The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  After school, Gretchen explained to me that Valentina was a “safety transfer,” a prime example of a Department of Education euphemism. Supposedly, the term meant the removal of a student from a school because his or her safety was at risk, but here it meant a compulsive brawler who wreaked such havoc that she had to be removed from her school—stat.

  The next day, Valentina entered class, late again, and peered through the darkened room at the image I had projected on a screen, the Dogon Couple, a famous sixteenth-century African sculpture of a pair of seated royalty from Mali. She pulled out a ridiculous large pink pen with a pom-pom on top of it and got right to work on the handout I had prepared. In contrast to nearly all her peers, she wrote in complete sentences, in handwriting that bordered on the baroque. A true romantic, her i’s were dotted with small hearts. Over her shoulder, I read her comments, snarky but on the money: “Well, isn’t it obvious that they are a couple? His hand is on her titty. I bet they are rich and important. The way they sit is regal.” Regal? That kind of vocabulary sure set her apart. Only Byron, who was scribbling out his usual tome, outdid her.

  “Nice work,” I whispered over her shoulder. She smiled and batted her eyelashes but then quickly resumed her default “Don’t fuck with me” face.

  Most of her classmates struggled with even the most basic questions. Not confident enough to use pens, they eked out simple fragments in pencil, scarred with red eraser marks: “a man ~n~ some lady siting,” wrote Blanca. “They mad skiny people” was all Nestor could get down. Ashamed, many shielded their work from me inside their curled arms.

  Done with the assignment, Valentina quickly became bored and started to exact revenge for the previous day’s unfriendly reception. She started on Norman: “What you looking at, you crossed-eyed piece of shit? Nigga, those frames ain’t even from LensCrafters, they from Medicaid!” Then she turned to Dannisha: “Did they give you that nice book bag at the shelter, honey? You fat black bitch.”

  By this point, I had become so desensitized to the words nigga and bitch, they seemed like just another form of the third person singular. I checked my amusement at the way she dismantled them all and tried to break up the trash talk, to no avail. “Valentina, I need to see you after class,” I said over the salvo of insults.

  Once everyone else had tromped out of the room, I perched on a desk next to her. I was trying to move past my usual, ineffective “shame on you” lectures, which didn’t seem to work anyway, and tried a more honest approach.

  “Well, Valentina, one thing is clear. You sure like to get into it with your classmates.”

  “You saw they was provokin’ me, didn’t you?” she shot back. Provoking! Again, I was loving her vocabulary.

  “Don’t worry, you got them back pretty good. But forget that. I know something that they don’t. I read what you wrote in class about the sculpture. It was very insightful and well written. You can’t fool me. I can tell from just that one sheet of paper that you have a very fine mind.” Her face went deadpan; she may have even been embarrassed. “If you choose to turn that mind on, you will really go places. But all this fooling around will get you nowhere. I can help you develop that mind, but it’s your choice.”

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Sure, anything you say, mister.”

  The more I observed Valentina, the less I could figure her out. One afternoon, I watched as two male security guards were barely able to restrain her during a major brawl with another girl, while a string of venom poured out of her mouth. The next day, she was outside school on a nearby park bench caressing and cooing at Moose, her brindled miniature dachshund, like a first grader.

  About a week later, Sita pulled me aside after a faculty meeting. Early on in the school year, she and I had bonded over our dislike of Gretchen. And just that day, we had spent our lunch break doubled over, mocking her New Age approach to education. “Better learning through crystals and Reiki!” we joked. But just two hours later, Sita looked sheepish and grave.

  “We have an issue. Valentina has filed an incident report accusing you of sexually harassing her.”

  I laughed. “Jeez, between being a full-time faggot and sexually harassing girls, you wonder how I find the time to teach.”

  “No, I am serious and this is serious.” She took a deep breath. “Of course, I don’t think it’s true, but I have no choice but to investigate the situation and alert Gretchen and Mei. I’m sorry, but I am mandated to.” I laughed again, but this time it belied a growing blast of panic.

