Someone Else's Shoes, (The Zapata Challenge) A Crowdsourced Novel

by Jay C. Rehak and YOU (Yes, YOU)

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This novel is the tenth crowdsourced novel ever to be conceived and written under the leadership of Jay C. Rehak.  Click here to read the opening to the first high school crowdsourced novel ever published, the award winning 30 Days to Empathy, available on Amazon.com. 

Someone Else's Shoes (The Zapata Challenge) is a novel I am writing with YOUR help.  It is based on the SEMINAL EVENTS of the writers who submit chapters. Seminal events are events in people's lives (often in their respective childhood) that effect the way they perceive the world for the rest of their lives.  Often, but not always, these seminal events are painful experiences. Sometimes, they are joyful and empowering.  I am asking people around the world to read the first chapter of Someone Else's Shoes (listed below) and then asking those readers to submit a chapter of a seminal event in their lives.  I will collect these seminal events and turn them into Someone Else's Shoes, a crowd sourced novel written by approximately 15 authors.   Each author will be given credit as an author of their respective chapter.  Each author will retain the rights of their own chapter, except that they grant me permission to publish their chapter in Someone' Else's Shoes.   When the book is published, I will provide each selected author with a copy of the book. No other compensation will be given.

For more information or to submit a chapter, contact jaycrehak@gmail.com.

Someone Else’s Shoes

(The Zapata Challenge)

A Crowd-Sourced Novel

Written By:

Julie Biehl, Joseph M. Burns,

Tony Hintze, Chris Inserra,

Garry Liddell, Josh Locks,

Barbara Mahany, Carol Maskus,

James McNamee, Pat Reordan,

Bob Rehak, Jay C. Rehak,

Scott Suma, Chet B. Waldman
& Eric Wright

Conceived and Edited by Jay C. Rehak

Acknowledgements

I begin with gratitude for my wife, (Susan Salidor), my children (Hope, Hannah and Ali) and all of my friends who put up with my incessant talk about how this book could actually be written and rewritten by a large number of people. 

Of course, this book would not be possible without the amazing cooperation of my co-authors and their willingness to explore often painful childhood events. 

Special thanks to the pro bono legal team that helped us navigate the copyright issues of our first class-sourced novel, especially Thad Chaloemtiarana and Andrew R.W. Hughes of Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard & Geraldson LLP.

Heartfelt thanks to Melvin Soto for all of the technical assistance and training he has given me over the years, and to Iryna Motyashok for her spectacular book cover design.

And most importantly, once again, to Susan Salidor, first and last, who inspires me every day with her love, kindness and creative flow.

To my family and friends for the love and empathy they demonstrate every day.

Outline

Chapter One – The Challenge Begins

Chapter Two – The Journalism Teacher

Chapter Three – The Assistant Baseball Coach

Chapter Four – The Social Science Teacher
Chapter Five – The Cop

Chapter Six – Mr. One Percent

Chapter Seven – The Psychology Teacher

Chapter Eight – The Counselor

Chapter Nine – The English Teacher

Chapter Ten – The Special Ed Assistant

Chapter Eleven – The Book Salesman

Chapter Twelve – Reality Check with Ms. Glass

Chapter Thirteen – The Fire Drill

Chapter Fourteen – The Science Teacher and his Gang

Chapter Fifteen – The Man in the Street

Chapter Sixteen – Confronting my 15 Year Old Self

Chapter Seventeen – The Assembly

Chapter One - The Challenge Begins
            Enough with the success stories, something was clearly wrong. I knew it and every other Board of Education Network Chief in Chicago knew it too, but for a long time, there wasn’t much we could do about it.  These were the “facts” as we were told them: year after year, Sojourner Truth Magnet High School on Chicago’s Near West Side was turning out superior academic and athletic results; the data from every standardized test confirming that the students were some of the highest achieving in the country, and certainly within the City of Chicago.  The school also called itself  “The School of Champions” because year after year it won more sports championships and academic honors than any of the other seventy-seven high schools in the district.
More suspiciously, virtually every teacher in the building was given a superior rating by the school’s principal; no union grievances had been filed in many years. How convenient! Anyone with half a brain outside the building knew such success and harmony was impossible and clearly the result of some sort of well-orchestrated collusion.            That’s why all the Network chiefs (with the exception of the Near West Side Chief) called them “Sojourner 'Lies' Magnet School.”  I heard a lot of kids in Chicago also called them that. I’m not sure who started it, but that’s how pervasive the feeling was that something wasn’t right over there. It couldn’t be.            Year after year everyone challenged the Board of Education to investigate.  You know what the Board did?  They sent in someone from the Near West Side Network.  Guess what his report said.  “Great school, great staff, great students.” Of course it did.  Guess who benefitted from such glowing report besides all the people at Sojourner 'Lies'?  You guessed it: the Near West Side Network.  Sojourner’s numbers made the Near West Side Network look good.  Why wouldn’t their Network Chief report that all was well in that lying, cheating school?  And since Sojourner's test results gave the Chicago Board of Education a school it could brag about on a national scale, the chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools did nothing until the rest of us rose up and said, “Enough with the stories.”            We insisted on a real investigator, not someone who would benefit from a positive report.   I was the Network Chief for the East Side, and everyone in the district knew I was a straight shooter and not someone to be trifled with. If anyone could shed light on Sojourner’s scam, it was I.  The fact that my top school, Chicago East Side Magnet High School, was sick and tired of taking second place year after year to Sojourner Magnet had nothing to do with my burning desire to expose what was going on.When the Board chose me to review the school and its staff, everyone around the City breathed a sigh of relief.  Every legitimate educator in the City knew that I was about to blow the lid off of Sojourner Truth Magnet.  Because I didn’t play.  No one impressed me.  No one. Ever.        Ordinarily, when I’m going to do an inspection of a school, I alert the school’s principal anywhere from twenty-four hours to a week ahead of my arrival, depending on how much I trusted them.  I don’t like to give principals too much time to clean things up, but I don’t like to give anyone room to complain, either.  This time, however, I decided to drop in unannounced.  Too bad if anybody at Sojourner Truth whined.  It’s lonely at the top.        When I entered the school, I was met by a security guard who was so nice I was worried someone might have tipped the school off that I was coming. How, I didn’t know, but she must have known, because she was too nice. She asked me who I was (as if she didn’t know) and then directed me to the main office.  There I met the principal of the school, Dr. Melvina Soto, a seemingly congenial woman seemingly not fazed by my sudden appearance.  Maybe she thought because I was a Latina, I was going to give her a break. ¡incorrecto!       We sat and talked for a while. When I asked about the students, she waxed poetic. When I asked her about the staff, she praised them all.  When I inquired about her school’s ancillary staff, she reported nothing but cooperation.  I asked her about parental involvement in the school and any problems she might be having with her local school counsel (LSC).  She claimed the parents were generally involved in the school and that the LSC did their best to be supportive of the school’s staff and administration.  All of this harmony made no sense.  Finally, I asked her for her views on the downtown office and asked her if she were getting all of the resources she needed. Suddenly her tone changed.  She complained about the annual budget cutbacks and noted that there were too many administrators in the downtown office.  Sojourner Truth needed more resources, the system needed to cut back on standardized testing, blah, blah, blah.  Clearly, she didn’t understand to whom she was talking.I made a point of visibly writing her words into my notebook as she fired off a litany of complaints against the Board of Education.  If she was intimidated, she was hiding it well.  That made me even more suspicious.  Most principals would privately agree with everything she said, but when a Network Chief stopped by, inevitably they would toe the party line.  No way Dr. Soto appreciated who I was.I leaned in to her, as if sharing a deep secret. "Tú sabes quién soy y por qué estoy aquí , ¿no? " (“You do know who I am and why I’m here, don’t you?”) I said in a way she could understand the gravity of the situation.  I was about to pop her school’s little bubble.        She crossed her hands in front of her and said in perfect Spanish, "Eres Carla Zapata , de la Red de Berlín Oriental y que estás aquí para ver si los datos de la Junta de Educación está recibiendo de Sojourner Truth es legítima o de alguna manera falsa " (“You’re Carla Zapata from the East Side Network and you’re here to see if the data the Board of Education is receiving from Sojourner Truth is legitimate or somehow faked.” )  She spoke a bit too confidently for my taste and I noted it.“That’s right,” I said slowly, so she could digest the fact that I was not about to be charmed by anything she or anyone else in the building might say or do.  Sojourner Truth Magnet was about to get knocked down a few pegs.  Dr. Soto evidently had no idea what the school was up against.“I’d like to speak to the staff and observe some classes.” I said.  I pulled out a dozen personnel files I had pored through the night before.
“Certainly.” She fired back a bit too quickly.“Unannounced.” I said with satisfaction.“Of course.  I do want you to know, however, that we have a fire drill scheduled for later on in the day, and we also have a school assembly during our last period, so it’s not a ‘typical’ day.”“Fine, fine.  Whatever.” It felt like she was making excuses before I started my review.  It’s what all the principals did.  They’d start by telling me why the day I chose to visit wasn’t ‘typical.’  Of course I wasn’t buying it. I looked at my notes.
“I’d like to start off with a Ms. Julie Glass.” I said with a curled smile on my face.  Ms. Glass’s students as a group, I had discovered from a deep data dive, had consistently outperformed every other group of sophomores in the district.  Not just once, but year after year.  She was unquestionably the fraud of frauds.  Her personnel file was full of superior ratings and various awards she had won, although, curiously enough, never a Golden Apple award.  She had been an outspoken critic of the district, and nothing would make me happier than to knock her down a rung or two. I’d begin with her and work my way through the school, talking to teachers and staff, one by one, until someone broke the code of silence and revealed the massive educational canard known as Sojourner Truth Magnet High School.“Certainly, Carla,” Melvina said with a familiarity I did not appreciate.  She was subtly playing the Latina card, I was sure of it. I wrote it down immediately.  She didn’t seem to notice, but I know she did.  Then she got up and led me down the hallway to Ms. Glass’s room.  “I’m not sure she’s teaching right now, but if she is, I’m sure she’ll be happy to have you sit in.”“No doubt.” I said sarcastically, as I knew from experience that even the most confident teachers in the system hated to have someone from the district come and sit in their classrooms unannounced.  They all claimed it was “unprofessional” or “disruptive to the learning environment” but inevitably what they really were saying was, “Oh, no!  You got me!  I’m just sitting around with my students doing nothing.”         I entered Room 129 to see Ms. Glass standing in front of the room talking to her students about the novel Black Boy by Richard Wright.  Ms. Glass appeared to be about sixty, but it was a bit hard to tell.  She was a short woman with dark hair and a friendly smile.  She appeared at ease in front of her students and they seemed to be listening to her.  She was talking about seminal events in Richard Wright’s life: Richard burning his house down, his mother and father’s divorce, having to live in an orphanage, his uncle being murdered by a group of jealous white men.  Then, Ms. Glass asked her students if they remembered any seminal events in their own lives.  One by one, students raised their hands and told interesting stories about their childhoods.  Part of me was fascinated by the stories, but the business part of me questioned, “How is this helping anyone with a standardized test? If all they do is sit around and tell personal stories, there’s no way they can be successful on the ACT or the SAT or the PSAT or the PLAN or any of the half dozen other tests the district required schools to administer.” While the students were enthusiastically sharing insights about themselves, I was decidedly underwhelmed.The fact was, I didn’t care who you were or what you did, I was never impressed. I learned at a young age the value of disdain. My father had taught me never to as much as walk across a street to meet anyone who might be considered by others to be somehow “important.” Julie Glass was no exception.  “Ms. Zapata?” Ms. Glass was calling on me. This woman had some nerve. "Would you like to share a seminal event from your life?           “No, I would not, thank you.” I said sternly, to let Ms. Glass and the rest of the class know that I was not going to be impressed no matter what they said or did. I was not going to be sucked into liking these people because they were allowing me to "share."  The last thing I wanted to do was share.       “Are you sure?” she insisted.        “No, thank you.” I said again. Nobody EVER needed to hear about my childhood pain, and I certainly didn’t need or want to go over it again.       “Please!” A number of the students chimed in, almost as if on cue.
I was about to go off on the whole lot of them when it happened. It was as if I were sucked into a hole in the universal timeline. Gracias a Dios que no era mi adolescencia. (Thank God it wasn’t my teen years) Instead, I was transported back to many years earlier; I was five years old.         It had just been announced that John F. Kennedy, at the time campaigning to become President of the United States, would be coming to my small town in suburban Illinois to make a speech.  Neighbors and people from adjacent suburbs planned to line Army Trail Road, the main street of our town, as his motorcade passed on the way to City Hall.  I asked my father if we could go.  Evidently he and my mother had discussed it and had disagreed on whether or not it made sense to wait on the street an hour or two in anticipation of arguably the next President of the United States.  My mother, a first generation Mexican immigrant, was very excited about the prospect of seeing a possible President of the United States and wanted to catch a glimpse, but my father, a third generation Mexican-American, was not impressed.  In retrospect, I think he had mastered the American art of feeling superior to everyone.           “What do you think, dad?  Can we go and see him?” I asked.“John F. Kennedy? ¿Quién se preocupa por el presidente Kennedy ? (Whenever he was angry or joyous about anything, he would slip back and forth into his native language - something I inherited from both my mother and him.) You don’t know him and I don’t know him.  ¿Por qué quieres que estar alrededor con un montón de gente para ver a John Kennedy ?  (Why would you want to stand around with a bunch of people to see John Kennedy?) I mean, after you’ve seen him, then what?  Will you know him any better?  ¿Lo sabes ? (Will he know you?)  Will he remember you?” my father asked with a bitterness in his voice.            My little brain couldn’t think of a response fast enough that made any real sense, so I just said, “Well, dad, he might become the President, that’s kind of important, isn’t it?”            “And if he does become President, will you know him any better if you catch a glimpse of him when his car drives by today? Will he return your phone calls tomorrow if you decide to call him up?”            “No, I don’t think so…but… it still might be fun to see him.”            “Fun?  To stand on a corner with a bunch of strangers and smell gas fumes?  Go if you want, Carla, but yo no cruzar la calle para verlo (I wouldn’t cross the street to see him) or anyone else I’ve never met.  Nor would I expect John Kennedy to line a street to catch a glimpse of me.  But you go with your mother if you want to.”            Not wanting to disappoint my father, but wanting to see the man everyone was talking about, I asked my mother if she was still going to go, even though dad had told me he wasn’t interested.  She said yes, she was definitely going.            Conflicted, I watched as my mother curled her hair and put on her nicest clothes, ready to stand on a corner and wave to the man who might or might not become our country’s next President.            In a moment of decision, hoping my father wasn’t watching, I grabbed my mother’s hand and quickly walked the few blocks to where everyone had lined up to see the motorcade.It was a hot day and the motorcade had been delayed.  Later, I learned that the crowds of people lining the streets in other towns had caused the motorcade to slow down even more than it had planned.  The first hour we waited seemed long, with the heat and the crowd standing around doing nothing sapping my energy.  I wanted to take a nap and thought of asking my mother if I could.  But she kept staring down the street, focused only on the car she hoped to soon see.  Somewhere in the second hour, I began to repeatedly ask her "¿Cuanto tiempo más?" (“How much longer?”)            “I don’t know, honey, I don’t know.”            Then the third hour came.  My blouse was sticking to me and all I could think of was, "¿Cuanto tiempo más?"            “Not much, I’m sure he’s close.” She would say, clearly uncertain. I knew she wanted me to feel her excitement, but the more tired I got, the more I started to feel my father’s indifference.  I started to play with stones on the ground, when suddenly the crowd let out a great roar of approval.  I jumped up as fast as I could, but all I saw, or think I saw, maybe, maybe was the back of John F. Kennedy’s head.  And that was it.  My mother took my hand and we walked home.            Later I heard my mother talking on the phone in Spanish with my grandmother, excitedly retelling the details of the day’s events.  I remember my mother excitedly saying into the phone,  Carla lo vio , también  (“And Carla saw him, too.”)   Then she handed me the phone to confirm with my grandmother that I had indeed seen John F. Kennedy.            Not wanting to disappoint my grandmother, but not wanting to lie, I said without enthusiasm, “I think I saw the back of his head.”  My father overheard me say it, and he understood my tone.   He looked at me and laughed.  I laughed, too.  My mother missed my disappointment and went on talking to my grandmother about what a fabulous day it had been. For years, she would end her story with "Carla lo vio, también." as if she had somehow provided me the greatest childhood experience of my life.        At the time, I had a different epiphany. I decided then and there, "basta con que se impresionó con la gente. " ("enough with being impressed with people.")  If John F. Kennedy could get my mother’s heart pounding that quickly, I’d have to respect her for it.  But I’d never understand.  I was my father’s daughter. No one would ever, ever impress me.            I felt a tap on my shoulder.  It was Julie Glass.  The students were gone and we were alone.            “Are you all right?” she asked me.
Embarrassed because I had evidently drifted off during my observation, I quickly nodded.“Did you enjoy the class?”
“What?” I said in clear irritation.“Just wondering if you enjoyed the class or wanted to talk to me about it.”She knew I had drifted off somehow and was rubbing it in.  I could feel her sense of superiority.  I was embarrassed and angry.            “No, no reason to talk with you at all, Ms. Glass. I’ll be on my way.”  I hurried out of her class, concerned that I had somehow been momentarily entranced by either Ms. Glass or her students.  Wanting no part of the Sojourner Truth mystique, I immediately looked for someone else in the building I could observe and critique more harshly.  Not that Ms. Glass had in any way charmed me. No, no, no.  I just wanted to get away from her for the time being and find someone else to evaluate.  I’d get back to Glass later, but for the moment, I wanted nothing to do with her.

Chapter Two - The Journalism TeacherI knew what to do.  I headed straight to the teacher’s lounge.  I knew it was on the second floor near the one of the student lunchrooms - I had been in Sojourner Truth for CPS meetings and knew the school had four lunchrooms scattered on the second and third floors. Ignoring everyone I saw and the few who tried to greet me, I burst into the teacher’s lounge as if I were leading an FBI drug bust.  I was certain I would find numerous teachers sitting catatonically, perhaps watching TV or otherwise wasting time.  Instead, to my left, I saw a single woman reading a newspaper in the corner.  Good I thought, just as I suspected, someone doing nothing.  I noted it.  To my right I saw three teachers sitting at a table, apparently discussing a collaborative project between the English and Social Science departments. Not sure if it was an act. They must have known I was coming. But how?  Someone must have tipped them off. The newspaper reader smiled a benevolent smile at me that I quickly dismissed.

The other three acknowledged my entrance by looking up from their discussion, but otherwise carried on as if I didn’t exist. I was disappointed and angry and I wrote it down.  I knew there must be more to the “collaboration” so I listened for clues that I was being played.

A long minute passed as I kibitzed on the three, with the educators animated in a back and forth discussion, completely ignoring me; I assumed intentionally, but I couldn’t prove it.  They seemed to be in an intense debate, too wrapped up in their own world to feel my powerful, lingering presence. I started to feel awkward and out of place.  Yet I was the Network Chief, dammit.  I could do whatever I wanted, go wherever I wanted.  Still, the awkward feeling persisted. I knew better than to let it show.

