Emergency Teacher (27 page)

O
ne morning, Jovani came into class massaging his neck. He ignored the other students and moved right to my desk, burying himself in my hip.

“I got into a fight, Miss,” he said. “I can't do my work because I hurt my neck. I can't turn it,” he said, rubbing his neck.

Jovani had gotten into plenty of fights before, but he'd never mentioned them to me. In class, he did what he'd mostly been doing for the past couple of weeks, which was wander without purpose. He drew circles on the board aimlessly or went to the back of the room to glue Popsicle sticks together. At times I convinced him he was my little helper, and he policed the aisles, awarding stickers or tickets to the students who completed the simple grammar work that stumped him. He relished that job, pleading for it each day. He felt useful, for once, maybe even powerful. The kids didn't smirk at him, like they did when he picked out coloring books at the library. They clamored for his attention. He took his job seriously. He didn't hand out the stickers to the popular kids, or the girls. His motive was to please me and to do his job well. Once, he even carried a girl's workbook over to me to settle some confusion as to whether she had really finished the entire assignment. She had, and this earned her a sticker.

On this day, he lingered in my room while everyone else went to lunch. He climbed up onto the chair next to my desk, folded his knees underneath him, and leaned his elbows up on my desk.

“I'm leaving, Miss,” he blurted out. “We going to New York.”

My first instinct was to assume this wasn't true, but as he gave me more details, I realized he really was leaving.

“How did you hurt your neck in a fight?” I asked.

“My neighbor did it,” he said. He said his neighbor was eighteen and had been bothering his mom the night before. “I went out to get him, and he yanked me by the head.”

Jovani shifted to show me how the neighbor had reached across him from the right and grabbed the left side of his head by the ear. His feet slipped off the chair.

“He hit my mom, you know, so I hit him back. They my family. I do what I gotta do,” he stated, with a hard emphasis on the Is and an arm-jabbing, neckrocking cadence that reminded me that despite his small frame Jovani could instantly turn into the toughest student in my class. He shifted around some more. His worn boots weren't even totally touching the ground, and on his bony frame was an oversized, stained gray turtleneck that he wore several times a week, if he came to school that frequently at all.

“We leaving,” he said softly. “My stepdad hit my mom, and she don't want that no more.”

His toughness fell away, and he looked like a lost little boy. “I'm gonna say good-bye,” he said.

Then he laid his head in the crook of his arm and cried. He buried his eyes away so I couldn't see them, or maybe so he couldn't see me. His angular shoulders shook and he breathed heavily. I stroked his head. He sat like that for a few minutes, sobbing to himself. “I don't wanna go,” he cried. “I'm gonna miss my dad.”

Jovani had never mentioned his dad before. I didn't even know he knew him. He had never mentioned any male figure in his life, unless it was some older boy trying to beat him up.

He stopped crying after a while and said, “You drive me home, Miss?”

We walked out of the classroom and down the hallway to the parking lot. He had wiped away his tears and clambered into the front seat, excited to sit beside the teacher. For a moment, I wondered whether he really was leaving or whether this was a ploy to get attention. As sorry as I felt for Jovani, I wasn't going to put anything past him.

“I'd like to come in and talk to your mom, Okay?” I said.

“Miss, don't tell my uncle we leaving. He don't know. Miss, what you gonna say? You gonna talk to him?”

“I won't say anything, Jovani,” I answered.

“Miss, you gonna see my house. In my house we got two couches now,” he said.

We turned onto Third and Indiana. Jovani bounded up the three steps of his stoop and pushed open the cracked door of his row house. There wasn't even a mailbox outside. I heard a man's voice. I stepped inside the dark hallway reeking of pot. To my right, above the living room, a hole gaped from the ceiling, spewing plaster and wires. The two couches that made Jovani so proud were pushed against the wall. They didn't face each other and were faded and torn.

A man lifted himself off the couch. He was in his twenties, dark-skinned, and had a goatee to match his cropped buzz cut. His eyes were sunken into his head and smoke trailed from a roach in his hand. For a split second, I imagined Jovani looking like that in ten years, but pushed the impression out of my mind. He approached me. Back in the fall, during the Puerto Rican Day Parade, I would have been scared, but I felt I had earned a place in this neighborhood since then, and at the very least I could distinguish between dangerous situations and the rest.

He looked embarrassed.

“Oh, hi. You're Jovani's teacher? His mom's not here.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I'm his cousin,” he said. I turned to follow Jovani back to the car. “Hey, um, I'm really sorry about this,” he added.

“It's not me you should apologize to,” I said, and closed the door.

In the car I asked, “Does he do that all the time?”

Jovani peered up out the window and watched the row houses pass by.

“He smoke cigarettes and he smoke that drug. He don't do nothing else. They smoke it all the time. I'm not allowed to be in the room, or it gets in me and they'll see it when I go to the health clinic. I have to go upstairs or outside.”

I thought about Jovani being constantly kicked around so they could get high. I began to see how he must have looked at me and my classroom and my Rules and Consequences and pink slips.

I had always known it wasn't Jovani's fault, which was why I had grappled with how to discipline him. Jovani's family had a responsibility to deliver him to us each day washed, fed, with a notebook and pencils, and ready to learn. After school, his parents had to make him do his homework—not make the teachers run around, phoning and visiting the houses, to get him to do it. Sending Jovani into our classroom each and every day was unfair to the rest of the class and to the school system. I didn't know much about the mother's situation (it certainly must have been desperate). But I did know that there were a lot of families in this neighborhood who struggled and yet still provided for their children and held up their end of the invisible partnership with the school. Jovani had ruined so many other students' opportunities to learn. What would happen when he finished school and was let loose on society?