  Because I was the subject of the investigation, I wasn’t privy to many of its details, but I knew that Mei and Gretchen were taking statements and interviewing students. After about a week, a hearing of sorts was assembled. Sita; Valentina’s adviser, Katy; Gretchen; and I sat in a circle in my classroom. I was a seething mix of pissed-off and scared. The last time I remembered feeling like this was in eighth grade when, as head altar boy, I was wrongly accused (but ultimately acquitted) of pocketing collection plate money. Sita read quietly from a report: “Valentina states that a week ago Thursday, after fourth period, you kept her after class, got very close to her and said, ‘You are mighty fine, you turn me on, and I can tell you like fooling around.’”

  “Let me be clear. I did not and never would say those words to a student. That’s absurd,” I stammered, my face growing hot. “I told her she had a fine mind, which she needed to turn on, and to stop fooling around.”

  Innocent as I was, I also felt a stinging, displaced sense of guilt. There were plenty of shortcomings that I could have, and really should have, been called on the carpet for. Gretchen was directly facing my desk, where a tower of uncorrected homework had grown so high it threatened to topple over. It was next to a binder full of sloppy half-completed lesson plans. The desks were scarred with graffiti, the floor littered with a day’s worth of projectiles. No one was learning anything, but I was getting nailed for this bullshit?

  I suspected that nobody really thought I was guilty, but the exercise in bureaucratic ass-covering dragged on nonetheless. Gretchen had the final word: “To protect you both, we will institute the following rules: You are never to be alone with Valentina. Don’t violate her personal space. And refrain from using any language that could be misunderstood as sexual. You need to choose your words very carefully when you speak to children. Nothing will go in your file at this time.” Her tone was so condescending she might as well have come over and patted me on the head.

  Then I had a queasy revelation: This was almost the same panel of judges that had condemned Kameron Shields, aka Nemesis, after he defended himself for his empty threat to blow up the school. A few months ago, sitting in the exact same circle, I could live with the fact that a bad kid got sent away for saying something he really wasn’t going to do because he was guilty of myriad other crimes. Now I was in the hot seat and filled with similar indignation. What a scary rabbit hole I’d fallen down. My situation and that poor kid’s were far more parallel than I wanted to admit—both of us guilty but charged with the wrong crime. And in the time-honored American tradition, the brown kid did the hard time while the white man got a slap on the wrist.

  A week passed and again I took a seat next to Sita at the sticky white lunch table in the teachers’ room. We had barely spoken to each other since the hearing.

  “Sita, I want to clear the air about the situation with Valentina. Off the record, what do you think was behind it?” I asked. She shifted uneasily in her chair, but I pressed on: “Did she really believe I was hitting on her? Or was it just a power play on her part? Am I giving off some creepy vibe I don’t realize?”

  She spoke just above a hush, eager to keep the conversation private. “No, you don’t have a creepy vibe. It’s so hard to know what is going on with that kid. She’s from a seriously screwed-up family. God only knows what she’s been exposed to at home. Abuse is rampant. Honestly, I think she has a crush on you and just acted out in a twisted way.”

  “What? A crush? No way
.”

  “These girls had very few male teachers in elementary school. Most don’t have any adult men in their lives at all. You are a nice-looking guy and you paid attention to her. Besides, didn’t you ever have a crush on a teacher?”

  “No.” I took a spoonful of chili from my Tupperware.

  Her voice started to rise. “But you were surrounded by a loving, middle-class family. And that was an age of innocence compared to now. Come on. Don’t you see the way these kids are growing up here?” She looked as frustrated as I was.

  I shot back, “But we can’t just explain away someone’s horrible behavior because they have had a tough upbringing. It doesn’t do them—or us—any good.” I was suddenly sounding far more right-wing than I wanted to and it started to make me sick to my stomach.

  Exasperated, I went back to the computer room for my free period and started to prepare lessons for the unit on India, pulling up a series of web pages from different sources. Each one of them seemed to have the same damn picture of the Taj Mahal. I spent an inexplicably long time staring at one of those photos.