The woman reading the newspaper gathered up a bundle of newspapers and headed towards me.  She was a slender woman of about fifty, with curly silver and black hair.  She reminded me of an older Ms. Frizzle, a cartoon character from the goofy Magic School Bus series, which was a grade school favorite of many students back in the day. I’d never gotten the point of them, but our network librarians regularly ordered copies of them until I stopped giving them full discretion to purchase whatever they wished.

Momentarily viewing this woman as a caricature, I wanted to laugh, but instead my face must have suggested confusion, uncertainty and hostility.   I was temporarily lost in a world I thought I knew.  Standing in front of me was Betsy Morgan, the journalism teacher, and as she approached, I realized she was holding and had been reading student newspapers.

“Excuse me, are you lost?  Can I help you?"

"No, thank you." 

"Are you sure? It's no trouble,” she said, as she fumbled mightily with the student publications.

         Who is this "helpful" woman and why is she suddenly worried about me?  I thought and as I asked the question in my mind, I hit that universal timeline hole, and was transported to a Catholic elementary school.   Suddenly, I was no longer looking at Betsy as a fifty year old, but rather, I was Betsy as a pubescent girl.  ¿Qué demonios esta pasando?

What the hell was going on? 

It was a cold November Saturday and she (I) was twelve. I was somehow inside of her, feeling what she was feeling, it was impossible, but that was what was happening. She must have already sensed she was teetering on that thin ice that freezes across so many ponds of the middle-school landscape.

One day at recess, a month earlier, Betsy had found herself plucked from oblivion. Until that day, she’d always been the geeky kid at Holy Sepulcher who had to wear tie shoes when everyone else wore loafers. The one who wasn’t allowed to buy nylon stockings till months after the cool kids. But that one day at recess, something changed.

She (I) remembered the circle that gathered around her, a crowd, there on the playground that day. She was telling a story, animating it in ways that were drawing shrieks of laughter from the faces all around her. They — the cool kids — thought she was funny. Really funny.  This isn’t going to go well I heard myself thinking.  Sixth grade girls, watch out, Betsy, I wanted to scream, but she couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t speak.  In this magical, mysterious state I was in, all I could do was watch as it all unfolded.

“You’re mental!” one of them screeched, after one of her particularly wacky tales was unfurled. In the vernacular of that particular playground, “mental” was a very cool thing. It meant you were hysterically funny. It meant you made for terrific lunchtime entertainment. It meant you were anointed.

So they deemed her one of them. The invisible drawbridge that is essential to sixth-grade playground politics was lowered that day to her. She was invited to cross the planks, to be let into their inner circle.

And so it went for a time. A very short time. Ugh, oh, I thought.

Before the phone call, there was the afternoon in the woods. A whole gang of them — girls and even a few boys, the bad boys — had gone deep into the tangled weeds and the trees. Someone pulled out a pack of Kool Menthols. Someone else passed it around. Everyone lit up.

The next thing she remembered from that day in the woods was her mother’s old wood-paneled station wagon, pulling up along the curb by the path that led from the road through the weeds to where they were huddled, under their cloud of menthol-tinged smoke. Her mother stood at the curb, calling her name: “Betsy, Betsy! Where have you been?”

Her knees froze. Her stomach lurched.  She (we) were caught. And she hadn't even wanted to be there in the first place. Hadn’t wanted that cigarette pack to pass through her hands. But she hadn’t thought fast enough to figure a way out. All she knew was she didn’t want to be there, and now she was in trouble — big trouble — for not being anywhere else.  Meanwhile, I’m feeling as sick as she is.  Why, I’m wondering, do I have to feel this little girl’s pain?

It was her first awful taste of being on the fringe. Of knowing deep down that these weren’t her people, this wasn’t her crowd. They played in the deep end. She’d rather be safe in shallower waters. But, then again, it was sort of a rush to have all the cool kids think she was funny, laugh at her jokes. I was getting sicker and sicker by the minute, and yet the memory kept going. ¡Para! I want to get back to me at Sojourner Truth.  But it kept going.

Betsy shuffled back to the car, knowing full well she was going to get it. Knowing full well she was caught in the middle. Behind her back, there in the woods, they were laughing at her. She was a baby. She got caught. And her mom, she wasn’t laughing. Nor taking it lightly. She’d crossed a line in her mother’s book, and there was no line crossing allowed.

So she suffered at home in her room. For the rest of the afternoon.

And, come Monday, she went back to school, back to the playground. But they weren’t laughing much anymore. And she wasn’t there in the thick of the circle. She was shoved off to the side, more or less. She might as well not have been there. The most she got was a jab to the elbow, when someone wanted her out of the way, so they could step to the middle.

And then it was Saturday. She’d endured the whispering on Friday. Was pretty sure they were making plans and leaving her out.

Saturday morning came and went. No phone call. No nothing. Of course not, Betsy, it’s over!  Olvídese de estas chicas Forget these girls I screamed but again, she couldn’t hear me. By Saturday after lunch, she tiptoed into her parents’ bedroom. She remembered the underbelly of carpet under her Keds, the sneakers kids wore back then. She paced back and forth, back and forth. She lifted the phone from the cradle. She started to dial. Don’t do it, darling. She slipped her finger into the hole next to the 9, then clicked the buttons on the receiver that ended the call. She started panting. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said to herself over and over. She picked up the phone one more time. 9-4-5. Click. More panting. More pacing. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” No darling, you’re done with them.

She circled back to the phone. Picked it up one more time, and round and round, she managed to dial all seven digits to Patty Lenz’s house. The phone rang. Once. Twice. In the middle of the third ring, someone picked up.

“Is Patty there?” she managed to say, the breath catching hard in her throat.

Patty’s mother called out to Patty. She heard the phone picked up in some other room. She heard the voice she knew to be the arbiter of sixth-grade cool. It was a voice with a squeak at the hard edge of B’s and T’s and D’s.

“Patty?” she managed to say, to begin before she could end. "Hey, do you want to hang out?"

Muffled giggles.  They were all there.

“Oh, no. Sorry. I can’t hang out today. My mom is making me stay home by myself.”

More giggles.

More time.

Enough time, enough giggles to feel the sharp edge of the blade run straight across her heart. Might as well have run across her wrists as well.

She stood there absorbing the sting. Absorbing the knowing.

“Okay, thanks,” she said as fast as she could. Then she hung up. And she stood there, looking out the window of her mother’s bedroom, looking out into the tangled limb of an ash tree.

She slunk back to her own room. Threw herself on the quilt of her old twin bed. Buried her face in the pillow. She didn’t even cry. It hurt too much to cry. She couldn’t bear to move the muscles it would have taken to cry. She just lay there stinging and stinging and feeling the zing through and through.

This is what it feels like to be dumped from the cool kids, she thought. Although the truth of it was, she was even more amazed, deep down inside, that they’d let her in in the first place. “I was never cool.” She said to herself between stifled gulps of pain.

She felt awful and hollow and branded herself a “loser” for days and days. For weeks and months. In some ways, all these years later, she still knew and lived with the feeling. She never forgot. I’d have ripped it out of her if I could, but I couldn’t.  

Over the years, there would be plenty of new friends. But the sting from that moment on the end of the phone line — when the giggles and lies sliced right through her — never totally faded. And that was why she always reached out to the ones at the edge of the circle.

In her mind, she believed no one should have to suffer that slice to the heart. It was awful and it wouldn’t go away. I felt badly for her, but hey, we’ve all got our memories. Try being a Latina woman in a Caucasian dominated culture, darling, then come back and cry to me about some mean girls who laughed at you once. I thought. And then we were back.

Betsy was walking into class, distributing her newspapers. I followed next to her. Betsy asked a clearly awkward looking boy to help her pass them out.   I had a sense she chose him for a reason, but decided not to note it as that wouldn’t help nail the school in any way. I was also too stunned to do much of anything, as I had somehow, someway experienced a flashback of this woman’s life.  I was nauseous, almost with a sense of motion sickness. Any other day I’d have gone home, but I had work to do.  I immediately looked for someone else to uncover the fraud that was Sojourner Truth Magnet School.  As to the time travel thing, I had to find  out what was going on and more importantly, a way to make it stop.

Chapter Three - The Assistant Baseball Coach

Although dazed, I still had a pretty good idea where to go.  The people in most schools who had the loosest language and were the easiest to catch goofing off were the physical education teachers.  Everyone knows that. As a group, P. E. teachers will tell you that they worked hard by playing hard, but as far as I could tell, most of them just played or did nothing.  I stumbled out of Ms. Morgan’s class and headed straight to the gym.    

The first teacher I saw was Matthew Kinney, the man I was looking for, a guy of about sixty-five.  I knew from reading his file that he was a teacher and a coach, and his teams were consistently mediocre, despite the fact that the rest of the school teams were consistently great. How he could teach P.E. to high school kids was beyond me, although he did appear to be in reasonable shape.  When I approached, told him who I was and asked to speak with him, he acted surprised.

            “I’m not one of the leaders of the school or anything.” Kinney said to me sheepishly.

            “No worries.” I replied, “I’m not looking for anyone in particular to talk to, just people who work here and can tell me about the school and how if functions.”

            “Well, Ms. Soto is the best principal in the nation.” He said as if he’d been programmed.

            “Yes, yes. Enough about her.  I’m interested in your program and what it is you do here.”

            “I teach five classes a day, freshman mostly.”

            “Freshman?  You’ve got to be one of the older members of the P.E. department.  Why are you teaching freshman?” I asked.

            “I like working with them.  They come here all nervous and I like to set them at ease.”

            “Hmm.  So you don’t work them very hard, is that it?” I said, pulling out my notebook.

            “I work them out hard enough, Ms. Zapata.  It’s more like I try to make them work together and not feel like they have to be the greatest athletes in the world to enjoy physical exercise.”

            “So you take it easy on them and they love you for it.” I said with authority.

            “I don’t know how they feel about me really, but I’d like to think they respect me.”

            “Yeah. Ugh, huh.  You’re the assistant baseball coach and the assistant track coach here for the fresh-soph teams, aren’t you?”

            “Yes, for over seventeen years now.”

            “Why ‘assistant’?  Why not head coach?”

            “Because we have better coaches than me.” He said matter-of-factly.

            “A bit down on yourself, don’t you think, Mr. Kinney?”

            “No, I think I’m a great teacher.  I just don’t think I’m necessarily a great coach.  Sometimes the two go together, but not always.”

            “Really?”

            “Yes.  I think my heart is with the less talented players and that may not always lead to the best results on the field.  I try and nurture everyone so they become better athletes, but I’m not fixated on winning as much as others.”

            “But you’re the coach.  Your job is to win.”  I had him now.  He looked down as if aware of his failings.

            “Winning isn’t everything.”

            “Convenient rhetoric for a coach who doesn’t win very often. Yet, the varsity teams seem to win all the time. You must have seniority around here.  Why aren’t you insisting on coaching varsity? Won’t they let you?”

            “I could if I insisted, I suppose, but I prefer the non-varsity teams.”

            “Why’s that? Too much pressure at the top?”

            “Because at the non-varsity level, we try and let everyone play.  When it comes to varsity, however, the focus is more on winning and less on letting everyone participate or giving everyone playing time.”

            “So that’s your excuse for losing?”

            “I value giving as many people as possible a chance to play the game.”

            “You haven’t been very successful at it though, have you?  I mean, no offense, but your fresh-soph teams never seem to win championships.”

            “No, they don’t.  But that’s not how I measure success.”

            “Well, I’m glad you have your own scoring system, because you’ve got to admit that in the real world, winning is important.”

            “It’s not the be all and end all.” Kinney said with a sigh.

            “I guess when you don’t win, that’s a good way to think.” I said with a snarl that he couldn’t miss.

            And just as the snarl was vanishing from my face, I hit the hole again and I was suddenly Matthew and I was eleven. I was the smallest boy at Wausau’s Little League baseball tryout. ¡Un chico! ¿Qué es lo que ponen en el agua en Sojourner Truth ! Esto era ridículo .

(A boy! What did they put in the water at Sojourner Truth?  This was ridiculous.) Yikes!  I hated the way I felt. My pants and everything in it felt alien.  And there I was, the littlest guy! Odiaba la vista!I hated the view! For the first ten minutes or so, Matthew (I) stood by himself behind the batting cage surveying the field, trying to gauge the level of competition, fighting a nagging sense of self-doubt.  Again, the self-doubt.  What is this?  Is self-doubt a pre-requisite to working at ST?

He (we) softly thumped the pocket of the Rawlings baseball glove he’d gotten that year for Christmas. He believed he could play. Who was he kidding? I know how this is going to play out. He’d done well enough in schoolyard pickup games but knew that the level of competition here would be higher. He’d watched boys a grade or two ahead of him play on a number of occasions; he’d even gotten into a couple of games with them and he’d struggled. Everything about the game, then, seemed more difficult. Even though its dimensions hadn’t changed, the field appeared larger, the base path longer, the ball somehow smaller and harder . . . everything speeded up. Sharply hit ground balls danced wickedly in front of him, then darted away before he could react; fly balls reached their destination before he had a chance to judge their line of flight and settle under them. But it was at bat, facing one of those hard-throwing twelve year olds, like that big kid, Michael Schillendorfer, that he faced his toughest challenge.

The little league pitcher’s mound is forty-five feet from home plate, not sixty feet, six inches, as in professional organized baseball, and this shorter distance greatly magnified a pitcher’s speed and negated any advantage a batter might have otherwise had because of the smaller field and lesser age and overall skills of the game’s participants.

At bat, Mathew looked for any off-speed pitches offered, even if they were a little out of the strike zone.  He felt he had an even chance on those but he could never catch up to the fastballs the more talented boys threw. He was simply overmatched. By the time he saw the pitch and started the bat it was already too late. Before he’d completed his swing, he’d hear the ball pop in the catcher’s mitt.

                                                            *  *  *

In his own backyard, he was quite a star. He pitched a tennis ball against the side of the family garage; throwing fastballs of his own or testing out a nascent knuckle ball or curve, trying to hit the corners of the strike zone he’d marked there; inadvertently wearing away a three by two foot section of the tiles of asphalt siding his father had so carefully affixed there when he’d refinished the garage.

By turns, he tossed the ball high atop the peaked roof of their two-story frame house and tried to field its errant rebounds, caroming off as they did at diffuse or odd angles. Each pitch, toss, carom or catch was part of a baseball game played in his head. These games were peopled with major league stars. When playing the caroms off the roof, their backyard fence or the side of their garage became the outfield fence at Ebbet’s Field in Brooklyn or the distant centerfield wall at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, and Mathew’s own small frame the trim, powerful physique of Willie Mays dashing effortlessly across the outfield grass to snare a sinking line drive or leaping high against the centerfield wall to rob a batter of a home run.

To be sure, those fantasies were fleeting; he entertained them only moments at a time. That is, he always knew that professional baseball was unattainable for him; that it demanded physical gifts he simply didn’t possess, and that this backyard version was only a game of make believe that he or other boys played, knowing in their hearts their dreams would never materialize.

                                                            *  *  *

That little league tryout was neither as difficult as he’d feared nor as reassuring as he’d hoped. There were far too many boys present for the prospective managers (adult volunteers from the local community) to conduct anything like a thorough evaluation of their skills. Consequently, it was run something like a modern day sports combine. They jotted down each boy’s age, height and weight. They tested their speed in getting from home plate to first base or in circling the bases and recorded how fast or how far they could throw a baseball.  They observed each youngster’s batting stance and swing but no one threw them any pitches.

            The tryout was one of two such events held at opposite ends of town. The teams were sponsored by local businesses or by organizations like the Rotary or Kiwanis Clubs or Veterans of Foreign Wars. These same sponsors were to provide uniforms and equipment. Soon the managers for each of these teams began the   process of choosing players.

They gathered all of the boys together and began the selection, one by one, much in the manner of choosing sides they’d all experienced in the local schoolyard.  Mathew watched as the biggest, fastest and most talented boys were chosen first. Then, others, by exactly what criteria he wasn’t certain. None of this would have mattered, except there was a limit of fifteen players per team and at this particular tryout there was exactly one boy too many, although no one appeared to have taken this possibility into account.

After the thirteenth, and then fourteenth, players for each squad were chosen, Mathew was among the now much smaller group of boys still left standing. As the fifteenth and last players for each team were chosen, the number of remaining boys dwindled until at last he was left standing with just one other boy. It was readily apparent, then, that whichever of the two was not chosen would be the only boy at the tryout not chosen for any of the teams.

“I’ll take that kid.” One of the coaches said, pointing at Matthew.  Hey, we got picked!

Then it happened. Matthew turned and looked at the other boy’s face.  The boy remained standing in place for what seemed a long time, as if he didn’t fully comprehend, his eyes pleading. Then he turned and slowly walked away, across the ball diamond and the outfield grass, his head down, his eyes fixed to the ground.  As he crossed the street onto the next block, he slowly disappeared from sight.  Mathew felt terribly for him; Cheer up, kid, you got picked, so much so he almost wished that final decision had been reversed . . . almost… But then, he realized he was much too relieved that it hadn’t been him.  Of course, kid. He didn’t want to be in that other boy’s shoes.  Yeah, well, someone’s gotta lose, I thought, still very uncomfortable in the pants Matthew was wearing.

                                                            *  *  *

Once on the team, reality set in. Mathew made every practice and at games proudly wore his uniform. But he rode the bench most all that season, getting into games only when the team was short a man or when a game had gotten hopelessly out of reach. Whenever he did play, he hoped for safe chances, a softly hit fly ball or a ground ball with an easy hop, something to put into the success column, something to build on. Then he was sure he would be ready to attempt the more difficult plays. At bat, he looked for a pitch he could time and get around on.  All in all, not a complete disaster.

Then, final gam of the season, pivotal pint, Mr. McMahon called on him to face Michael Schillendorfer; Really?! No doubt, the fact that the team’s starting lineup had barely managed to make contact with any of Schillendorfer’s pitches and that he’d just walked a man, his last few pitches high and away, had a lot to do with it. Mathew was the shortest boy on the team. Perhaps the manager imagined he would present a problem for the big right-hander; he might have trouble getting his pitches down into the strike zone. He sent Mathew to the plate looking for a base on balls.

Michael Schillendorfer was something of a puzzle to the other boys in town. As a baseball player he was the envy of them all. It was whispered about him that he had major league potential, but he didn’t seem to take any of that seriously, didn’t appear to feel that it made him extraordinary in any way. Good-natured, even fun loving at times, he was something of a gentle giant, if one can say that about a twelve year old, but his very presence on the pitching mound struck fear into the hearts of Wausau’s Little League batters.  