We reached his aunt's house, but Jovani's mom wasn't there, either.

“She at the welfare,” his aunt said.

He loped up the stairs, his jacket dragging behind him. Suddenly, I had a flashback of the humiliating experience months earlier in which I had driven around in circles trying to find Jovani's house. My relationship with Jovani had deepened so much since then. It felt odd to think that I was ever so angry with him. Just reflecting on that day made me blush. Mr. Rougeux had said Jovani had probably just been trying to spend more time with me. Since we had become so friendly, and I was doing so much to help him, I decided to bring it up.

“Do you remember that day I tried to drive you home, but you wouldn't tell me where you lived?”

Like that, his expression brightened and that old mischievous, catlike grin reappeared. “Yeah.”

“Why did you do that? You know, I was trying to help you.”

I should have let it go. Why did I have to dig up that afternoon? Deep down, I suppose I was still humiliated. I didn't really want an explanation. I wanted an apology or a slightly guilty look, at least an acknowledgement.

He leaned his head back and peeked up at me. “Miss, I told you where to go. You dropped me off at the school and wouldn't let me back in your car.”

He was smiling to himself again. That wasn't the answer I wanted. Clearly, I wasn't going to get it.

We said our good-byes. Three days later Jovani stopped coming to class. I never saw him again.

While Jovani was endlessly frustrating, I never disliked him. I somehow always managed to separate my personal feelings from my role as the teacher. With Javier, I wasn't sure I could still do that.

I had now turned into one of Javier's many targets, and his sole purpose in class had become to lash out at me. Javier made me feel helpless, and I resented him for it. I knew he needed medicine, but I had struggled for two months to appease him, taking him on field trips and persuading Mr. Rougeux to allow him to work alone in his computer room. I had even arranged for a Puerto Rican lawyer to visit my class as a guest speaker, in part because Javier always said he aspired to be a lawyer.

Unfortunately, the lawyer took a longwinded route to explain the origins of the legal system, and everyone had tuned out. Most students had suffered silently, but Javier had been impatient. He had thrown pieces of paper into the air and poked the girls around him. Finally, he had stood up and bounced a rubber ball. I had to interrupt the speaker and confront the problem.

“Give me the ball,” I said, as everyone looked on. I confiscated it, but then he blew papers off Odalis's desk, so I told him to leave. I didn't see him for the rest of the day, until he appeared outside my door last period waving through the window. I went out to get him, and he ran down the hallway. Then he reappeared, knocking on the door and yelling at students so it was impossible for anyone to concentrate. What could I do? Ms. Vinitzsky's room was full, and Mrs. G. refused to take him. A good teacher prevented this from happening by being organized, showing compassion, and being consistent with discipline. How did I build a relationship with a student dropped into the class with just three months of school left?

I ignored the banging, but then he came inside and picked up my phone and dialed random numbers. “Hello?!” He shouted into the phone. I walked over to him, and he dropped it. Then, he grabbed José R.'s book off his desk and dodged between desks to the back of the room, waving it in the air.

“Heyyyy,” slurred José R., lugging himself out of his chair. Oddly, ever since Javier had joined the class José R. had been calm and obedient. Thankfully, most of the class didn't like Javier and wasn't paying attention to him. I didn't want to be dragged into a fight, so I tried my old trick of pretending a reporter was in the room, observing everything. How would I want myself portrayed in an article? This worked for a minute, but my temper fought back such maturity. José R. was traipsing down the aisle in pursuit. I cut him off and confronted Javier.

“Javier, please sit down. Javier, give me the paper. Javier, no one in the class is interested in your showing off. You're embarrassing yourself.”

He yelled, “So what! I don't CARE! You're embarrassing yourself.” He dodged between desks, and I felt stupid chasing him around. “Gimme my ball back!” he shouted. “I want my ball back.”

He was so wild-faced and angry, I wondered if he was having a reaction to his medicine. He slipped past me, marched to my desk, and picked up a packet of stickers. He waved them so close to my face they brushed my nose. I swatted to grab them, but he yanked them back at the last second.

“I'm going to take these, then!” he yelled. He kept waving the stickers in my face before the whole class.

“I see them, Javier,” I said, gritting my teeth. “They're stickers.”

I turned away from him, livid, and busied myself with a student's question. Soon, it was 2:50 PM, and I prepared to dismiss the class. I wrote on the chalkboard, “Quiet down. The longer we talk, the longer we stay after school.”

I turned around and tapped on the board to draw their attention. The students were laughing. I looked back to see Javier standing behind me erasing the board. I picked up the chalk and rewrote it, and he stood there waiting and then erased it again. I was so outraged and exhausted, I simply could have lost my composure right then and there and shoved him down. I'd pinned my hopes to the notion that no student was beyond reach of a good teacher. Either I wasn't that great of a teacher, or Javier was beyond reach, because nothing was working. It crossed my mind that Javier might hit me. He was only thirteen, but already my height, and I presumed much stronger than I. If he attacked me or punched me, I was alone here. I clenched my teeth and said the only thing that came to mind.