  In an instant, I was taken back to 1978 and my first day of high school. I was in search of my Afro-Asian Social Studies class. In a daze, I wandered into room 217 and set eyes on Mr. DeFazio. My lust was instant, powerful, and ineluctable. A college football stud, John DeFazio was broad and darkly handsome, with wolverine-like levels of body hair. There was no better foil for my five feet of hairless prepubescence; his olive oil to my soda bread. In grammar school I had been taught by sexless nuns and single women. I hadn’t expected this. I shifted inside my new-for-school brown polyester pants and prayed that no one saw my erection.

  It soon became apparent that Mr. DeFazio favored the football players and wrestlers that he coached; his indifference to me was total. So early in the year I set out to impress him with an academic tour de force. I poured my heart and soul into the first research paper he assigned on a World History topic of our choosing. I thought long and hard and settled on the Taj Mahal. Just as Shah Jahan had constructed that famous alabaster slab as a loving tribute to his wife, so my meticulously researched paper would be a valentine to Mr. DeFazio.

  I even took the trouble to go to the main branch of the Rochester Public Library to unearth facts and features that would surely dazzle him. Did John (yes, we were now on a first-name basis in my imagination) know that Shah Jahan planned to build an all-black version of the Taj for himself directly opposite the white one? Or that the building was called “a teardrop on the cheek of eternity” by a poet?

  I pumped precious dimes with abandon into a loud, orange Xerox machine, trying to frame each image just so. There were close-up pictures of the facade’s delicate tracery and a map of greater Agra. The night before I handed the paper in, I lay in the bathtub, staring at the ceiling, tugging on my scrotum and envisioning the waves of praise and attention to come.

  A few agonizing weeks later, Mr. DeFazio handed back the papers. I knew it was going to be a special day, because he wore a short-sleeved shirt that showed his hairy, muscled guns. I flipped through the pages, eager to interpret every comment. But there were none. Not one. Only a solitary B on the last page, red but bloodless. I walked out of the room feigning indifference but collapsing inside.

  Over lunch the next day, against my better social judgment, I sat with the geeks from the honors section of DeFazio’s class. I carried my Taj paper on top of my books like a distress sign, a lovesick badge. Between bites of Underwood deviled ham, my brilliant cousin Tom looked down on it and impassively told me that in giving instructions to his class about the term paper, Mr. DeFazio said, “Somebody in the other class did their paper on the Taj Mahal. Don’t do it on something stupid like that.”

  I laughed out loud in the student computer room thinking about it. It seemed so ridiculous in retrospect, but at age fourteen those impulses were potent and painfully real. Repression, peer pressure, and a puritanical school culture kept me well in check, but Valentina and her peers had far fewer barriers to hold them back from running wild. They were almost reckless with their emotions and budding sexuality. Sita knew what she was talking about.

  Burned by Valentina and left vulnerable by the administration, I followed orders and kept my distance from her after the hearing. She treated me with a mix of mild disdain and detachment. From afar, I watched as she used her bag of tricks on others throughout the school year.

  “Hey mister, gimme a dollar,” Valentina would shout in her weird little-girl voice to anyone who would listen, in the hallways, in the middle of a test, to oblivious old men on the street during field trips. One afternoon, escorted by Mei, a highly decorated Iraq War veteran visited our class. Expecting to be hailed like Caesar, instead he got, “Hey mister, gimme a dollar.” The class roared at his flustered response.

  A pair of Special Education experts, two middle-aged women who looked like they had just tumbled out of a Talbots catalog, inspected my class one day. They paced up and down the aisles reviewing the work of my students with learning disabilities. I was surprised by how much time they spent talking in hushed tones to Valentina, who had no diagnosis that I knew of. Afterward, they peppered me with questions: Why wasn’t she on the Special Ed roster? Had I reviewed her IEP—the federally mandated plan that all Special Education students must have on file? Hadn’t I seen the classic signs of her dyslexia? I fumbled, obfuscated, and lied my way through the conversation. With a condescending smile, the older inspector told me, “Because you realize, of course, the school would be in violation of federal law if she wasn’t given reasonable accommodations.” Sensing another Valentina-generated shitstorm on the horizon, I tracked her down in the hall at dismissal and asked why she hadn’t told Ms. Hancock, her adviser, or me about her dyslexia.