As Mathew stepped to the plate to face him, he felt all of the weight of the moment. The entire setting: the ball diamond, the small gathering of spectators positioned along the baselines or behind the batting cage, the imposing figure on the mound; all took on a look of unreality. The batting helmet he wore was too large for him. It covered half of his forehead and its sides dipped well below his ears, partially muffling the voices around him. As he took a batting stance at the plate, he tried to shut out any extraneous element and he gripped the bat firmly. Looking for the base on balls that would put the tying run in scoring position, he took the first pitch. It was a called strike . . . Now he had to swing (or so he thought).

The next pitch was high and away but he didn’t see that until it was too late and he’d already started his swing – strike two. Don’t swing, kid!  I never played the game but I know enough not to swing at something I can’t hit.  What’s he doing?  Matthew stepped away from the plate, trying to refocus, as he’d seen major leaguers do on television, and then back into the batter’s box. Then he tried very hard to pick up that last pitch as it raced toward the plate. He swung and missed. Why?  Matthew’s team lost.  Not particularly due to him, but he felt the weight of the loss all the same. Well, you should have just stood their with your bat on your shoulders, idiota, instead of trying to do something you couldn’t possibly do.

It’s been said that baseball is a metaphor for life; each game a tiny representation of our individual (or collective) hopes and struggles, of our triumphs or most painful defeats.  Perhaps more than anything it informs us that our failures are ultimately acceptable. In baseball, even the greatest players fail at times on the biggest stage.  But an eleven year old doesn’t really get metaphors.

It took years for Mathew to get perspective on the little league games he lost, but more often he occasionally revisited the exploits of Willie Mays or those make believe games in his own backyard.

He often recalled Michael Schillendorfer and of what the future held, although of course no one knew it at the time.  Michael never had the baseball career that appeared so promising. He would star in baseball and basketball at the local high school. Then, a congenital illness diagnosed in his early twenties made any future in sports impossible. He would become the first of his classmates to die.

And of course, Matthew never forgot the boy not chosen.

Then suddenly we’re back in the gym.  I wanted to write something snarky about the coach who never seemed to win any titles, but the image of that kid slowly walking away, across the ball diamond and the outfield grass, his head down, his eyes fixed to the ground haunted me, and I decided maybe old Kinney wasn’t worth torching.  I’d mark him down as a loser, but I knew there would be others in the building whom I could use more effectively in my report.  The “time travel” was shaking me up, but I had work to do and I was damn well going to do it.

Chapter Four – The Social Science Teacher

               I turned the corner and ran into Chris Hall, the Social Science teacher who everyone thought was a conservative asshole.   I happened to like conservatives, so this was the one guy in the building I thought I might like.  I followed him to his next class, AP US History.   Mr. Hall was talking about the Viet Nam war and asking students to comment on whether or not the war was legal or not.  I was surprised he would ask such an open ended question, as I knew that line of questioning would only lead to either vigorous debate or the sound of crickets in the room.  I was surprised when hands went up and Mr. Hall called on a student in the front row.   

               Before I could hear what she had to say – Poof!! – it was the spring of 1967 and Chris Hall’s world was becoming undone.  You know by now that I was inside Chris, feeling his feelings and unable to help him. A boy again, although this time a gran chico.  WTF?????

Chris was living in Port Washington on Long Island in 1967 and he was fifteen.  The Beatles had just released their Sgt. Peppers album, which was a strange leap from their Revolver album just before.  The times they were a changin’ and it wasn’t always easy to keep up.  Chris had a girlfriend. Her name was Janice, and she introduced him to love and lust and was the center of his euphoric existence in their white bread town on the Sound.

And it wasn’t just puerile petting that endeared him to Port.  Chris was also popular.  He had a network of cool friends who did cool things and thought cool thoughts.  He was living the egocentric middle school dream, and his only interest in current events was new music.

Then came the word.  They were moving . . . again.  His large Irish Catholic family of eight always kept moving from one town to another – sometimes from one state to another – for reasons that are not at all clear to him even to this day.  His father was a lawyer but did not work for some international corporation and was certainly not in the military (his parents were both real lefties) but every year or two he would announce to their kids that “we’re moving.”

These announcements were received differently, naturally enough, by each of his siblings.  His older brother Mark also loved Port, but had just joined the air force to avoid being drafted into the army and going to Vietnam.  His older sister, Linda, was not grooving on Port like Mark and Chris and so was up for the change of scenery.  And he didn’t recall being interested enough to know what his younger sisters thought of it, but Chris was devastated.  And the devastation was made all the worse by the new destination – Jenkintown, PA.

Jenkintown is a one-square-mile town north of Philadelphia, which Chris came to think of as the original “nowhere” – a word that the Beatles had recently brought into mainstream usage from beatnik times with the song, Nowhere Man. That was his original impression when they got there that summer, and it only got worse when school started.  After living in Port Washington where long hair, bell bottoms jeans and tie-dye t-shirts was the new norm, walking into Jenkintown High School was for Chris like walking onto the set of a fifties teen movie.  Rolled up Levis and white t-shirts with a cigarette pack under the sleeve was the look there, and Chris wasn’t into it.   

But it’s a funny thing how one event can change the way you look at everything – put a different slant on just about everything you thought you knew about yourself and your world.  That one event began for Chris on April 4^th, 1968.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

At the time Chris did not realize that this tragedy would have any affect on him, whatsoever.  When Kennedy was shot five years earlier, school had been let out.  It was mid-morning, and everyone walked home in a kind of daze.  King was killed on a Thursday, but it was after school had been let out . . . it was in the evening in Jenkintown.  Sure Chris’s parents were upset, and stayed glued to the radio, or wouldn’t let them switch off Walter Cronkite, but this was a white bread town and there was no public mourning that he was aware of.  Chris went to school the next morning as if it were a regular day and it didn’t even come up in conversation!  No, it wasn’t the day of King’s assassination that directly changed his world, it was the Monday after, April 8^th, 1968.

In Jenkintown Chris lived on a street that was adjacent to the High School.  Lots of kids lived on Elmont Road, though, as he said, he wasn’t friends with any of them.  But as Chris was walking down Elmont after school that Monday, as he approached his house, he saw two police cars parked out front, and another couple of official looking black cars across the street from them.  Their lights weren’t on or anything, but there were cops sitting in all of them.  One got out of one of the black cars as he turned to go up his driveway.

“You live here, son?”  He asked.

“I do, what’s going on?”  Chris replied.

“Just go on inside, your parents got company,” he said with a smirk. Then he leaned back against his car with his arms folded.

When Chris walked in the front door, he didn’t hear anything.  But just before calling for his mom he looked to his left, into his living room, and sitting there was a black man in a beret.  He didn’t have a shirt on, but he had on a brown leather vest that was not buttoned.  Around his neck, hanging by a strip of leather was what looked like a clip of three large bullets.

“Heh,” the man said.

“Heh,” Chris replied.  He didn’t feel frightened, Chris remembered, because of the look on this fellow’s face.  He looked deeply hurt, and struggling to understand something.

 “Oh, Chris, you’re home.”  Seeing his father home during the day was oddly more startling to him than encountering a black man in his living room just moments before. Oh, my god, it’s Bobby Seale, the Black Panther. “Chris, this is Bobby Seale.  Bobby, my son, Chris.”

 “’S’appenin’,” he muttered.  The name did not ring a bell for Chris.

“What’s with all the cop cars?” Chris asked his father.

 “Mr. Seale, er, Bobby is a member of the Black Panthers.  And I don’t know if you have been following the news, but there was a shooting in California Saturday.”  Bobby Seale was hoping for our conversation to be over, Chris could tell.  “And a friend of Bobby’s was killed.  Bobby Hutton.”  And after a moment for this to sink in, his father continued, “He wasn’t much older than you.”

 At that moment, two other black men came in from the kitchen and the four of them – three Black Panthers and Chris’s father – went into his office and closed the door.

And things got “curiouser” and “curiouser” as the evening went on.

         It turned out, of course, that Bobby Seale wasn’t just a Black Panther. He had started the Black Panthers with his friend Huey Newton, who was in Prison for murder.  Chris got quite a lesson in current events at dinner that night as eleven people crowded around his dining room table and ate pork chops and mashed potatoes.  Chris learned about the development of the philosophy of Black Power, and that the whole name of the Panthers was actually the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.  It was formed to confront the racist police agencies that were bringing terror, brutality, murder and repression to the black people across the nation.  It was also meant to be a celebration of African identity, the idea being that blacks could control their own destiny and create a new black sense of self within this country.  That was the idea, but something had gone terribly wrong in Oakland that Saturday past, and now somehow Chris’s father was helping in some capacity.

         The next morning Chris got up in time to see the three Black Panthers dressed in their black leather coats and berets leaving through the front door and get into his families Dodge station wagon with his father at the wheel.  There were lots of neighbors standing across the street and some reporters had gathered and they started to take pictures.  Bobby Seale lifted his fist into the air and a lot of camera flashes went off.  He was still wearing his three-bullet neckpiece.  Then they drove away, police cars right behind them.

Chris didn’t know what to expect at school that morning, or even if he should expect anything at all.  There weren’t that many black kids at Jenkintown High, but he never saw them treated badly, and although the white kids were stuck in some kind of cultural time capsule, he never heard them being overtly racist.  There was separation, though.  Black kids and white were like two different planets orbiting the same sun.  They mostly only came together in sports.  But when Chris got to school that Monday, something was definitely different.  Everybody was looking at him.  Nobody said anything to him at first, but as Chris got to his locker he saw Nate Jordan standing there waiting for him.  Nate was the Jenkintown football star and he was black.  Their paths had never crossed.

         “Who the fuck are you?” he asked in an oddly non-threatening way.

         “I’m Chris Hall . . .”

 “I know who you are,” he interrupted with a bit of frustration, “but why was Bobby Seale and them other brothers stayin’ at yo’ house?”

 “I think my father was helping Mr. Seale with something.” Chris replied.

 “Bobby Seale?  The Black Panther, Bobby Seale?”

 “Yeah, that’s the one,” Chris replied.

         He started to nod softly, trying to make sense of this white kid who just had an encounter with someone who was clearly a hero of his.  Then he pointed his finger at Chris’s nose. Muchacho blanco que va a conseguirlo ahora!

 “If anyone in this school or this whole white boy town gives you any trouble you come an’ git me, hear?”  And he thrust a fist in the air and walked off to class.

“Okay,” Chris replied to the air.

Nate and Chris became friends, but he never did need his help, protection-wise.  In fact Chris became something of a local celebrity at Jenkintown.  His family had other Black Panthers come to visit them in the following years, sometimes with the cops and reporters outside, sometimes not.  Chris’s mother started the Philadelphia chapter of the Women’s Strike for Peace, and his family spent a lot of time driving to political events and demonstrations.  Chris was, after that, an activist – he became involved, politically and otherwise.  He got rid of his apathy and life became fuller.  When he took the time to reflect on the events of his life years later– when he asked himself what share he’d had in the world’s confusion and wickedness, he found a measure of solace in that he had learned to be a full fledged member of the human race from three Black Panthers and a high school football player.

And suddenly I was back in his classroom, and a spunky sophomore was telling Mr. Hall that everyone in the 60’s were losers.  Finally! I thought.  Someone with informed disdain. “The left and the right were both wrong, Mr. Hall. The fools who brought the US into the war in Viet Nam should have all been put in jail, and anyone violently protesting should have also been locked away.”  The room went silent and everyone seemed to be fidgeting, waiting for the bell to ring. I was pleased.

A boy in the back of the room raised his hand enthusiastically, “Yes, Lou.  Your thoughts on this?” said Mr. Hall hopefully.

            “Can I use the bathroom?”

            “If you must.” Mr. Hall said with a very slight tone of disappointment. Yes, just as I suspected.  Nothing going on here.  And then it happened.  

         “I think Eric is being a little too harsh and equivocal.  I don’t see how both sides are losers.  It seems to me at least some people back then were trying to do the right thing.  I mean, remember the Black Panthers?  Weren’t some of them trying to help feed people in their neighborhoods?”

         “No, they were just violent activists. It was good what the FBI did to them.” someone said without raising his hand.

         “Good?  Are you freaking kidding me? They violated their civil rights, even killed some of them?”

         Suddenly the room was abuzz with argument and counterargument.  No more hand raising, just arguments flying back and forth.

“We tried to save the Vietnamese from themselves!”

“How? By killing them?

“No, by trying to save them from the Chinese.”

“The Chinese?  You mean the people Nixon opened trade with?
 “I mean the Communists.”

         “The same people who are now one of our hugest trading partners?”

“No, no them; I mean, yes, them, but they weren’t them back then.  They were real communists.”

         “So now they’re fake?”

         “They’ve embraced capitalism and you know it.”

         I watched as Mr. Hall let the room fill with point and counterpoint.  He seemed to be enjoying the ebb and flow of the sounds, almost as if he were in an auditorium listening to a symphony.  When I thought I fight was going to break out, I was interested.  Now that I knew Viet Nam was going to be debated all over again, I was through.

 Basta!, I thought.  I don’t need to revisit ancient history.  These kids need to get lives. I mean, what kind of a 21st Century kid gives a damn about Viet Nam?  I got up and left before someone could ask me for my opinion.

Chapter Five – The Cop

I headed towards the second floor cafeteria, when I noticed Jack McNamara, a tough looking, extremely fit forty-something, cleanly pressed, uniformed cop speaking to a hulking student in a small room in a hallway just to the right of the library.  The scene was quite animated from what I could see, with the student crying and Officer McNamara looking strangely comforting.  I had heard through the grapevine that Jack, a regular Chicago Police officer assigned to the school, was soft.  The school rarely made arrests, which made no sense; I was sure some students did criminal acts at Sojourner Truth.  Kids are kids, after all.  Yet, somehow, Sojourner Truth consistently reported a very low crime rate.  I presumed this was because McNamara didn’t understand his job and often let kids off with a slap on the wrist.  Or more likely, the principal had instructed him to avoid arrests whenever possible, just to make the school look good. 

I waited patiently as the student, a heavy-set, muscular sophomore, wiped away his tears and lumbered out of the officer’s mini-interrogation room.  I knocked on the door and invited myself in.

“Officer McNamara?”

“Yes?”

“Can I have a few words with you?  I’m Carla Zapata, from the Network, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”  It felt good to say that to a cop.

“No worries.  Come on in.”  He said as he gestured for me to take a seat

“The child looked extremely upset.  Did you arrest him?”

“No, I didn’t. Nothing like that.” He said with a laugh.

“Catch him doing drugs?  Selling some?  Stealing?”

“No. It’s all good.”

“Oh, you can’t tell me?  Confidentiality and all that nonsense?”

“Well, yes.”

“Can’t give me anything?  I promise I won’t tell anybody.”

“It was a private conversation, Ms. Zapata, but I can tell you that the issue he had had nothing to do with this school or him doing anything wrong. Yet.  He just wanted to vent some private frustrations before he did anything stupid. Because from I gathered, he is having a tough day.”

“So he came to talk to you, Officer Friendly?” I countered with a sneer.

“I don’t exactly know why he came to me, instead of his counselor or one of his teachers, but the fact is, he did come to see me.”

“No idea why?”

Jack leaned forward, almost as if he were embarrassed to say it. “He came to me, I think, maybe, just maybe, because every year I give a little speech to the entire school about trying not to say or do stupid things out of frustration or annoyance.  I told him that as a young adult, he’s got to be careful not to let his emotions or even physical superiority to most students get the better of him.”

“You’re trying to keep him from fighting someone?”

“I’m trying to get him to be a bigger man by showing his strength through restraint.”

“What kid believes that? For that matter, what adult?” Why did I ask the question.  I was tumbling through time again and I knew I’d be a boy which I really don’t like being.

And there I was inside the body of Jack McNamara, the most handsome boy in his 8^th grade class. Al menos yo soy guapo , aunque la sensación en mis jeans todavía no está bien (Well, at least I’m handsome, although the feeling in my jeans still isn’t right.) We were sitting at a desk in Holy Family Catholic elementary school in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and it was 1980.  Again with the Catholic schools, I thought. Jack was a big guy for his age, clearly a dreamer with no ability concentrate on what the teacher was talking about. There was too much else he was interested in.  His mind was racing as he observed every student in the room, every class poster and every activity occurring outside the class window.  In today’s school system, he might have been identified as having Attention Deficit Disorder.  But here, he was simply an unruly, unfocused child who needed to be chided into behaving differently. I like the old days.

The uniform he was required to wear included a white shirt and a blue tie.  Most of the boys wore “clip on ties” that could easily be and routinely were pulled off by classmates. Jack always wore a real tie, one that he kept neat and that had come from his father’s wardrobe. It was old but he didn’t mind.  It made him look better, although occasionally his friends would pull on it, assuming it was a clip on, and then realize it wasn’t.  “Yo!  It’s real, you asshole.” He would cry, and the friend would apologize.

               The school's teachers included strict nuns and an assortment of “no-nonsense” lay teachers. Most had little patience for kids like Jack. Me gusta esta escuela,(I like this school) I thought. Somehow Jack muddled along, trying to avoid humiliation as best as he could.  When he wasn’t distracted it seemed like that was his default thought: “Avoid humiliation. Avoid humiliation,” his heart seemed to pound. But he couldn’t always avoid embarrassment, and he knew it.  The teachers had a system of disciplining students who didn't do well on tests and Jack was not a good test taker.  At Holy Family, if a student failed a test, it was assumed he or she wasn’t really trying, and a healthy dose of humiliation would solve the problem. Suena bien para mí

 (Sounds good to me,) I thought.

Jack was, among other things, a terrible speller. All grades were routinely announced loudly so the whole class could hear the results.    To help ameliorate the problem, Jack would have the two girls who were seated by him who had been assigned to grade his test, change his scores to passing grades.  In that way he wouldn't be humiliated when his score was broadcast to the class. He was thankful for the help in getting by on that, but beatings at this school by teachers, especially the male lay teachers were common toward some of boys. If the teachers didn't hit the students with rulers or a paddle, they’d make the boys stand in the back of class with the biggest and heaviest book in each arm out until the end of class.

Here we were sitting in English class with the biggest and meanest of the male lay teachers, Mr. Charles Graham. At six foot, two and a half, Graham was at least 240 pounds of atrophied muscle. He scared me although I knew had nothing in the long term to worry about.  Somehow, someway, I had been given the magical ability to observe and feel the physical and emotional pain of the person I was observing. I knew no matter what physical pain, it would be ephemeral.  Anyway, evidently, students were randomly being chosen and required to read book reports in front of the class.  Mr. Graham began gruffly giving out instructions.

“Slide your desks together and work on your reports.” Mr. Graham commanded.  Jack slid his desk to sit with his buddy, Mike Gibbons, who was as bored and unfocused as Jack.

“Patty, you’re up!”  Mr. Gibbons spat, his disdain for the human muck in front of him unhidden from all but the most dense.  Patty Albanio, a shy looking, thin legged girl, slowly made her way to the front of the class as Mr. Graham glared at the room and dared anyone to make a sound.

As Patty began her presentation, Mike Gibbons slid a piece of paper across to Jack with the framework for playing tic-tac-toe. I couldn’t see it, but I knew what was coming.  Mr. Graham silently moved towards the two boys lost in their game. Jack never saw the teacher approaching.

