trust anyone.”
I tried not to act as shocked as I was. Even though my coworkers were sensitive and caring people, they would casually drop bombs like this and I would try to cover my greenness. You’d often overhear snippets like “Her parole officer was here yesterday…Yeah, seems like a lot of sophomore girls are living with their boyfriends…He’s trying to scare up money for her second abortion.”
My mind raced to understand. How could a child’s life go so wrong, so haywire, so early? What parents would allow this to happen? Wasn’t there anyone to protect her? I wasn’t totally naive, I knew this kind of thing happened, but to a middle school girl?
The next day, I smiled at her as I handed back the papers at the end of class. I had written, “Yvette, your response is beautiful and thoughtful. You are an excellent writer and thinker. Thank you for sharing this. I promise not to tell anyone about your writing. I’d be happy to talk to you about it and anything else. Please come see me after class anytime.” I made sure to put the paper facedown to show her that her secret was safe with me. “I’d like to talk to you about that more,” I whispered. She glared at me, stuffed the paper into her backpack, and huffed out of the room.
The rest of the year, I never saw another sign, another opening, from Yvette. Every overture I made was stonewalled. I didn’t reach her. I didn’t save her. I hardly talked to her again. But I would never again look at the angry or blank stares of my students and think they told anything close to the whole story.
In November, on the night of the parent-teacher conferences, things went from bad to worse for Nee-cole. The hallway was packed with tense parents, some with clingy younger children in tow. Leaning against my doorjamb, I watched as the crowd made a sudden wide wake, the kind afforded only to those feared or honored. At the end of the hall, amid a sea of puffy black coats, I watched a riot of color slowly come into focus: a tattered orange vest, a tangle of scarves, rainbow leg warmers, and bootleg designer jeans. I couldn’t stop staring. The statuesque woman drew closer, her dreadlocks interwoven with ribbons, shells, and the earphones of an aged Discman. She wheeled a suitcase behind her while keeping time with the tinny old-school music that pumped out from the earphones. I strained to hear. Was it Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park”?
As she got closer, I tried not to gawk at the unclear boundary between her forehead and hair. Covering a seriously receding hairline was a boxy, bruise-blue tattoo that took up much of her forehead. On the side of her face the tattoo continued with Josephine Baker–like pin curls permanently inked onto her skin.
She consulted a piece of paper, squinted up at my room number, and then looked at me. In a voice almost as theatrical as her appearance, she said, “Why, good evening, Mr. Boland, is it? I’m Charlotte Jenks, Nee-cole’s mother. It’s so nice to meet you.” No other parent said it was so nice to meet me. She sized me up through the same bookish glasses her daughter wore and extended her hand. Her commanding posture and warm manner only added to my confusion.
I closed the door and she began, “I am not at liberty to fully explain the situation, but years ago circumstances forced us out of our home and I had to place Nee-cole in the foster care system. I love my child beyond words and am still very involved with her life. Her education is my priority.”
“I see,” I answered tentatively. I was in unfamiliar waters.
“I was unhappy with her middle school in Harlem. I did research and found out it was on the chancellor’s list of underperforming schools. I had no choice. I pulled Nee-cole out and homeschooled her. But we didn’t have a home so I made do and I taught her where I could, mostly on the subway, for the year.” I restrained a gasp and nodded slowly.
She relayed more details without a hint of self-pity, but I wasn’t absorbing much at that point. I felt nauseated and angry. How could such a thing happen in the richest city in the richest country in the world? And what to make of this woman. Should I admire her? Judge her sanity? Trust her story?
She went on to ask me questions about her daughter’s progress, more incisively than any other parent had. At the end, she asked, “Are the kids treating her okay? We’ve had problems before with her being bullied.”
I hesitated. Should I give it to her straight or spare her? “Oh, just fine. She’s getting along with everyone.” A mercy lie, but still a lie.
After that evening, word traveled like wildfire around the school. The kids were heartless. “Did you get a look at her? Mama look like a homeless clown. Yup, Nee-cole’s mother is a HOBO!” Not just homeless, not just crazy, but a laughingstock, too; reduced to a word I thought was used only by people my grandmother’s age. Other teachers and I tried to intervene, but our attention only widened the gap between her and her peers and made her even more of an outcast. Watching her suffer was even worse than what the kids were visiting on me.
Month after month, despite the cruelty, Nee-cole never seemed to give up hope of connecting. In December, her advisory unit had a Christmas gift exchange in the cafeteria. I sat a table or two away. She had saved her four-dollar-a-month allowance (the great beneficence of the foster care system) for offerings to the pack of nasty girls in her advisory group: a lumpy stuffed Christmas bear, sparkly lip gloss, a spiral notebook announcing, “You Rock!” (The stores in nearby Chinatown could turn even the poorest of the poor into gift-buyers.) She passed out the gifts, one by one, to a round of smirks and rolled eyes. Their ingratitude was run-of-the-mill, teen-girl cruelty, but still cruel.
Then Chantay got a cagey look on her face. “Oh yeah, we got you something, too.” She handed Nee-cole a large manila envelope, which she eagerly tore into. Even at a distance from my faculty perch, I sensed it was a trap. Out fell a pile of magazine ads. Smiling but confused, Nee-cole spread the images out on the table, not understanding their vicious gist at first. I got it right away but wished I hadn’t. Smiling fashion
models had been horribly disfigured with blobs of purple eye shadow, mascara, and brown smears of foundation. The girls had re-created a hideous, cubist montage of Nee-cole’s hobo mother with eerie accuracy. Nee-cole kept her frozen smile on, but I doubted it would last. All the girls laughed out loud, but most showed a shred of humanity by not looking at her after they humiliated her. But Talia, who was sitting across from Nee-cole, laughed right in her face. She laughed so hard she was falling off her stool. I started to make my way over to the table to give her hell and console Nee-cole, but I stopped cold. I felt so unhinged I thought I might do something reckless, violent, to Talia. I bolted out of the cafeteria, terrified to watch any more of Nee-cole’s reaction and even more afraid of my own.
I stayed late that day, and by 6:00 p.m. just about everyone was gone. Only Jim, the janitor, remained. He was bald, mustached, and in his fifties, an utterly decent guy. With a few quiet uniform whooshes, he swept my room with an economy that comes only from twenty years of cleaning the same place. Without ever having seen me teach for even a minute, Jim could divine a lot from his decades of cleaning classrooms. He must have sensed my state. He pulled off his headphones and said, “Look, Ed. I can tell you aren’t having an easy time of it. There’s graffiti on the walls, candy wrappers on the floor, and the desks are kinda nutso at the end of every day. I live in this neighborhood and I know these kids got no goddamn respect for anybody. Just now, I had to change the toilet paper in the boys’ bathroom because some punk soaked the whole roll with piss. Anyway, you’re a good guy. I hope it gets better for you.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that, Jim,” I said, hoping to keep the uncomfortable conversation short. He closed the door behind him as he left.
If there was one thing I thought I knew how to do, it was to connect to people, even if we didn’t share similar backgrounds. When I taught English in China after college, I was pretty comfortable being one of a handful of white people in a city of six million Chinese. While fund-raising at Barnard College, it wasn’t unusual for me to be the only man at a reunion of two hundred women. During the height of the AIDS epidemic, despite my modest roots, I served as the gay fund-raising ambassador to the grand dames of the Upper East Side. But here I was at a total loss: Trying to connect with Yvette only drove her further away. Trying to connect with Nee-cole only got her more ostracized.