  She tittered, “What? You think I’m a retard? Oh no, mister, I’m not Special Ed. Don’t get me tight. I was jus’ fuckin’ with that lady’s head, but I did like her shoes.” I exhaled. My shoulders dropped and I turned away without saying a word. Walking back up the steps, I was secretly gleeful to know that she could play the experts just as well as she could play me. I probably should have reported this transgression, but the less I had to do with her, the better off I would be.

  Another morning the following week, after I’d confiscated a cell phone from Chivonne, one of Valentina’s friends, I intercepted this pithy message sent at about 10:00 a.m.: “Hey gurl, gonna go to school today, but first i gotta smoke this blunt all the way to my face, take my lil’ Moose for a walk, and get some pictures developed. C U soon!”

  I called the aunt who was raising Valentina to discuss her poor attendance and erratic classwork. When I finally got through to her, she seemed shocked that Valentina was disruptive. “Really, sir? My Valentina?” she said in a thick Caribbean accent. “But she’s such a shy girl, a lonely girl.” I hung up the phone, even more puzzled than before. Who was this kid?

  In the spring, I noticed that Valentina had become the center of attention of a group of skinny sophomore boys, most of them recent emigrants from Africa. Leaning against my doorjamb, I watched them follow her up and down the halls, laughing, talking dirty, and calling her name—a great white shark with a school of pilot fish in tow.

  “Yo, Valentina, we havin’ a lil’ par-tee at Mamadou’s house tonight and you is da guest of ’onor,” said one boy with a lilting Cameroonian accent.

  “Fuck off. You all just trying to get with me.” She scanned his physique and let her eyes land on the baggy jeans he was swimming in. “I need a man who can give me a meal, not some skinny boy with a snack.” This drew howls from everyone within earshot.

  “Don’t you worry. We’ll fill you up, bay-bee,” responded a member of the boy chorus.

  Not long after, I gave a test on ancient Greece with the essay question: “Describe three contributions that American society today has inherited from the ancient Greeks.”

  Valentina’s response was perplexing and unique as always: “Women in ancient G
reece was treated just like meat. They had to cook and clean and have sex whenever the guys wanted to. Anyway, now a days, it’s just the same, guys go around gassing gurlz heads up, telling you that you’s beautiful and shit. After a while, you give in and get with them. But, BAM! Then they’re gone and you’re no good to them anymore.”

  Whatever the correct pedagogical response to this was, it sure wasn’t covered in graduate school. I wasn’t touching this one. I wanted to tell Sita or Valentina’s adviser Katy, but then thought better of mentioning anything sexual about her to anyone. To protect myself, I chose to ignore a cry for help.

  When spring came, it brought the much-awaited class trip to Six Flags Great Adventure. Somehow, Dorothy, the math teacher, had persuaded Mei that a sham promotional event billed as “Math and Physics Day” at the amusement park could be counted as an academic field trip. We prepared for weeks: coordinating payment plans, gathering permission slips, making threats to leave kids behind at school if their behavior didn’t improve. They talked incessantly about the deep-fried onion “blossoms,” the bumper cars, and, most of all, the Kingda Ka, the world’s fastest and tallest roller coaster.

  The big day arrived. As our class burst into the park, we passed by another school group, obviously from the suburbs. Surrounded by a sea of blondes and near blondes, a middle-aged teacher in a navy polo shirt had drawn a complex diagram of a roller coaster on a whiteboard, annotated with terms like “vector” and “g-force.” They had taken Math and Physics Day to heart, while our kids, who struggled all year with basic algebra, ran by heckling them.

  The ninth grade dispersed throughout the park and I sat silently on a bench for a half hour holding my face up to the sun, the peace interrupted only by the whoosh of nearby rides and distant joyous screams. I was calmer and happier than I’d been in a very long time. But soon a pack of Union Street girls found my hideaway and announced that they were headed to Kingda Ka.