         Without a word, Mr. Graham came up behind Jack and grabbed him by his tie. To keep it from ripping, Graham quickly wrapped the tie twice around his fist and lifted Jack off the ground.  The tie tightened around Jack’s neck and cut his skin.  He couldn't breathe. He saw Mike Gibbons looking scared as he threw away the paper he had been doing tic- tac- toe on. Jack was unable to breathe up off the ground while Mr. Graham was screaming. I could feel his fear.

“What the hell are you doing, boy?” Graham roared.

 Unable to respond, Jack looked over to Mike who sat staring in horror.  Suddenly, the unthinkable happened. Jack couldn't control his bladder and se mojó los pantalones (he wet his pants.)  I felt it as he felt it, running down his leg and everyone could see the wetness. I was surprised when no one laughed. Everyone watched in horror. ¡Pobre bastardo!

Mr. Graham then slammed Jack’s head into the back wall several times before he threw him to the ground. Graham walked away as Jack scrambled to get the tie loosened off his neck because he couldn't breathe. He stumbled back to his desk choking and trying hard to regain himself.  Jack sat in the wetness of his pants, unable to look at anyone.  Even Mike.  When the bell rang to go home, he decided not to tell his parents what had happened.

He got home and quickly put his pants in the washer.  He knew what Mr. Graham had done was wrong, but he was afraid his mother and father would be upset that he wasn’t paying attention.  He wondered how he could face his classmates the next day. 

The phone rang. He was sure it was a classmate calling to relive his humiliation.  Instead, it was a parent of a classmate upset about what his child had witnessed.  More phone calls from parents and friends, sympathetic and outraged.  Over the course of two weeks, the administration of Holy Family, reluctant at first to admonish a teacher, finally forced Mr. Graham to resign.  As an administrator, I think it was the right call.

And we were back at Sojourner Truth. “Big people have to be careful with their physicality.” Jack said ruefully.

“You’re a big man.” I said.  “What about you? Do you watch out for your physicality?  Ever have to use the nightstick on someone?”

         “I work in a school, Ms. Zapata.  It’s about the learning.  It’s always about the learning.”

“Some people don’t learn the easy way.” I said.  “Sometimes you’ve got to show them who’s boss, or they’ll take advantage of you.  How do you know that kid who just came in here isn’t bullshitting you and getting into a fight right now, while we’re sitting here talking?”

“You and I have different definitions of the ‘easy way,” I’m afraid.”   Jack said.

“So you let these kids get away with anything?”

“Not bullying, if I can help it.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Then everybody loses.”

“I’m just surprised that a big, tough cop like you is afraid to arrest some of these kids.” I said, trying to goad him into losing his temper.

“I’m not afraid to arrest them, Ms. Zapata.  I’m reluctant to do it.  There’s a difference.”

“Still, it makes the school look good if you have a low arrest record.”

“Take a look around the school, Ms. Zapata, and see if the kids are out of control or in need of stricter discipline.  Come back, then, if you see big problems in the hallway and tell me who needs harsher punishments.”

“I’ll do that.” I said with an authoritative tone any cop could understand and half would have arrested me for.  Jack McNamara just smiled and waved in a student waiting to speak to him.  I left him frustrated and annoyed.  I wrote down, “Cop not much of a cop” even though I knew there was much more to it than that. 

Chapter Six - Mr. One Percent

            I was becoming concerned with the apparent competence and charm all around me so I needed to find someone at the school who I knew I could really hate.  And when I first read the personnel files of the staff, I knew I had just the perfect candidate:  Chad Weinstein.

Mr. Weinstein was an Ivy League grad who had gone on to law school and then had gone straight on to work at one of the biggest, baddest law firms in Chicago where he ultimately became a partner.  I had heard he made a ton of money, rode around in the latest model Mercedes-Benz, and lived in one of the wealthiest parts of the City.  A slimy, no good “one-percenter.”  However, for some bizarre reason, Weinstein abruptly “retired” from his high-powered law job and came to work as an English teacher at Sojourner Truth.  Something didn’t smell right.

While Weinstein’s mother had been a principal for thirty-plus years at one of the most prestigious elementary schools in Deerfield, one of the suburbs of Chicago, even winning a “Blue Ribbon” award for her school and having one of its wings named after her, Chad, I sensed, would be nothing like his mother.  I was sure he was a rich, liberal puke who wanted to “give back” to the community by teaching city kids in order to ease his guilty conscience from all the clients he must have bilked over the years.  I couldn’t wait to interrogate the guy.

When I arrived at his classroom, I noticed a formally dressed (jacket and tie), middle-aged, balding man talking to this hulking, football-type of a kid who seemed to be blubbering uncontrollably.  The man had to be Weinstein.  He had his hand leaning gently on the student’s shoulders, seemingly trying to quiet him down. Shouldn’t really be touching the kid. After a few minutes, the classroom door opened, the red-eyed kid glanced up, barely noticing me, and walked on down the hall with Weinstein yelling to him, “keep your head up Jamal.”  What a big baby this Jamal was, I thought.

I looked directly into Weinstein’s eyes and asked “Do you get off on making grown men cry?” 

He looked back at me, and without missing a beat said, “I didn’t make him cry and, by the way, that kid is not a grown man.” 

“But he’s at least, 6’3” and 200 lbs.; he could break you in half,” I said. 

“Jamal is only 16; he may have the body of a grown man, but, trust me, he is a kid who is going through some serious stuff at home.  I was just trying to encourage him, help him get through it.  And, who may I ask are you?” Weinstein said. 

“Carla Zapata.  I’m the Eastside Network Chief and I’m going to ask you some questions which I’m sure you won’t mind, although I guess you’re a big shot lawyer who is used to asking questions, not answering them.” 

“Ms. Zapata, that means ‘shoes’ in Spanish, doesn’t it?”

“No, that would be ‘Zapato’.” I said, thinking, no tan inteligente como te crees que eres (not as smart as you think you are.) correcting the hot shot lawyer who evidently didn’t know as much as he thought he did.

  “Well, I am happy to answer any questions you have, although I am a little curious as to why you would want to talk to me,” Weinstein responded.

Before I could break it down for him, I felt that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach and found myself in the head of thirteen year old Chad Weinstein.  

Chad and I appeared to be at a big affair at some catering hall surrounded by a circle of people.  The men were wearing skull caps or “yarmulkes,” while the women were dressed to the “nines.”  We were bobbing up and down, up and down, and I noticed that we were sitting in a chair being lifted by a group of smiling men in the midst of blasting “Klezmer” music.  It sounded like the song: “Hava Nagila.”  To the right was Chad’s eleven year old brother, and to the left was his seven year old baby sister.  They also were on chairs being lifted by groups of men and women, respectively, all laughing and shouting.  As our chair was put down back on the floor I could see Chad’s parents “kvelling” over their son, so proud that he had just become a “Bar- Mitzvah.”

I did a quick review of what I knew about Judaism. When a boy of the Jewish faith turns thirteen, he has to learn a lengthy passage from the Torah, essentially the Old Testament bible, and lead a congregation in prayer, as well as deliver a speech about his Torah portion to its members.  Upon successfully doing this he becomes a “Bar Mitzvah,” a “man” among his people.  Afterwards, the newly-anointed man is thrown a big party by his parents who invite all of their family and friends.  I had become Chad enjoying his bar-mitzvah party along with a few hundred other people.  His father, Sam, a good-looking, dark haired man, delivered a beautiful toast welcoming this new man into the Jewish faith (i.e. Chad) and expressing publicly his pride and love for his son.  Chad and his family reveled in the adoration from the crowd.  It was a proud and happy moment in the spotlight for this young man.   

Yo soy la primera mujer en la historia del mundo para ser bar mitzvah, (I’m the first woman in the history of the world to be bar-mitzvahed,)I thought.

All of a sudden I was no longer at the festive bar mitzvah party, I had been transported to a much darker affair . . . a funeral.  It was four months after the bar mitzvah and we were at the funeral of Sam Weinstein, Chad’s father.  At age 38 he had developed a rare blood cancer.  So rare, that teams of doctors and medical students had come to his hospital room to “study” him.  Sam had not felt well for a few months but he had put off going to the doctor’s office until after Chad’s bar mitzvah event was over.  Sam went to the doctor’s office for what he thought was to be a routine check-up.  However, minutes after examining Sam, his doctor sent him directly to the hospital.  Sam never again saw home.

The funeral home was overflowing with people.  As mentioned, Chad’s mother, even back then, was a teacher, highly regarded in the community before becoming a principal, thus many people attended the funeral out of respect for her status.  Additionally, the tragic, sudden death of a young person under forty with three young kids seems to bring people out in droves.  I was there, sitting with Chad, his younger brother and sister in a line, with literally hundreds of people coming up to each of us communicating their condolences.  When each person came up to Chad they would be choked up.  Moving on to his younger brother, tears would well up in their eyes.  But when they got to his seven-year old sister, they would break down, traumatizing the poor girl.  “I am so sorry” each would say.  I could hear Chad’s thoughts . . . “Why are you sorry, you didn’t do anything, you barely knew my dad.”  Chad, however, wasn’t mad at these people.  He was mad at God.  At his bar mitzvah service a few months earlier, Chad had publicly song God’s praises.  Now he felt God had taken his father away and there was no justification for such an act.

Everything became blurry for an instant, and when I could finally see clearly, I realized I had now been transported again, to another dark place.  After getting my bearings, I noticed that I was in Chad’s bedroom two months after his father’s funeral.  It was nighttime, but Chad was up and I could hear his thoughts.  It had dawned on him, lying there in the blackness, that if a burglar would barge into his home, at age 13, as the oldest “man” in the house, it would be up to Chad to protect his family.  He sat thinking how he, 90-pounds soaking wet, without any weapon, would accomplish such a feat.  Chad Weinstein, a so-called man in the Jewish faith, did not feel that he would be up to the task.  Indeed, he knew he was just a boy.

“Hey, Ms. Zapata, you still with me?” Mr. Chad Weinstein asked. 

“Yeah, I’m here, just got lost in thought for a moment,” I said. 

“So what’d ya do to make him cry?” I asked. 

“His little brother was just hanging out with some friends and he got caught in a cross-fire, shot in the head.  Never saw it coming.  It appears to be gang-related.” 

“Hmmm . . . I was wondering, why’d you leave being a big bucks lawyer to come to this place?” 

“You just saw one reason.  There are a lot of Jamals out there.”

“Yeah, I know.  I’ve been in this business a lot longer than you’ll stay in it.” I snapped.

“I don’t know how you do it.” Then he started crying.  Right in front of me.  Big tough lawyer.

And suddenly I saw him at thirteen with his father gone.  But this time, I wasn’t flashing back with him.  I just suddenly imagined how he must have felt.  I didn’t like the feeling that was coming over me, so I decided to look elsewhere before I thought about it too much.

Chapter Seven - The Psychology Teacher

I walked over to an Advanced Placement Psychology class headed by a “Chad Anderson,” a six foot four, thirty-five year old white guy who was a little bit too focused on race relations for my taste. Ethnicity was never far removed from the fabric of Sojourner Truth Magnet High School, to be sure.  According to the most recent data from the Board of Education, Sojourner Truth’s student body was 32% African-American, 32% Caucasian, 23% Hispanic, 8 % Asian, 2% Native American and a small group of students categorized as “other.”  I knew the school must have had racial tensions, but it never made it in the press, like other schools.  It bothered me.  It also bothered me that white guys like Anderson talked about race so glibly without understanding the implications. It was if he were juggling hand grenades and not thinking twice about it. Anderson was talking about the school’s namesake, Sojourner Truth, when I walked into class.  

         “Does anyone know who Sojourner Truth was?” Chad asked with an arrogant confidence I didn’t appreciate.  It was if he were certain that many hands would go up. Surprisingly, many did.

         A young lady standing with her arms folded smacked her lips disdainfully at the question and replied, “She was born into slavery around 1787. She was separated from her family at the age of nine when she was sold at auction with a flock of sheep for $100. After having her children ripped from her, she spent her adult life working for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights.

         “That’s right, Crystal.” Anderson said approvingly.  “She was a drum majorette for justice.”

         “Nice allusion to Dr. King, Mr. Anderson” a white boy in the back shouted.

         Anderson was way to smug. What could he possibly know about racism or the first thing about the difficulties of living in a Caucasian dominated culture?

         “Her most famous speech was, “Ain’t I a Woman.” A Hispanic boy added, without raising his hand.

         “Well done, Luis.” Chad said with a nod.

         I was afraid they were going to all break out in “Kumbaya” when there was the sound of a coach’s whistle blowing from across the gym, and suddenly we were in Anderson’s childhood.  A white boy again, I thought, 

pero al menos yo soy grande esta vez.

(but at least I’m big this time.) If these mysterious transitions were some mystical groundhog day meant to change me, they weren’t working.  I sort of enjoyed the brief moments as a male, but for the fact that my body didn’t feel quite right, and I spent a lot of time focused on that thing between my legs.  But there we were standing in front of two people I assumed were his folks. From the thoughts in his head, I knew he longed for a brother. There he stood at the ripe age of eight getting the word from his parents.

“Chad, we want you to know we’re planning on adopting a boy, a brother for you.” His mother said in a distinct Southern accent.

         “What’s his name? Does he like sports?”

“Jesse Crawford.” His mother said with a smile, adding, “I don’t know if he likes sports.  You’ll have to ask him.” His father drawled.

Chad’s older sister, Carly, was also adopted. His parents brought her home seven months before he was born in Spain on a U.S. Air Force base. Growing up, Carly was constantly serving as a second mother to Chad. Each morning as they left for school together Carly would ask Chad “do you have your lunch and your homework?” She was a calming presence alongside him throughout his school years.

Chad also had a younger (biological) sister named Becky. In an earlier age Becky would have been perfectly suited for the role of court jester: loud, comfortable on stage, opinionated, all enveloped by an edgy sense of humor.

Chad grew up in Richmond, Virginia – a place that fought at every turn over the meaning of its past. A place where school children wore shirts that read, “Lee may have surrendered, but I didn’t.” Chad felt that same weight of that history bearing down on his own family.

His parents told him about an ancestor (William Seddon) who had lived in Richmond and served with the Confederacy as the Secretary of the War.

That distant relative was buried in Hollywood Cemetery on a picturesque hill overlooking the James River. The family saved a chair from Seddon’s home where Robert E. Lee had sat when he visited one day.

When Chad was in elementary school, one of his Social Studies teachers led the class in reciting a short poem ---

                  Jefferson Davis rode a snow white horse,

                  Abe Lincoln rode a mule.

                  Jefferson Davis was a gentleman,

                  Abe Lincoln was a fool.

Despite this, progress also seemed possible. The people of Richmond fought and argued and eventually placed a statue of native son Arthur Ashe alongside Confederate Civil War generals on its iconic Monument Avenue.

A few years later, Chad’s parents took him out of middle school on a bitterly cold January day to attend the inauguration of the nation’s first black Governor, L. Douglas Wilder. Wilder declared on that cold day that he “was a son of Virginia,” and hailed a new mainstream that elected him in a massive upset.

And when Chad’s parents decided they wanted to adopt a son, they told their family they wanted to adopt a biracial child.

So it was with great excitement that Chad learned about Jesse Crawford, his new baby brother. He looked at pictures with his parents, and helped prepare Jesse’s room for his arrival.

Chad would never meet Jesse. Two weeks before the family was scheduled to pick up the infant they would learn that he was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. Chad’s mother tearfully brought her children together and told them “Jesse needs care we can’t give him. He needs intensive medical treatment and around the clock attention we can’t provide.”

Chad’s parents wouldn’t be deterred. They continued to interview with adoption agencies and look for a son they could raise with their other children.

Finally in late November of that year the family received the news that Jeremy Nicholas was placed with them for adoption. Jeremy was born earlier that month to a white mother and African American father. Both had struggled in a relationship that was marred by violence and abuse. Jeremy’s biological mother made the terrifying and courageous decision to place him up for adoption.

Chad’s education in race Richmond began in earnest. On a snowy day in December his family piled into their wood paneled minivan and made the four hour drive west to Roanoke, Virginia. The day was made more memorable when the family van slid into another car on a snowy highway outside of city.

The moment finally arrived when Chad and his family waited expectantly for Jeremy’s arrival in the adoption agency. He was outfitted in a Christmas stocking when he was finally united with his family. Chad eagerly accepted when the local social worker asked him if he wanted to hold his little brother for the first time. He felt the rarest mix of awe and joy and protectiveness at that moment.

Jeremy and Chad changed each other as they grew up. Chad witnessed how hard it was for Jeremy to be treated fairly.

When Jeremy got into trouble at school, Chad sat with him as the guidance counselor interviewed him. Chad had worked with the school counselor before and liked him.

But sitting in front of his brother now the counselor seemed like an entirely different person. He lacked any of the patience and understanding that Chad had earlier encountered. Instead of an interview and assessment, the social worker accused Jeremy again and again of being a “harmful influence” in the school.

Chad couldn’t understand why his brother’s experience was so different from his own. Pero al menos yo soy grande esta vez. (Maybe it’s because you’re white and he’s black in a white dominated culture!)

And it was worse out in everyday life. People stared in restaurants at the little biracial boy with the all white family. Restaurant hostesses would pull Jeremy aside and ask “Are you sure you’re supposed to be with this group?” Chad’s friends couldn’t understand why the family practiced a new holiday (Kwanza) right after Christmas.

And most troubling was that jarring, awful word that was levied against Chad’s brother by much older people.

“What’s that…..Nigger…doing with your family?”

“That’s my brother,” Chad would say to the regularly bewildered. And though the racism he regularly witnessed was second hand, it was a close second hand, and one that would motivate him to confront the “elephant in the room” whenever and wherever he saw or felt it.

Back at Sojourner Truth Carla watched as Chad challenged the class to consider a day in the life of the school’s namesake.  “Sojourner Truth not only dealt with being black in antebellum America, but can you imagine being black and a woman back in 1851?”

“You have no idea!” an African-American girl in the back row yelled out.

“Good point” Anderson said with a touch of sadness. “How about you, can you imagine it, Aja? Being Black, being a woman, living in 1851?”

“I’ve got the first two parts down pretty good, Mr. Anderson. The 1851 part is a little harder to imagine,” Aja said with a wry smile on her face.

The class burst into laughter, as did Anderson.  The familial rapport was more than I could take.  I bolted for the door.  But before leaving, I wrote in my notes, “Chad Anderson, too glib with the notion of racism.” Como si no tuviera ni idea. (As if he had a clue.)

Chapter Eight -The Counselor

I walked down the hall still totally mystified about what was going on. These flashes of other people’s lives had spooked me, to be sure, and I was pretty sure it had something to do with Julie Glass. What, I didn’t know, but I had a job to do and I was going to do it, regardless of the moments of insanity I seemed to be having.

So, I pushed on. I knew from experience that regardless of the neighborhood, high school kids rarely had it together because teenagers are always dealing with emotional crises as their hormones are rearing up to bite them and because life is always just so damn complicated.  I also knew that the weakest group of people in any school was almost always the staff of the Counseling Department.  Many counselors just phoned it in and shuffled academic records to justify their existence. I took a walk to the counselors’ wing and in the hopes of finding somebody doing nothing.

I knocked on the door of Room C-001, the suite where all the counselors’ offices were clustered, but there was no answer.  No surprise there. I entered and looked around. There were a couple of sitting areas but not much else.  Again, no one.  I approached the first door on the right.  The name on the door was Dan Breslin, Chair, Counseling Department. I knocked.

“Come in,” a voice said. I went in. “How can I help you?” he said. 

“I can see you’re not busy.  Do you mind if I sit down and talk to you for a while.”

“Sure, are you okay?  Do you need a glass of water?” Breslin seemed genuinely concerned for me, completely missing the point of my visit.

“I’m Carla Zapata,” I said. “I am from the East Side Network and I’m trying to get a feel for the school. How long you been here?” From the looks of him, Dan looked like he was about sixty, and he had an easy-going demeanor that seemed to be increasingly typical of the faculty. Again, another staff member not intimidated by my presence.  What was it with these people?

“Twenty-two years.  Came here after spending four years at a neighborhood grammar school in Lawndale.”

“So this must be Shangri-La compared to that.” I said with a slight grudging respect for the man, inasmuch as he did have some real world experience. “It had to be a hell of a lot tougher than working here, but that was a long time ago.  It’s gotten worse since you’ve been over there.”

“Every place has its challenges.”

“Tell me about the challenges here.”

“They’re kids.  They have stresses. Like everyone.”

“Like what?”

“Anything you can imagine.”

“Drugs, suicide attempts, broken homes?”

“Yes, all of those, and a thousand other different issues. Most of them related to low self-esteem and feelings of low self-worth.”

“And you help them?”

“We do the best we can.”

“Got any data to back up the fact that you help any of these kids?”

“Very hard to quantify. But every day these kids come to school with the heart and energy to try to learn, I call a success.”

“Sounds like a very low bar.”

“I tell you Ms. Zapata, what some of these kids live with, some of the issues and memories these kids carry, it’s amazing they get up in the morning and come at all.” Tell me about it.

“Oh, really. And what do you do to help them get here?”

“I let them know that they are not alone in their feelings.  That we’ve all gone through periods of low self-esteem, grief, and despair.”

I looked at the man.  Great shape. Probably commuted from a rich suburb.  What did he know about low self-esteem, loss, or despair? He was a white boy in a white world. What could he possibly know? I shouldn’t have asked.  I knew the drill. Suddenly, I was Dan. I was eleven years old, and I had five siblings younger than me.  My (Dan’s) parents were away at a fund-raising luncheon to honor Cesar Chavez, the visionary, charismatic, and now honored leader of the Farm Workers’ Union

I couldn’t help thinking, Los blancos aman César Chávez , como si él es el único Mexicano que alguna vez ha hecho algo para la humanidad ! ( White people love Cesar Chavez, as if he's the only Mexican who's ever done anything for humanity!)

Dan’s parents were involved in the labor movement in Chicago and knew that migrant farm workers--fathers, mothers, pregnant women, and children-- were compelled to work in the fields. The children were barely old enough to follow directions or to know what was safe; no one protected the children from the toxic pesticides and the unrelenting sun. All of them were exposed to stoop labor; there were no machines to harvest grapes and America needed its grapes. They knew the farm workers drifted from community to community and state to state to follow the harvest of the crops. They knew these migrants—often a mix back then of Filipino and Mexican -- were slaves in the fields, long after slavery had been abolished and picking cotton had been outsourced to the third world and machines. Dan’s parents knew the farmhands, many undocumented, were without a voice without a union. They knew these migrants worked fourteen hour days without clean water, food, sanitation, or rest; they knew many Americans treated their pets with more care and respect. Dímelo a mí !

  His parents knew these migrant laborers were exploited by labor “contractors” and vineyard owners who recruited them to work in the fields and then took their meager wages after promising them decent housing and good work. They knew migrants were the invisible workers in our vast agri-business that feeds America and the world. Chavez wanted us to know-- and Dan’s parents knew it, too, --that we had to protect these workers’ rights. They knew migrants should have the right to a safe and toxic-free work environment, to earn a decent wage, to have health care and housing, and to have their children be in school, not in the fields. Dan’s parents knew that being there for those struggling for economic and social justice was what they were supposed to do.

But Dan’s parents didn’t know that no one was protecting their own child that day. It was late April, a beautiful Sunday. A teen-aged girl from next door was babysitting Dan and his five siblings, sitting on her own front porch, inattentive, and doing whatever teenaged girls did back then, mostly talking with her friends.  His mother was pregnant with a seventh child, due in eleven weeks.  Dan, the eldest child, didn’t want to be outside and was in the house reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, the true story of a Kansas farm family that was slaughtered by two psychopathic killers. Timmy, only a week from his third birthday, was a sweet child, with an angelic face and blond hair, playful, confident for his age, and a good brother. Timmy was playing with his brothers out in front of a neighbor’s house, a few houses down from the home that he always waved goodbye to, saying “goodbye house” when Dan’s father drove the kids away.

It was a ball. It’s always the ball, isn’t it? It just bounces where it shouldn’t go. The little ones especially don’t know any better and they go after it. It only takes a second of inattention. The driver, an elderly gentleman, was glancing sideways over his right shoulder to see the side lot of a house for sale.  He didn’t see the ball and he didn’t see Timmy.

Thud!  Then screams from everyone.

Dan raced out of the house and down the street to where his youngest brother was lying in the street. Dan sat down next to him and cradled Timmy in his arms. Timmy wasn’t bleeding. Whatever damage had been done wasn’t obvious. Still, there was no joy in Timmy’s face, just serenity. Dan didn’t know what to do, so he sat there holding his brother, not saying anything.  He wanted to fix it but he couldn’t.  He was speechless; he wanted to do something or say something that would reverse time, but it was as if he was waiting to hear his brother say something to him first.

Ambulance wails filled the street. The ambulance came; a neighbor rode with Timmy to the hospital. Dan’s parents were driving toward the house when the ambulance passed them. They saw the crowd down the street, never thinking it was their son.  

For the next three days, neighbors watched the family as Dan’s parents watched over their Timmy. Dan took the responsibility to be there for his brothers and his one sister, especially the two brothers that were closest in age to Timmy. The three youngest were called the “Monks” and they hung out in a custom built playhouse where the boys could play safe in the fenced backyard. Dan sat with the brother closest in age to Timmy and they just talked about Timmy. Talking about it just seemed the right thing to do.

On the third day, in the early evening, Dan’s mom came home from the hospital without Dan’s father. She gathered everyone into the living room.

“Timmy’s not coming home.” She said quietly. “Fr. Peter is going to give him the Sacraments of Confirmation and of Extreme Unction.”

“But he’s going to be okay.” Dan said as if saying it would make it so.

His mother shook her head and closed her eyes.

Dan’s father knew that Dan’s mom couldn’t be there when they turned off her son’s life support. No mother, especially one so close to bringing a new life into the world, should have to be there for the death of a child. So Dan’s father shouldered the immediacy of his son’s last moment in life without his spouse. It couldn’t have been easy; but that is what fathers do. His grieving had to be private because fathers were supposed to be strong. Tears were not obvious. The pain must have been crushing.

Dan knew his parents replayed their choices. They could have chosen not to go to that luncheon, to not care for others because it would have been safer not to care.  They could have chosen a more mature babysitter.  They could have ordered the children to stay in the house and play. They could have come home thirty minutes earlier.  He also knew they could have blamed the driver who was so grossly negligent. But they didn’t. Instead, Dan’s parents simply and complexly loved each other and their children and went on with life.  They didn’t consider the son born eleven weeks later Timmy’s replacement; they honored the new son by naming him after Dan’s father. Dan’s parents asked Dan to be the godfather for his new brother.  Dan knew his parents respected and trusted him even though he was only eleven.

Dan knew that his students learned by example, just as he had learned from his parents and from their community of supporters. He knew his brother’s death had changed him and he instinctively knew that the challenge was to be there for those who just need someone to sit and talk through the fears and pain of loss. Answering the tough questions from a teenager about life and why it is so fragile isn’t easy but, cliché aside, he knew somebody had to do it. Dan knew that he had an-going obligation to share his life experiences with those struggling to cope with their own pain. That was also Dan’s commitment to his own children—and he remembered that he had needed the example of his parents’ love and strength when his youngest child, at age eleven, was in a near fatal accident, thirty-one years after Timmy died. Dan knew how his father cried those many years later, fearful that he had lost his grandson, too. Timmy’s death was a life lesson that Dan hadn’t forgotten.

Dan snapped back to the moment and noted softly, “We are there for them when they are in pain. We don’t always know what to say, but we know how to listen.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.  That’s it.  That’s all we do.”  Dan looked past me and I sensed he was reliving his brother’s death. Then he came back in an instant. “We make referrals to other agencies if necessary, if that’s what you want to hear.   But mostly we just listen.”

“What if they don’t want to talk?”

“Then we just sit.” 

And then we sat there for a long minute until Dan broke the silence.  “You okay, Carla.  You want to talk about it?”

I most certainly didn’t.  I just wanted to get out of there and find run of the mill slackers.

“Thanks anyway, Dan. Adios.” And I left to keep digging to find the real Truth.

Chapter Nine - An English teacher who got beaten up.

I was tired of watching teachers manipulate their students. I needed to go somewhere without adult supervision; a place where students were actually free to be themselves- the lunchroom.

I walked out of the classroom and asked the first student I saw where the lunchroom was. “You can go to Red House,” she said.

“Red House?” I inquired.

“Yeah, it’s color coded. All the chairs are red so you’ll know you’re in Red House. We have Blue, Green and Gold, but Red House is the closest.”

“Thanks,”

I approached this so called “Red House” and spied a group of students reading their history textbooks while eating what appeared to be leftover spaghetti. I asked if I could sit down, expecting a typically dry, uninterested teenage response.

“Sure, grab a seat,” answered an African-American boy looking up at me.

“Uh, thanks,” I responded a little taken aback by his politeness. I decided the best thing to do was tell them I was writing a book about high schools; I figured if I told them I was from the district they would immediately clam up and cover for their teacher’s incompetence. “So I see you guys are doing homework on lunch. Don’t you think that’s a little much? I mean, when do you get a chance to just relax and eat?”

Quickly a girl with long blonde hair and a school soccer jacket explained, “Oh, we have a test in APUSH next period, we’re just doing a little review to make sure we understand the context of the Missouri Compromise.”

“APUSH?” I asked, a little confused.

         “Ha, sorry. That’s AP U.S. History. But everyone calls it APUSH.”

         “Your teacher must be a real sadist to test you so much that you have to sit here and study instead of eating.”

         “Ms. Easter? Man, she’s awesome!”

         This sounded a little strange coming from a kid with blue hair and an Avenged Sevenfold T-shirt with what looked like a giant skull eating an eagle on it. Clearly the cold leftovers were causing some abnormalities. I decided to go after the food situation. No matter how much kids can claim to love a school, there is no getting around the fact that cafeteria food is cafeteria food and cold leftovers are cold leftovers. “What do you have there- uh, sorry I didn’t catch your name. What’s on the menu for today?”

         “Hey, I’m Rohat, this is some spaghetti that my mom made yesterday. If you got a fork you can have a bite.”

         “No thanks, I don’t like cold pasta.”

         “Cold? This is piping hot. There’s a microwave over there. I just zapped it.”

         “They let students use a microwave?”

         “Sure, why not?  That’s why they put it there. Anyone can use it.”

         “Teachers and students?”

         “Sure, there’s Mr. Keys using it right now.”

         I looked over and saw a young white man hunched over the microwave. “That’s a teacher?” I asked incredulously.

         “Yeah, that’s Mr. Keys.  He teaches English.”

         “He looks more like a student than a teacher.”

         “He actually used to go here, but now he’s a teacher.  I think he’s been here for about five years.”

         “Yeah, my brother had him.  He teaches freshman.  Says he likes working with them.”

         “Probably because they’re the only kids who look younger than he does.” I said with a snarl, and walked over to Mr. Keys.

         “Can I help you?” Mr. Keys asked as he was pulling out a bowl of soup from the microwave and saw me approaching.

         “Got a minute? I’m Ms. Zapata from the Network.”

         “I heard.” Keys said with a childish undertone of disdain.

         “Just checking out the school, trying to get a feel for the place.  Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

         “Go right ahead.  You mind if we walk and talk? I want to put this down in my cubicle.” He said, looking at his soup. “It’s just over there in the English area.  Around the corner near the Blue House lockers.

         “Sure, whatever.  Some students told me you like to teach freshman, is that right?”

         “Yes.”

         “Easier to control than upperclassman, right?”

         “Easier?”

         “Sure.  You know, they don’t talk back as much.  You can push them, and they don’t push back, if you know what I mean.” I said, stopping, leaning up a set of lockers, trying to measure Mr. Keys.

         He bumped into me as I evidently had stopped too quickly.  “Ahhhh!” he screamed, as his soup sloshed out of the bowl he was carrying and burned him a bit.

         “Ouch! That must have hurt.” I said in a slightly insincere tone.

         “I don’t push back on anybody.” He said flatly.  “That’s not my style.”

         “Oh, I don’t mean you bully your students, Mr. Keys, but no doubt you keep them in check.” Oh, Dios, aquí vamos de Nuevo!

         Suddenly I was standing in front of a locker facing Blue House.  Alone. I was Josh, and I was fourteen, musing about something that had happened to him earlier in the school year.

         Every time I walk by that locker feel like such a pussy. I should have done something. I should have thrown my algebra book at him. I should have tackled him. I should have done anything besides run to the bathroom and look at my giant black eye in the broken mirror through blurry tears. I’ll never understand it. I did everything I was supposed to do. I did everything that the people who don’t know anything say you’re supposed to do. Except punch him in the fucking face.  My friends all said they would have had my back if I’d wanted to do something when he came back but I’ve never won a fight in my life. What did I do wrong. …Ah, it was just some asshole sophomore being an asshole sophomore and I happened to be the unlucky freshman in the way.

         The first day of freshman year we were all assigned a locker based on what homeroom we are in, so mine just happened to be in Blue House. The lockers are double sided and in rows of three with Seniors on the outside lockers and freshmen lockers on the opposite side, right up against the cubicles of the social studies department. Some of my classmates had lockers on the inside rows facing other lockers, which gave them almost no room, so I felt pretty lucky to be by the cubicles giving me a little more room to get in and out. Here’s the one thing I don’t understand- I was in a freshman division, we all have freshman lockers. So why were there two sophomores in the locker next to mine? Especially two asshole sophomores.

         Every morning I did what normal people did and went to my locker to put my stuff away. This was a big school, and as you would expect, there were tons of cliques each with their own little spot carved out to hang out at and talk. The clique that happened to hang out right in front of my locker was the artsy kids who were rebelling against the hip-hop centered, excited high school students they saw around them. They were all Ackies which meant they went to school at our academic center for 7^th and 8^th graders. By the time they are sophomores, they act like they are seniors and think they are so fucking cool. All the girls wear wool sweaters and torn jeans and never smile and smell like cigarettes. Why would you wear a wool sweater and smoke cigarettes? Obviously they were trying to piss someone off- “ooh I’m so mad at my mom and dad for making me come to this school for 7^th and 8^th grade.” “Ooh, I’m a fucking bitch who thinks they’re so damn cool because I know upperclassmen and I smoke cigarettes and drink behind the arts building because life is so hard.” Put on some perfume and smile for once in your life.

         The boys they hung with were no different; they cut class, sat at The Billy Goat and smoked cigarettes in the back. If you had to write a high school movie and cast the opposite of the jocks you could pretty much do it with these guys. Here’s the real psychological analysis- in 7^th and 8^th grade the Ackies get laughed at. They are completely insulated from everything else because they are a tiny, miniature human beings. They are Gulliver in Brobdignag; they get bussed to school and take classes that are pretty much only with other ackies (except foreign language classes where upper classmen either ignore them or copy their homework). Then they get to freshman year and are released into the world;. They get to take the CTA! Wow, amazing! Congratulations, you know how to ride a fucking bus! By the time ackies turn to sophomores they go down two paths: total AP class driven, science club, debate team, Harvard or bust, school focused academics. Or fuck it, I can’t believe I have two more years here still. Guess which ones chose to hang by my locker.

         Greg Moy had been giving me a hard time all year and I never really could figure out why, other than the fact that I was a freshman and that’s what sophomores thought they were supposed to do. I don’t remember accidentally bumping into him, I don’t remember talking to him, I don’t remember stepping on his coat. I don’t remember a damn thing other than him calling me freshie and generally being a dick. Him and his partner in douchiness Zahreb Horub. If my name was Zahreb Horub I guess I would feel self-conscious too. Zahreb smelled like a combination of Marlboro and body odor- eau d’ just hit puberty.

         I never considered myself naïve- I knew going in to high school that I was to expect some level of freshman hazing. I didn’t think it would be very physical, I didn’t expect to get thrown in a garbage can (which happened to other people, but not me), but I expected some pennies to be thrown and some taunting to occur.

         The beginning of freshman year was great; I was making friends and felt like I was one of the cool kids in my class. All the other freshmen knew me, I was getting good grades and going to baseball practice. Yes, Greg and Zahreb are talking shit when I’m at my locker, but that’s not very often, so whatever. A few weeks into the year, one of them closed my locker while I was getting something out of it and almost closed my hand in it. I didn’t react too much because I knew that’s what they were looking for; I said thank you and walked away. They kept doing shit like that, and I kept ignoring them because I wasn’t bothered by it.

         I honestly don’t remember what prompted my decision to start talking back. I think I was just sick of it; I was doing well at baseball and no one was giving me a hard time there, so I figured if the people I respected and expected to get on me weren’t doing it, then who were these dicks who deserve no respect to think they could get their jollies from me? Maybe I would just start with a comment- something to let them know that I could play their game as well. I decided I would think of something in advance- something smart ass, but not about their families- people get sensitive about that stuff. I came up with the line “you’re breath smells like cum.” Great idea right? It implies that they’re gay, but doesn’t come right out and say it. There’s no swearing, there’s nothing about their mom or about their girlfriends. Just a guy to guy comment that would tell them to shut up and leave me alone.

         Sure enough, the moment came the next day. Before first period I went to my locker to get my Algebra book and Greg said something to me about being a freshman. I don’t remember what he said, but I had my answer ready to roll: “You know your breath smells like cum.”

         Bam.

         He hit me. He hit me! He hit me? What the fuck? I literally said to him, “Why’d you hit me?”

         I had expected him to say, “your mama.” or “what did you say, motherfucker?” Or something. Where was the give and take? Where was the build up? Where was the banter?

         As I’m thinking all these things I realized- wait a second- I just got punched in the face. I looked around and all of a sudden I realized that other people also saw me get punched in the face. I can still see them looking at me for a reaction and I still remember thinking- Now what do I do? Isn’t that Mr. Jerome walking by? Did he really not see what just happened? Come on!

Another look around and I saw that none of my friends were nearby either. And then I ran away. I ran into the bathroom to look in the mirror to see my right eye swelling up and bruising. At that point I realized it was too late to go back and fight him since I had just run away, so I really didn’t know what do.

         The next few minutes are a blur.  I don’t know if I went and told on him, if a teacher was in the bathroom and saw me or if I went to class and then got called to the office. I have no idea. I just know that in my guitar class, my favorite teacher, Mrs. Murphy, this sweet, guitar playing hippie said “What happened Josh, someone pop you?” And she said it with such pity in her voice, it made me feel so small that all I could muster was a little “yeah” and spent the rest of the class trying not to cry because I was so mad at letting myself become a victim. Eventually we were both called into Mr. Jerome’s office to find out what happened, and Greg tried to play like it was my fault because I made one comment to him. I told Mr. Jerome that Greg had been picking on me all year and that was the first time I had said anything to him. Fortunately, he knew Greg was a douche so he believed my side of the story and told me I did the right thing by not fighting back because then I would have been suspended as well.

 I would have much rather done the wrong thing and had some of my pride, instead of walking around the rest of the year seeing Greg and knowing that he won. I contemplated punching him in the face when he wasn’t not looking; I contemplated kicking him in the back of the head when he was sitting down; I even contemplated hitting him in the side of the fucking head with my baseball bat, but I never did any of those things and I know I never will.

         He left me alone the rest of the year, and the next year our lockers weren’t anywhere near each other. Still, for three years, whenever I saw him, his smelly locker partner, or members of “the arts building crew” I felt a little knot in my stomach, walked a little faster and pretended to look the other way. I decided I would never screw with the freshmen just for being freshmen. I don’t need to make someone else feel bad to make myself feel better. There’re plenty of people who deserve to be treated poorly but I’ll let their character not their age make that determination.

            And with that, I was back to being me and Josh Keys was staring me in the face, not with anger, but with disdain, as if I were somehow related to the kid who had beaten him up years ago.

“It wasn’t me.” I said reflexively.

“It wasn’t you what?” Josh asked.

“Nothing. It’s just that I’m not a bully Mr. Keys, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m here to do a job.”

“Who said you weren’t?” Keys tossed back.

“Nothing.  It’s just the way you’re looking at me. As if I’m some kid from freshman year who beat you up.”

“No, it wasn’t you.” Keys acknowledged, “It was just a small minded douche bag trying to prove something he couldn’t prove. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Ms. Zapata?”

“Is that the way you talk to your students, Mr. Keys?” I said, que culito.

“Only the douche bags.”

“Really, you want to talk about it?”

“I’d rather eat my soup.”

Keys walked off and I felt I was getting somewhere.  He obviously wasn’t over getting pushed around as a freshman, and he no doubt had come back to teach freshman as payback. I pulled out my notebook and wrote down, “Some teachers bully students unnecessarily perhaps out of some personal issues related to childhood experiences.”  All in all, a great interview.

Chapter Ten - The Special Ed Assistant

I continued down the hallway and soon heard something juicy—the sound of yelling.  It was coming from inside a classroom on the right.  I approached the classroom and looked through the window—a teacher and student were engaged in a battle. More unprofessionalism I could document.

“It’s an idiotic assignment!” yelled the student, as he marched to the back of the room. 

“Tell that to the thousands of critics who’ve revered Shakespeare over the past half century!” yelled the teacher.

The student slumped into a desk in the corner and began grabbing textbooks from a shelf behind him, building a fort around himself.  Other students looked on for a minute, but soon began writing in their journals.  They seemed to understand what they were supposed to be doing.

            The teacher marched over towards the door, yanking at his ancient Nineties tie, glancing at me while he grabbed the phone.  I quickly moved out of sight.

            “Yes, can you send Annie? Christian’s too much. Thanks.” 

After that I heard nothing but silence.  I dared to glance inside the room—the teacher was at his desk, rubbing his forehead, while “Christian” was using a marker to tag a whiteboard directly next to where he was sitting. 

            Not a minute passed before a young woman in jeans and a t-shirt glided past me and opened the door.  I watched as she said something quietly to Christian, and he stood up, grabbed his journal and a pencil, and stomped into the hallway with her.  “Hi,” she said to me on her way out. 

            Annie led him to a couch, where he slumped down again.  “Remember what Mr. Barlow told you? If you don’t like the daily prompt, you can have a free write.  Why didn’t you do that?” she asked.

“I didn’t feel like it. I’m having a bad day.  He wasn’t giving me enough time to get started.”

            I watched on as Annie coaxed feelings, and eventually writing, from the student.  He opened his journal and began scrawling furiously, yet purposefully.  He was upset, it turned out, by being turned down by his crush during lunchtime. 

            This situation confused me—the tempestuous teacher, the student out of class—how could this be good for a school?  Yet there was a rightness to the situation, evidenced by the student writing.

            I motioned the young woman over to me.

            “How did you get him to write?” I asked.

            “I’m good at de-escalating kids—remaining neutral when a kid is aggressive, and getting them to calm down.  Some of the teachers, like Mr. Barlow, are not so good at it, and so they call me.”

            I shook her hand.  “This school is supposed to be good.  How do teachers like Mr. Barlow keep their jobs?”

            “Teachers can be good and emotional at the same time.  Some of the best teachers are…less than conventional.  The best part of working at this school is that it nurtures unconventional employees.  I’m Annie, by the way. I’m a special education assistant.”

            Annie continued to talk, but her words became foggy and the spot between her forehead seemed to expand and blend with the background.  I shook my head to try to concentrate, but all of a sudden, I knew what was happening and I knew I couldn’t stop it.  At least I was going to be a female. Images began surrounding me, one by one, in rapid succession.

            I was Annie as a little girl, in a fancy red dress at a classical music concert, enthralled with the sparkly decorations…I was an adolescent, drinking a hot chocolate and looking out a hotel window at the sight of the Eiffel Tower—I was in Paris…I was other places, too—flashes of the Forbidden Palace in China, a tea ceremony in Japan, the Taj Mahal in India—I had been to all these places…I was a teenager, spending hundreds of my parents dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue on a prom dress…I was sitting at a café with my friends, and looked down on a girl who walked by in an unsophisticated outfit. Evidently Annie had come from a world of money.

            Images shifted again, but they took a different tone.  I (Annie) was an adult now, struggling to carry bags of groceries onto a bus, as people gave me annoyed looks…cupboards were bare except for a couple of boxes of macaroni and cheese…my employer was bullying me by taking away my work shifts at the grocery store…I took the trash out in the dark and ran back to my apartment, for fear of unknown, dangerous people.  The tone had certainly changed—the earlier riches were nowhere to be found.

            The flashbacks slowed down and settled into one. I (Annie) was an adult, sitting in a restaurant on the trendy side of town.  A plate of onion rings sat in front of me—five onion rings for five dollars, a happy hour special—not a great deal.  Annie wore a black and white dress that she had carefully selected on clearance at Old Navy—her dress cost the same as the onion rings.  It had looked beautiful on her end of town, but here, in the restaurant, it looked cheap and unsophisticated.  Annie realized that the girls in her high school who wore these clothes hadn’t lacked style, but money. 

            She sat in a group of people, one of whom her friend was trying to set her up with.  He sat across from her (us) and paid more attention to her friend than to her—Annie realized because she no longer looked like she came from money.  At one point he looked at us and said:  “Hey, you work with retards, right?  Why do they always have that same haircut?”  We bit into an onion ring, annoyed by our tiny dinner, and realized that falling down financially provided insights.

People who had less were never stupider or lazier than she was—she had just been blinded to their struggle.  And she was glad to leave this culture of conceit.

            I gradually left Annie’s memory and came back to the present situation.  The student, so worked up before, was now calm and relaxed on the couch.  I tried to reorient myself, overwhelmed by joining Annie’s whirlwind time travel.

            Annie looked at me and rolled her eyes, seemingly in reference to the student.

            “The best part is, Christian and Mr. Barlow love each other.  They just engage in this drama because they’re stubborn.” 

            She turned around to look at Christian.

            “Come on Christian, it’s time to get back to class,” she said.

            Christian scowled, and turned to pick at the fuzz on a throw pillow.  Annie continued to look at him.  Finally, he got up, slammed his journal shut, and joined Annie. 

            She opened the door to Mr. Barlow’s class and she and Christian sullenly re-entered. 

Chapter Eleven – The Book Salesman

            I staggered into a social studies class and was stunned to see a man sitting in the back row, taking notes.  A man I had known for more than thirty years.  What the hell was Louis Sojo doing in a high school World History class?  When he saw me, he waved at me immediately, recognizing me as I had recognized him.  We realized we were both in places we ordinarily wouldn’t be, yet here we were at this bizarre place called Sojourner Truth High School.  I’d already realized the place was somehow cursed or possessed with some sort of unknown magic.  It was as if people couldn’t help but open up.  Louis kept waving so I walked in on the class and asked a kid to give up his desk next to Louis.  The teacher ignored us both.

            “Great to see you, Carla,” Louis said as he pumped my hand in warm friendship, though I really wasn’t that good of a friend.  Over the course of the next few minutes, I whispered my explanation as to why I was there, and he whispered his.  Evidently, his publisher — he’s a textbook writer — had sent him out to sit in on some classrooms where one of the company’s books, The Spirit of the Nation, was being used.

            We exchanged a few quick pleasantries and then I tried to focus on the classroom teacher, but it was as if Louis were suddenly possessed with a need to get something off his chest.

            The instructor of the class ignored us, and kept on talking about the turmoil of world events from the 60’s.  That seemed to set something in Louis off.

“Summer vacation, 1964, the summer after my freshman year in high school, was the beginning of my dark night of the soul,” Louis said, matter-of-factly. I’m not sure he was even whispering at that point.  Strangely, I wasn’t time travelling this time, I was just listening to a guy tell me about his life’s decisions.  I didn’t ask him, he just started talking.  Very odd.  I certainly hadn’t suggested I wanted him to “open up.” So…. What the hell?  What was Louis Sojo talking about?

“It was,” he said, “the start of almost twenty years of wandering in a jagged wasteland, searching for something — I didn’t know what.  Confused, uneasy, lost, I would get glimpses now and then of a direction to take, a turn to make.  Was this the right way to go?  I didn’t know.  I just knew I had to be moving.  I had to continue searching.”

            “Maybe we could talk about this later, Louis.” I said, embarrassed that he was rambling in the middle of a high school class.  Still, the students, surprisingly, didn’t seem to mind.  I certainly did, but I couldn’t stop him.  He wasn’t really listening to me.  He acted as if we were close friends.

We weren’t close.  I was happy to see him again and glad to catch up and all that.  I never expected to hear him unload his life story — or, at least, his story about the summer of 1964.

            But the man couldn’t stop himself.

“In 1963,” he said, “I had been riding high, graduating from eighth grade with good grades and high expectations.  As one of the four boys in my class going off to be priests, I’d been a pet of the nuns.  Unlike the other three, though, I wasn’t going to the archdiocesan high school seminary.  My choice was more exotic.  I was to go to a seminary 60 miles away, out south near Kankakee, outside the small hamlet of Momence, barely more than a stop sign or two on Dixie Highway.  St. Jude was a boarding school.  No one from our neighborhood had gone there before me.  No one from my neighborhood, at least as far as I knew, had ever gone to a boarding school.  It had lush green grounds, a gym, a swimming pool.  It was a new complex, built in the 50s.  It was fresh and clean, and some place completely different from the blue-collar neighborhood in which I’d been raised.

“Louis, Louis, Louis.  This isn’t the place.”

But the teacher and the students disagreed.  “Let him tell his story,” a voice from the front said.  I sighed and let him go on, not really understanding the point.

“This was a fulcrum moment in the history of the Catholic Church.  The Second Vatican Council was just getting under way.  John XXIII had opened the windows, but the breezes were just beginning to stir things up.

“You were an altar boy, right?”

He nodded.

“I had been the chief altar boy during the summer after 7^th grade, with the responsibility of making sure servers were at each mass (which meant that my younger brother and I were over at the church, a half block away, almost every day). I was deeply rooted in the Latin liturgy.  I was bedazzled by the gold candlesticks, the elegant vestments, the insider-ness of the thing.  I had read Henry Morton Robinson’s novel The Cardinal, and I’d seen the movie starring Tom Tryon — and that was what I saw for myself.  The hero priest!  The priest, so firm in his faith that he could face the challenges, dangers and, yes, temptations of the world and persevere.  And not only persevere, but succeed — end up as a Prince of the Church.  For me, the church was a way out.  It was a ladder out of my neighborhood and up the levels of acclaim and triumph.   It had much in common with the hierarchical structure of the city’s Democratic Machine — precinct captains, committeemen and aldermen, Mayor.  Joining the Conclave of Cardinals was not much different, to my teenage eyes, as being elected to the Chicago City Council.

“Not that I thought I had to become a Cardinal. I didn’t need to.  The priests in that era — which was so near its end although neither I, nor most people, could see that — were small gods.  In an immigrant Catholic neighborhood like mine, they exuded ultimate authority.  Their word was law.”

As he talked, I could see what he meant.  When I was growing up, the pastor was a powerful guy in the community.  Then, the neighborhood began to change, and, well, I stopped going to Mass…

I didn’t say any of this to Louis.  He was on a roll, and it didn’t seem that he was all that interested in my own memories.

“So going off to the seminary was like heading to officer training school.  It was like an appointment to West Point.  When you were done, you had a title.  The plebe became a lieutenant.  The seminarian became Father.  You had prestige.  You had status.  People acknowledged you.  You were — in the sidewalk theology of that time — a sort of saint in their midst.

“And my first year at St. Jude was, in many ways, like boot camp.  We arose at 6:30 a.m.  We wore a uniform — a black pullover sweater with an orange-grey-black patch over our hearts announcing our affiliation with the school.  Much of the day was spent in silence.  We were silent in study hall, silent in class (unless responding to a teacher’s question), silent at most meals (while listening to one of us read from a religious book or magazine).  We all had jobs — called manual training — around the buildings and grounds, and there were set times in the day when we were to carry out our duties.   We had two hours of recreation in the afternoon, and a half hour after lunch and supper during which we could talk.   Every minute was scheduled, from the morning bell and prayer until lights out at 9 p.m.

“It wasn’t so bad.  There was a feeling of camaraderie among us that, I suspect, is similar to what recruits feel as they go through the rigors of boot camp.  We were lonely — I was devastatingly homesick for the first month or more — and the rules of the seminary discouraged what were called ‘particular friendships.’   But we did make friends, and we felt, like our compatriots with the marines, we were getting tougher, sharper, more skilled as the year went on.  I did well in school.  I wrote for the school newspaper.”

That sounded better than my freshman year in high school.  We were all pretty lost and confused — and we didn’t have a common goal like Louis did at his school. 

“High school’s hard for everyone,” I said to Louis.  “Yours sounds not so bad.”

“Well, maybe,” he said, and then rolled on. “The seminary was the training ground for the Congregation of the Sons of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known as the Claretians, for the group’s Spanish founder, St. Anthony Mary Claret.  The Claretians were involved in a wide range of ministries, and I always thought of the order as a poor man’s Jesuits, serving in a lot of odd, out-of-the-way places.  One Claretian, in fact, was the chaplain to the Chicago Police Department, of which my father was a patrolman.

“The ministry in which I was most interested was U.S. Catholic, the monthly magazine the Claretians published.   I knew I could write.  I knew that, whatever I would do in life, I would be writing.  The editorship of U.S. Catholic seemed made for me.  I felt that, once I zipped through the 13 years of preparation for the priesthood, I would just move into the editor’s office at the magazine’s headquarters on West Madison Street in Chicago’s Loop, and my life path was set. “Then came the summer.”

He stopped and looked off to the left.  His face was intense.  “I’m not sure what I expected,” he finally said, looking back at me.  “I guess, I thought things would be the way they’d always been.   And, in fact, the old neighborhood, my family, my friends — all of them — were pretty much as I’d left them.  But I had changed.

“As I look back now, I can see what was going on.  I had broken away from my nest.  I had severed ties to the old way of life, the expectations for children of my neighborhood.  I was different.  I’d seen a bit of the wider world, albeit the cornfields outside of sleepy Momence.  I’d put myself on a track that no one else I knew, no one my parents knew, had chosen.    I was blazing my own trail, a task that, over the years, would involve immense struggles but also wonderful discoveries.

“Yet, I was only fourteen.   I couldn’t see the big picture.  I had no way to visualize the trajectory of my life — how, by making the choices I’d already made, I’d pointed myself into a new direction.  Scary, to be sure, but at the same time exciting. “I just knew I felt like a freak.”

“We all felt like freaks in high school,” I said.  The students in the class nodded their heads. Louis didn’t seem to hear. I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth.

“As that vacation began — during the school year, I’d only been back for a couple weeks at Christmas and a week at Easter — I tried to wade back into the stream of everyday life.  But it didn’t work.

“I reconnected with my best friend, Tom.  We rode our bikes together a couple afternoons, but he finally said to me, ‘You’re different.’  We faded away from each other after that.   I stayed at home and read books.   I organized and re-organized my baseball cards.  I hid out. It wasn’t that anyone said anything mean to me, or that I did anything strange.  I just withdrew from the life of the neighborhood because I was embarrassed at who I was.

“That may sound crazy since a good part of the reason I went into the seminary was for the status it would bring me.  But, as a 14-year-old boy with horrible acne coming back from nine months at a place as foreign to my neighborhood as the face of Mars, I knew — I knew — I didn’t fit in.  I felt like an alien.  I was an oddity. I had no one to talk to.  (Who, after all, in those days, was trained to talk about things anyway?  My neighborhood was a tight-lipped place where feelings were thought best left unexamined.  And, of course, in the seminary, feelings were dangerous because, well, lust was a feeling, wasn’t it?)

“That lust thing was, of course, part of it.  I felt like a eunuch because I was choosing a path that was leading me to celibacy.   That neighborhood, as much as it bowed to the priests and nuns, didn’t celebrate celibacy.  Fertility was king.  Within a block or two of our house, the Foys had nine kids, the Hamiltons had fifteen, the Houlihans fourteen, the Doyles eight  At the time, I had ten brothers and sisters, and my mother was pregnant with an eleventh.   Eventually, she would give birth to fourteen children.”

This was starting to make me uncomfortable.  No me inscribo en todos estos recuerdos personales y puntos de vista. (I didn’t sign up for all these personal flashbacks and insights.)  Still, it was fascinating to get a glimpse into the life that Louis led then.  And how he was thinking about it now. What was happening to me?

“Again, it’s not that anyone said to me, ‘Oh, you impotent freak!’  But that’s what I felt.  I was frozen.  I was trapped.  Going away, I had turned my back on my neighborhood and its values.  Now, I was paying the price.  I was oppressed by my feeling of foreign-ness. I snapped.

“On the night before I was to return to St. Jude, I worked up the courage to tell my parents that I didn’t want to go back for my sophomore year.  I don’t know how I did that.  With so many kids, my parents operated on the assumption that, once a decision was made, it was made.  There wasn’t time or energy for “fiddle-faddle.”   They were taken aback by my statement.           

“Not return?  All the other high schools are already in session.  Where will you go?  How could we pay?  (I was on a hefty scholarship to St. Jude.)  And: Why?

“I couldn’t say.  I had no words to put to the chaos of my emotions — my sense of having escaped and yet feeling caught, my dread of being different, my confusion at the demands of celibacy and the demands of my body, my pleasure at the routines and clarity of seminary life, my tightness, my emptiness, the gravity-like pull of my neighborhood on my psyche, my fear to even ask for a reprieve.

“I didn’t get one.  My parents decided that I was being precipitate.  It was too late to make a decision like this.  We were to drive to the seminary in about 12 hours.  I would go back and think about it.  They never said, ‘Think about it, and, if you want to leave, we’ll take you out.’   I think they felt that I was undergoing a spasm of craziness or something, and it would all go away once I was back at the school.  (I’m afraid my Mother and Father never could quite figure me out.)”

Maybe that’s how it is in large families, I thought, as I listened to Louis.  There’s only my sister and I in our family, and our problem was always that our parents paid way too much attention to us.

Louis didn’t seem in a mood to hear about that perspective and I wasn’t really that interested in giving it.  I had somehow been transformed into some kind of cosmic listener or “pain channeller.”

“So, I returned to the seminary,” he said. “And I stayed.  I stayed with the Claretians for nearly eight more years — three more years of high school, four years of college at St. Louis University and nearly a year of novitiate in California and Chicago.  I finally made my break with the order in the late spring of 1972.  A month or so later, I got a job with a community newspaper — in my old neighborhood.  Nine years later, I met the woman who became my wife, and it was then that my dark night ended.  It was then that my journey through the desert found its Promised Land.”

He took out his wallet and showed me a photo of Judith, a redhead with a gap-tooth smile.

“Louis, what’s all this about?” I asked.  He seemed to have run out of steam.  He was gazing off to the left again, but this time with an empty look.  “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’m trying to make peace with that fourteen year-old boy.”

“It’s nagged at you all this time?”

“Not really,” he said.  “Not in my conscious mind, but I think it’s been gnawing at my subconscious.   It was an embarrassment.  Seeing you, I don’t know why, has caused me to start seeing it a little differently.

“Me? What have I got to do with it?”

“I don’t know.  But I know the boy I was wasn’t a loser.”

“I never thought or said he was.” I protested.  Louis ignored me, as if I he hadn’t heard.

 “He had a courage to face his emptiness.  He had strength to struggle on despite feeling a freak.  There was, within him, an inner urge that gave him energy.  He had hope — hope that, in the struggle, an answer would emerge.  He had faith that there was an answer.  He believed that, somehow, he would find love.”

“When I was in eighth grade, the nuns would talk about vocations.  They meant vocations to the religious life. Back in ’64, when I started struggling with my vocation, it seemed to be a question of whether or not I would be a priest.  But, in reality, it was a broader search.  I wasn’t trying to figure out what I would be in life or what career I would have.”

 “I was searching for who I was, trying to find me. During that journey, I never felt a guardian angel at my shoulder giving me encouragement.  I never heard God’s voice or saw Him write a message on my wall.”

“But I have come to realize that the pain and the confusion I felt then were, in an odd way, gifts from God.  Messages from God. They were helping me see where I was and grapple for the answers of where I was to go.   They were real, and they were in me, and they were what the nuns used to call grace. They led me to Judith.”

What could I say?  Louis looked depleted.  I looked around the room and saw the students staring at Louis in silence.  Though this was a public school, a few of the students nodded in some kind of silent understanding. It wasn’t as if they had anything like a similar experience, how could they?  They hadn’t lived long enough.  And yet, their looks, their nods, even their words to Louis afterward suggested some kind of understated empathy.  I started to apologize to the teacher for Louis’s strange outburst, but he didn’t want to hear it, nor did the students. “It’s cool man,” a tall African-American in the middle of the class said, trying, as he said, to get me to “chill.”  The teacher (I never did get his name) thanked Louis for his story and asked students to go home that evening and ask their parent or guardian about their own struggle for identity in high school. I thought it a strange and possibly hopeless assignment, but was too tired to say anything combative. I said my goodbyes to Louis and again staggered out of the room.  What was it about this school that made people feel crazy enough or whatever, to share the seminal events of their lives? Why would they think anyone cared? And yet, somehow, someway, I knew I kind of did care.  My stomach and mind churned as I left the room, in desperate search for the familiar.  It certainly didn’t seem to exist at Sojourner Truth.

Chapter Twelve – Reality Check with Ms. Glass

            Realizing the weirdness all began with the first teacher I interviewed, it occurred to me that I needed to go back to the beginning and talk to this “Ms. Glass” lady.  It all seemed to start with that weird diminutive lady.  I realized my best chance of finding out what was going on would involve a little tête-à-tête. Ms. Glass, I thought, like Alice in the Looking Glass. Somehow I had slipped behind the world’s mirror and fallen into a worm hole of childhood experiences better off forgotten but always, always somehow present.

Unfortunately, when I got there, Ms. Glass was busy with her class.  I wanted to interrupt her and pull her into the hall for an explanation of all that was happening to me and around me, but she was “too professional” to stop teaching and talk to me.  After politely telling me she would speak with me after class, she invited me to sit in and listen as she held a classroom discussion on empathy.  I looked around and saw a young white boy who looked like he hoped Ms. Glass would ignore him, so I sat next to him figuring his discomfort would be something I certainly could understand in what was otherwise becoming the most bizarre day of my life.

As I sat down next to the boy, I was about to ask him his name, when suddenly, his thoughts became my thoughts, and I was inside his head.  Although his mouth wasn’t moving, I heard this boy’s thoughts in his voice, not mine.  I tried to not listen to him, but it was impossible; as I said, I was inside his head and it felt like he knew I was inside his head.  He looked at me, and wordlessly, he communicated his feelings about himself and a lot more.

Man, I hate being called on in class. Especially when I have to come up with an original thought. It’s so much easier to be called on to just to read some dumb paragraph from a book, but even that’s hard because your voice cracks, kids goof on you, and then you rush through it and you think you’re done and then Ms. Glass asks that damn “What do you think the author is saying?” question. With math, at least the answer is just a number, even if you’re wrong.

So you can go two ways with English: you can answer the question with a real answer that you actually thought about, or you can rattle off the first things that come to your head. The first option is for other kids, ‘cause Ms. Glass will keep callin’ on you to feel good about herself and think she’s actually teaching. You just know she goes home to the husband and tells him that she’s makin’ real progress with the class, especially with that Tony kid who gives SUCH insightful answers, when all Tony did was game her the whole time, especially when parent teacher conferences are coming up, and Ms. Glass doesn’t even see the pattern.

            I take the other option: just throw out some random thought, and you become a 2^nd stringer rather than a primary receiver. You throw somethin’ out there, and you know it’s so damn stupid and is so way off, but it’s English class, so “there is no right answer” so you can’t get in trouble (stupid English teachers should have never told us that in 4^th grade).

Next thing you know, Ms. Glass doesn’t call on you so fast any more. It takes some time and effort to get her to that point, but eventually you know she’s been trained when she asks some question that requires a real original answer, then she scans the room, and she looks straight at you for a second and her eyes dart to the other side of the room like she’s just accidentally walked in on her grandma gettin’ undressed.

I’ve been a second or third stringer for 8 years now, and I know it frustrates the hell out of the teachers because I can get all B’s and A’s on tests and they don’t get why I can’t express an original thought out loud in class. I love screwin’ with them.

But then we get a class like today, when Ms. Glass wants us to get all in touch with ourselves and be frickin’ profound and crap, and the only thing you can do to get out of it is stick your finger down your throat so you throw up at your desk so you have to leave or be a damn girl and pretend you got your period 2 minutes ago and have to hit the bathroom. Damn lucky girls and their periods. I mean, they can pull that get out of class card any time they want. I’ve seen girls get 3 periods in the same month.

So I knew I’d have to play the game today but I hoped we went into overtime. I kept an eye on the clock and hoped my turn would come tomorrow and maybe I could have got lucky and caught the flu or been in a car accident or somethin’ and not been back for a few days. I knew she was savin’ some “special”, A-lister student like Tony for last so we could all hear his oh-so-special insight into his nominal event……I mean, seminal event (that’s a good line, think I’ll open with that….”My nominal event happened when…” and see if she catches it). I’ll bet Tony catches it.

As the class went on I knew I was cool, because teachers want to start strong and end strong. They want the A-lister answers on both ends. So she started with an A-lister so the rest of us B-, C- and D-listers had a good sample to follow, and then I know she’ll end with the best A-lister. Damn English teachers. Always teachin’ in outline form. But at least I knew I was somewhere in the middle, in character development, rather than conflict or resolution order.

I needed to come up with an event. You’d think she would have warned us so we could think about it. Or maybe she knew she only wanted to hear the A-listers anyways. Maybe she texted them the question last night. How the hell else are these goofs comin’ up with some of this crap? Think, Al, think….

That time I got my finger caught in the riding mower last summer? Nah. Funny story, but not a life changer. She’ll just ask how it changed me, and all it did was piss me off at the riding mower. That time I missed the easy layup at the last second in overtime in 8^th grade? Too tragic. Don’t want to remember that and too many other kids will get on me at lunch about it. You always have to think about consequences of being honest.

“Alex? You ready?” Ms. Glass asked.

“Sure, Ms. G,” I answered. Stupid B-lister reflexes. I really wasn’t ready, but now I was in it.

“Go ahead please.”

I looked at the clock; too much time left for an extended stall, hoping the bell would ring. But I needed a second. The other kids were looking towards me. Someone coughed. I heard feet shifting and a low, “Aw come on man,” coming from behind me and to my left. I had to blurt something out…

“You want it to be about just me or someone in my family?” Good, stupid question. Got some groans. Solid.

“Make it about you please, unless you experienced something with members of your family and it affected them as well, in which case you can give us more than one perspective,” she said. That’s the thing about English teachers. You answer their dumb question with a dumb question and they treat it like it’s a legit question; like a therapist talkin’ to a serial killer who wants to know if he’s going to heaven if he’s truly sorry.

I looked around the room. Maybe I could pull a Keyser Soze and make up some crap from things I saw on the bulletin board and the desks.

I looked around. Maps of Europe, some quote from Maya Angelou, a poster telling us to read like Dr. Dre does…..man, fiction is hard. Then I saw that X was wearing a White Sox cap. And a real memory clicked in my head, which I’d forgotten. Guess I didn’t have to make up a story after all. Maybe this would be easier than I thought.

“OK. So my seminal event happened when I was 12.”

I heard Tony laugh. Ms. Glass shot him a look. Soooo cool.

“Yeah, so I’m a Cubs fan, as you all know. You cut me and I’m going to bleed blue.” Most of the kids got the reference. Tony had to whisper to the kid next to him for an explanation.

“My grandfather was a Cubs fan, and he lives with us, so he watched Cubs games every day. When I was born I think they put it on my birth certificate. 9 pounds, 8 ounces, male, Cubs fan.” (Teachers like it when you make stuff personal. And parent teacher conferences are coming up.)

So my friend Ricky, he’s a Sox fan. But I still hung out with him and his little brother John and his older sister Sue. We argue all the time about which team is better, whatever. And he always brings up 2005. Sox World Series and all. Yeah, whatever. Thing is, you grow up with the Cubs or any favorite team, you can’t just turn on them. So you feel like you want to switch sides, but it’s like not cool ‘cause then no one trusts you. They’d be like, ‘hey, what’s with the Sox cap, I thought you were a Cubs fan?’ and then you get a rep for being all fake and crap. So if anyone doesn’t know, I’m a Cubs fan and that’s not changin’.”

Ms. Glass chimed in, “Your seminal event please, Alex?”

“Oh, yeah, just laying some groundwork, Ms. G., you know, puttin’ into context and all.” I can see why B-listers are known as smart-asses.

So when I was 12, Ricky and John and Sue wanted to go to a White Sox game. Day game. I said, sure, let me check with my parents, figurin’ they’d say no way since the oldest person going was Sue, and she was only 14. Then I could blame it on my parents that I couldn’t go. I mean, what the hell did I want to go to a Sox game for? And besides, it was on the South Side and I’d never been to the South Side and all I knew about the South Side is that everyone has a gun.

Then my Mom talked to Ricky’s Mom and damned if they didn’t see a problem with all of us going. The more the better or some such ridiculous parents’ code. So now Ricky couldn’t go unless I went, so we all had to go.

Ricky’s Mom dropped us off at the train and we took the El to the Cell. And I didn’t give a damn about the game, and what was I supposed to do? Like, fake clap and jump around when the Sox hit a homer? So I started goofin’ on Ricky and clapped for the Mariners the whole game. And Ricky was gettin’ mad, wearin’ his Sox cap and his Konerko jersey. Well, you know how long a baseball game is right? It’s like 3 hours that seemed like 4 hours when you don’t care who’s playin’ and I wanted to leave after the 7^th inning stretch and it was like 12-0 White Sox so what was the point of stayin?

But Ricky and his brother and sister, they wanted to stay. Had to see the last out and sing Nah Nah Nah or whatever. So we stayed. And my Mom was texting, wondering how I’m loving this game and all. And I tell her it’s alright, but Ricky wants to stay to the end, so we’ll let her know when we’re on the El and all.

Finally, finally the game ends. And Ricky and everyone sings that stupid song so I start singin’ ‘Go Cubs Go’ just to piss him off. But I’m only 12, so no one else is really pissed off at me. It’s not like I was a teenager.

We started walkin’ to the El. We’re crossin’ over the Kennedy and these 2 black kids come up from behind us. And they’re asking people “what was the sco’? what was the sco’?” Even though they all knew damn well that the Sox won and the fireworks went off and everything. So we keep walking, and I’m getting nervous because I decided I don’t like the South Side very much. And these 2 dudes, they just keep going up to people asking what the ‘sco’ was. Then they catch up to me, and I got separated from Ricky and the others in the crowd. So I tried to play it cool when these dudes ask me that same stupid question. I just keep walking, not looking at them or answering. Which I guess pissed them off. Then I see that the one dude’s got something in each hand. He’s got a beer cup in each hand, but there’s not beer in them. He’s got one filled with ketchup and the other filled with mustard. Weird, I know.

So after asking me and asking me and me not answering, the dude pours both cups all over me and then they both ran away, laughing. I get on the El and I catch up with Ricky and he doesn’t know if he should laugh or not. So on the whole ride on the El I smell like ketchup and mustard and there’s really no place to clean it off. And it sucked big time. So, yeah.”

“How did that event affect your life, Alex?” Ms. Glass asked in her best therapist voice.

“Well I REALLY hate the Sox now,” I joke.

There was a pause. Ms. G. is good at this. She’s wasn’t about to let me off the hook with a joke.

“Not sure we blame you, Alex. But seriously. We’re talking, people, about events that shaped the way you think or live or how you see the world differently. So. Alex. This ‘event’ that you experienced, while not exactly a fond memory, how do you think it shaped who you are today?”

I swallowed, trying to keep my next words from coming out. But that damn Ms. G had given me no way out.

“Truthfully, I distrust African-American people.”  Alex looked around, nervously.  “Not you guys, the guys I know and go to class with, but the ones I don’t know. So about 99.99999999 percent of the African-American people in the world.  So I try my best never to go  to the South Side. But the thing is, I don’t consider myself a racist. Just race-afraid, you know?

And I was out of his head, just sitting next to him.. Ms. Glass looked at the boy for a moment longer than she normally would, and I could tell she would have put her hand on my shoulder if she was close enough. Normally she may have had a follow-up question. Some damn question like, “Can you see how this seminal event molded who you are inside?”

But sometimes the effect is obvious. She turned to the next “B-lister.” I felt his race phobia in that moment, and felt sorry for him.

And then I was no longer with him, feeling his pain. From what I could tell, this white kid came from a nice family and was slightly above the grading curve, though not in the brilliant category. He was probably headed to a good college and always was friendly with everyone. I had no idea he had looked at African-Americans as any kind of a threat. And I never would have thought of him as a racist. Wouldn’t even have considered it.

 I figured he had just sealed his fate with every person in that class and the school.  The kid was clearly shaken, as if he couldn’t believe he had just told everyone the story he had told.  He’d basically declared himself afraid of 40% of the kids  in the school he didn’t know. 

His classmates were somewhat in shock at his candor, and I assumed he would be ostracized  forever by anyone who heard his story retold.   And certainly every African-American classmate would hate him until he graduated. 

But, this was Sojourner Truth, so, of course that’s not quite what happened. A class discussion erupted about what happened to Alex. A few of the kids in the class were initially upset with him for painting with such a broad brush, but ultimately, instead of ripping Alex, they started talking to him about how they understood his anxiety and suggesting if he ever wanted to go to a Sox game  (even though he was a Cub’s fan) they’d go with him. The kid was clearly shaken, as if he couldn’t believe he had just told everyone the story he had told.  He’d basically declared himself afraid of people in the school he didn’t know and gotten away with it.  When the bell rang, and the students left, I approached Ms. Glass.  I’d seen more than enough, maybe too much.

            “What’s going on here, Ms. Glass?” I asked in clear frustration.

            “What?”

            “Kids just coming out and confessing that they’re racists and other kids understanding?”

            “No one declared himself a racist, Ms. Zapata. Alex just told us a childhood memory that scarred him.  He was honest enough to tell his story, and it resonated.”

            “What do you mean, ‘it resonated’?  The fact that the kid is a racist?”

            “No, the fact that he was traumatized by something that happened to him when he was twelve.  And the truth of the matter is, he’s moved from the specific event to a general unease with a group of people who, in that single instance, shared the perpetrator’s ethnicity.  It happens.  I don’t think Alex was proud of his feelings, he was just acknowledging them.”

            “Great, great, Whatever.  What fifteen year old does that? In front of his peers?”

            “What fifteen year old does what?”

            “Acknowledges his racist attitudes…”

            “Everyone has racist attitudes, Ms. Zapata.”

            I couldn’t believe me ears.  I’d hit the jackpot.  Ms. Glass was calling herself a racist.  I would put it all down in my report.  “English teacher Julie Glass acknowledges she’s a racist.”

            “I beg your pardon, Ms. Glass, but I don’t have any racist attitudes.”

            “Perhaps none you would acknowledge.”

            “Whoa, are you calling me a racist, Ms. Glass.”

            “I’m saying everyone has racist attitudes that they have to acknowledge and confront on a regular basis, yes.”

            “Wow.  Sounds like your calling yourself out.”

            “I think if you dig a little deeper into yourself, you might find that human imperfection, Ms. Zapata, but then again, I could be wrong.”

            “Sounds like your backing off your accusation.”  The bell rang and students started pouring into the class.

            “I’m an English teacher, Ms. Zapata, I teach the human condition.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “It means we all have things we need to work on. I don’t put myself above or beyond all kinds of faulty thinking.  I just do my best to combat that thinking.  I think that’s what Alex is trying to do, but what happened to him, he just hasn’t gotten over yet. It may be years before he does.  But today, I think, was a start.”

            “It’s not your job to get these kids talking about their victimization, Ms. Glass.  Your job is to teach them English.”

            “You’re welcome to stay and sit in another class of mine, if you’d like, Ms. Zapata.”

            “I don’t want to spend another minute in this school. There’s something weird going on here.”

            “Weird?”

            “Don’t play games with me, Ms. Glass.  I don’t know what you do or how you do it, but what happens around here isn’t normal.”

            “No thanks, I’ve seen enough.” I said with a sneer.  Comforted by my latest observation, I headed to another classroom, looking for more.

           

Chapter Thirteen –  The Fire Drill

            The fire alarm went off just as I left Ms. Glass’s room, and I followed what appeared to be a distracted music teacher urging her students out of the building.  Unlike many of the other teachers who seemed to be sleepwalking through the drill, this teacher seemed to be very much caught up in the idea of the school being on fire.  It occurred to me that she didn’t realize it was a drill.  Hadn’t the school told their staff that a drill was happening that day? 

“Excuse me, Ms…?”

“Clarissa Moujel, but I can’t really talk right now. When I get the students out we can talk.”

When we got out into the street, I asked she still seemed agitated, as if there was some drama to a fire drill.  “Is everything all right?”  I asked.

“Yes, it’s just a drill, but I want to make sure the children are safe, just the same.

“You seem upset. Are you all right?” I said, and then suddenly I saw Fire!  Flames! Burning! Screaming!  Although now I was Clarissa at home and I was fourteen years old, a pan of grease, thawing on the stove,  had just spilled over into the gas flames and caught on fire. The flames engulfed the wooden cabinets above the stove. Clarissa's family kitchen was on fire!

It was Father's Day; her dad was outside cooking burgers on the grill. Clarissa's  mom  had gone next door to borrow something from  a neighbor.  Sitting in the sun room, just off the kitchen, Clarissa was waiting for her sister to get out of the shower while dreaming of the cleansing, cool water to rid her body of layers of camping grime. Her mother, her Cadet Girl Scout leader, her sister and Clarissa had just returned from  three day camping trip.  Smelling smoke, Clarissa peeked into the kitchen, saw the flames, opened the back door and yelled, "The house is on fire!"

Running from the grill, her dad bolted inside and did what he thought best. He grabbed the burning pot of flames to douse it in the sink with water. What he didn't realize is that the worst thing for a grease fire IS water. Fortunately, he never made it to the sink because he slipped on the grease covered floor. Unfortunately, the pan of flames fell on top of him.

Clarissa had somehow wiggled her way into the kitchen, stuck in the far corner behind the flames....and stood watching her father scream and writhe on the floor in pain and flames.  Thinking she was in a bad dream, Clarissa simply watched, waiting to wake up and have the nightmare be over.  Somehow her father was pulled out of the kitchen by others. In a state of shock and disbelief, Clarissa simply told herself that "she" would take care of things and put out the fire. In her ignorance, she bent over to pick up the scalding pan from the floor to carry it to the sink.  The grease-covered floor  seemed to grab her and pull her down, and in the process, burning her legs, bare feet, and right arm before she could reach the sink.

Clarissa's  mom dragged her out of the kitchen and carried her outside to the deck. She instinctively poured an entire box of Morton Salt all over the flames and then grabbed ice cube trays putting them on her husband's arms which had developed 3rd degree burns before the paramedics arrived. Clarissa could hear my dad crying out from the bathroom as her mom and a neighbor, waiting for the ambulance, soaked him in ice and water.  As a neighbor carried Clarissa to the ambulance, a friend asked her what had happened.  In a complete daze, she responded, "The house burned down."

Clarissa rode in the back of the ambulance with her dad. With first and second degree burns on her feet, legs and right arm, Clarissa was sent home that night, but she wouldn't see her dad for weeks.

 For years following the horror of the fire, Clarissa experienced sporadic terrifying nightmares. Daytime flashbacks during which she would freak out stemmed from neighbor’s  barbecues to Greek restaurants where servers said "Ooopah"  as they set on fire cheese at the tableside.  

Back at the school, Clarissa was guiding her students back into the building. I was annoyed yet again that I had to witness someone else’s childhood trauma.  We all had them, why did I need to experience everyone else’s?  What was it about this school that lent itself to slipping into a problematic hypersensitivity to other people’s pain?

I really just wanted to expose the school for what it was, and yet I was unable to keep from getting into the mindset of

Chapter Fourteen -  Becoming Your Enemies

            I  walked over to the science lab and was literally run into by two dozen students and a good looking fifty something year old man who were running in the halls. I didn’t quite hit the floor, but I was staggered.

            “Oh, my God, excuse me, I’m so sorry.”  He said with a deep sense of embarrassment. “Are you okay?””

            “What are you all doing?”

            “It’s a physics experiment.  We’re demonstrating Newton’s Second Law of Motion.  You know,  the relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma.”

            “No idea what you’re talking about, Mr…?

            “Mark Assummo, I teach Physics and we should have been looking but we weren’t.   We did alert all of the other classes on the floor, but we didn’t think anyone else would be in this area.

            “Clearly. Maybe you shouldn’t encourage gangs of children to run the hallways, Mr. Assumo, even as an experiment” I admonished.

            “Gangs in the hallway, running, probably not a good idea, you’re right,” Mark agreed.  “And you are?”

            “Carla Zapata, from the East Side Network.  Having a little look around.”

            “Well, just so you know, we don’t usually run over our visitors.” He said with a laugh.

            “Still, maybe it’s best to keep your gang in the classroom.”

            “They’re not my gang, they’re my students.”

            “All the same, be careful when you’ve got that big of a group.  They have a tendency to forget about everyone else.  Sort a group bullying mentality that’s not good for anyone.”

            “Agreed,” Mark said and a sadness came over his face, the room went dark and I knew what was about to happen. Suddenly, I was fourteen and living in Oak Lawn, a suburb of Chicago.  I was Mark and Mark was being chased.

Running as fast as I could,  I cut through the parkway past St. Catherine’s school,  trying to get to Tripp Street.  Slashing past Mrs. Schmitt’s house, I came upon Larry and Rick Hansen in their front yard.  Behind me were about ten of my so-called friends, all fellow  Miniature Oak Lawn Ass Beaters (MOLABS).  I wasn’t exactly sure why they were chasing me, but they were.  I felt like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, hunted by classmates gone feral.   Out of breath and nowhere else to run, I collapsed  in the front yard of the Ricky and Larry Hansen, my old and abandoned friends.

Then it happened; just as I was going to get pummeled by a few of my MOLAB pals, Ricky came out from behind a bush.

Ricky stepped between me and Boots Gallagher and didn’t say a word.  He just punched Boots in the mouth.  I heard the thud and then Ricky  said, “Get out of here or I’ll do it again.”

The small gang of Miniature Oak Lawn Ass Beaters crossed the street and headed back down the crosswalk into the shadows.      

The Hansen brothers were my best friends since I knew what a friend was.  Larry was my first love. I would cross the street, knock on the door and yell, “Yo, Lar, Yo, Rick,” and walk right into their house.  Mrs. Hansen was my second mother.  After eating a few bowls of Crisp or Captain Crunch at my house,  I would have a helping of potato pancakes or some other Slovak delicacy at their kitchen table.  We slept over at each other’s house  almost every week. We were inseparable.  I remember the shock of being directed to the other kindergarten room and seeing Larry disappear from my side on the first day of school.

By 7^th grade I had walked away from our friendship.    I would head out my front door and pass the Hansen home and wander to the park and join the cool kids  who said “fuck”,  drank beer,  got high, and explored  sex.  I had drifted so very far from my childhood buddies. 

Now, grass stained and embarrassed,  I turned to Ricky and thanked him.  There was an uncomfortable silence.  I wanted to apologize , but instead I just walked away again,  crossed the street and ran after the gang of jerks who treated me like crap.

It hadn’t been the first or last time I was to be targeted. When I got to school the next day, fellow MOLAB Pat O’Shea, red faced and a lot bigger than me entered the almost empty classroom doing a little hunting.   Watching  him in slow motion, he came toward me and smashed me in the nose.  I stood there stunned and bleeding.  He called me a  “pussy,” for running the previous day, instead of taking my beating. Then, he disappeared into the hall.  Offering no resistance, I just took the hit.  Fighting back would have made it worse.  I cleaned up in the bathroom and I told no one.    It made no sense why I continued to hang around with kids who bullied  on me. Still, I did.

Suddenly the memory fast forwarded to a year later. My dad and I pulled into our driveway and saw  Dugan and O’Shea in our garage.  My dad was a manufacturer rep  and had a  gold mine of samples.    Combs, shampoo,  codeine laden  cough medicine, and the mother lode, Foster Grant sunglasses.  All my friends knew about it.  When I saw them,  I  jumped out of the car, ran up the drive and flipped the fence in pursuit  of the two biggest assholes in my 8^th grade class.  I caught up with them on the crosswalk.  They turned around and asked me why I was chasing after them. 

“Don’t rip my father off.” I said, ready to take it to the next level.

Dugan stared at me and calmly said, “Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.  Must have been someone else. “ O’Shea snorted. 

I was hoping  my dad would pull up in the wagon, but he never showed.  I was left to deal with them on my own and there was nothing to do.  “You guys are pricks.”

I got on my bike one day and  rode across Pulaski Avenue and wandered around St. Cristina’s  parish.  I found a group of kids and  hung with them for a while, then found some more.  It was nice being new and I  was glad that the bullying was over.   At least I thought it was.  Graduation was in a few weeks  when it happened.

His name was Bob Fovell.  Kids at school called him Feeble.  He was so small and nerdy that for the most part the punks  ignored him.  Because of his size, he wasn’t much of a prize.  I still don’t know why I did it.  I guess I  wanted to  feel what it was like to be powerful.  For a moment in time, I turned into the very thing I despised.  I became Gallagher, O’Shea,  and Dugan.  It was my turn to feel the rush of dominance. Bob and I were alone in the hallway.  I  tried to force him into his locker and shut the door.  

“What you doing, Assumo?” Bob yelled in shocked distress.

It was over in a moment.  I’m not sure if it was shame, disgust or repulsion, but I backed off from him.  “Just kidding!” I said, adding, “Just playing, man.”

He walked away quickly and quietly. Later I saw Bob playing baseball in the church parking lot. I walked up and  tried to offer another apology, but he just looked away.  For him, I was no different than the creeps who mistreated me.  He was right.

Then I was back, and Mr. Assumo and the class were still apologizing.

“Forget it,” I said.  “It’s not that serious.”  I was sick of all these people’s childhood issues and confessions.  I didn’t want to relive anyone’s traumatic childhood experiences any more than I wanted to relive my own.  All I wanted to do was label the school and its teachers and its staff and its students all frauds.  I didn’t want to delve into ancient histories.  I needed to get a breath of fresh air and found an exit as quickly as I could. 

Chapter Fifteen – The man in the street

As I walked out of the school, I kept my head down and made a beeline to my car.  I wanted out.  I was done with the mystical school and their mystical students and mystical teachers.  I needed to find some normalcy.  I did not want to deal with anyone else’s childhood experiences.  I assumed when I got away from the school, all of that hocus pocus would be over. Fifty feet out of the side door of the school, I almost bumped into a forty-something panhandler.

“Can you spare any change?” he asked with pain in his voice.              Feeling lucky to be out of Sojourner Truth, I reached into my purse to find a dollar or two.  “Give me a second,” I said, looking up at the man.  As I looked at him, his story came rushing out at me.  I wasn’t him this time, I was just sensitive to his story.  He didn’t say a word, but his story came silently rushing out at me.  Again, I had no idea what was happening, but I didn’t have time to do anything but listen.

Growing up in the Henry Horner projects, seeing my share of gang fights, and even taking part of fist fights of my own in the ten years that I lived in this poverty stricken environment sort of prepared me for my life in the South Suburbs of Chicago and the fist fights with the neighborhood bully.  Yes, after existing in the ghetto for ten years, my father, and eighteen wheeler truck driver, had actually managed to save millions for dollars, moving us from the projects to the South Side suburbs, and a fine house with many rooms, two bathroom and more.  I guess that job at Interlake Steel paid very well.  My mother thought my father was throwing the money away on women, but my father surprised her the night said we were moving from the projects to the South Side suburban home.

It was long ago, yet I still recall my days with the neighborhood bully.  Yes, everyday after school, I would gather all the boys for a game of softball in the parking lot and like the sun coming up in the morning, he would always choose me for a fistfight on schedule after every ball game.  I hear he’s all gown up now, living a life as a nurse with a wife and children.  I only know that now he’s much more mature, the he can put his feet in my shoes, and that his children won’t have to go through the remorse that I had to go through as a child back in the day, Finally, I pray to the arbitrator in the sky that you and all of your children will not have to wear my shoes as a youth.

Chapter Sixteen –  Confronting my 15 year old self.

            I had to get away from the school, the school grounds, the neighborhood.  What was happening to me was beyond bizarre.  When I wasn’t embodying someone as they tumbled back into a childhood memory, I was somehow connecting with them on a level that wasn’t humanly possible.

I didn’t know what I was going to write in my report and I didn’t care.  I thought perhaps I was going insane.  This newfound “ability” to get inside people’s heads, to somehow “experience” their childhood or current traumas or otherwise “feel their pain” was overwhelming.  I wanted to be done with it.  I reached into my purse once again.

“Here’s twenty dollars.” I said to the man.

“Thank you so much,” he replied with an earnestness that made me feel generous, even though I knew in my heart I was mostly being generous to him because I hoped  it would ‘magically” break the curse I seemed to be living.  I had hoped that by “being generous” I would have learned some cosmic lesson that would allow me to stop channeling other people’s histories.  I had enough of my own problems and I really didn’t want to have to carry the sad memories of others.

“Good luck,” I said with a deep sense of inadequacy. I wanted to tell him things were going to get better for him, but I didn’t want to lie. 

“Same to you,” he said and walked away.

When I finally reached my car, I saw a young couple sitting in the car next to mine.  The boy and the girl seemed to be listening to music and laughing. I was happy for them, but just a little worried that if I got to close to their car, I might suddenly be transported back into one or both of their sad childhood memories.  I couldn’t deal with that.  Rightly or wrongly, I wanted to assume that they were a happy couple, both respectful of each other. In truth, I just wanted to get home, pour myself a glass of wine, turn on the television and call it a day.  The fact that it was just past two in the afternoon didn’t matter.  Not today.  I had been overwhelmed by it all. Whatever they were doing at that school was too crazy for me to try and combat. I turned the car on and made the mistake of looking over at the couple one last time. She had leaned over and they were now in a soft embrace. She looked Hispanic and all of fifteen and he appeared Caucasian and about seventeen. I had the urge to vomit.

Then it came to me as I feared it would:  in a mad rush of thought and emotion; I tried to suppress it but it wouldn’t go away. No quiero pensar en eso !No quiero pensar en eso !No quiero pensar en eso !  But the memory rushed into my mind before I could block it.

I was fifteen although I looked to be about eleven or twelve--- I was very short, physically undeveloped and young for my grade.  The nice kids called me cute; the cruel ones preferred shorty, pip squeak, or simply asked me, "Hey, Chiquita--are you old enough to be in high school?"  Since my high school was large it was easy and often desirable to get lost among the many.  The school was also diverse---everyone was equally divided among four groups:  the Mexicans, the Blacks the Jews and everyone else.

Early in the fall was the first school dance - a big deal for everyone.  Girls were waiting to be asked and since I had never really talked to a boy "in that way," I didn’t expect to be invited. But then friends I knew got asked, and suddenly my interest increased. But then the days passed with no invite,  so I resolved not to go.  Then two days before the dance, Alex, a cool, very tall junior invited me.  I was thrilled.

I should have been wise from the beginning, but being naïve I didn’t suspect anything when, unlike my friends' dates, Alex didn’t want to come to my house before the dance to pick me up. 

“Just meet me in front of the school,” he instructed, almost as if he were the boss and I was his employee.  But I was excited to go to the dance, so I said, “Sure.”

I arrived at the high school, super excited as it was the first school dance of my life.  All the kids were rushing into the school; everybody looked great and I couldn’t wait to see Alex.  When he arrived, he seemed a little agitated.  

“Let's take a walk before we go into the dance,” he said.  I was nervous, but I didn’t want to seem uncool. 

“Sounds good,” I lied. 

 So we walked--- to the woods.  “Have a beer,” He commanded.

“Sure,” I said, not sure at all.  He pulled out a Rolling Rock from a bag he was carrying, and it appeared to be one of a six pack.  I

 WOW, was I cool. I had never had alcohol before and after one beer, I was feeling quite woozy.  Alex smiled at me as I finished it and then quickly handed me another.  Not knowing what else to do, I drank it and didn’t feel like myself at all.

"Take this,” he said, as he pushed a little blue pill into my hand.

“No!” I said firmly, giving it back to him.  I was young and naïve but everything was going a little too fast and I wasn’t feeling Alex at all. I just wanted to go to the dance.  That’s all I had signed up for.  This “pre-party” between the two of us wasn’t on my radar until he suggested it, and I had already gone further than I had intended to go.  I just wanted to dance and look at my classmates dressed up.  I suppose I also wanted to show off my new blouse and skirt that my mother had purchased for me.

“Not cool, Carla,” he said, very disappointed.

“Sorry,” I said, ashamed.

“Fuck it, then, let’s just go to the dance.”  He turned and started walking out of the woods.

Feeling embarrassed but relieved that I would soon see my friends, we left the woods and started silently walking back to the school. 

 As we walked through the tree lined outer rim of the school's property, Alex marched two steps ahead, completely ignoring me. I was feeling stupid and playing the whole earlier “pill scene” over in my mind.  I was thinking about the end of the night and whether or not I should give him a goodbye kiss or if I really ever wanted to date him or if he was “boyfriend material.”  My mind was all over the place. Even if he asked me out again, I was pretty sure I’d say “no.” He just didn’t seem nice enough, but maybe it was me. Was it me? I decided I wouldn’t make any decisions until after the two beers had worn off.  

Just before we reached the lit school grounds, he suddenly turned and knocked me to the ground. ¡¿Que estaba pasando?!

 I was stunned as he quickly climbed on top of me.

“Alex, what, no!” I said softly, embarrassed that I was somehow suddenly in the position of having to turn him down. Crazy but I kept thinking, I don’t think this is right but is this what’s supposed to happen when you accept a dance date? ¿Soy ingenua ?

  No, I didn’t agree to this.  I didn’t in any way lead him on to this.

As he tugged at my skirt I looked at him in fear. I thought if I looked at him scared he’d know I wasn’t interested.  The whole time I was feeling guilty, ashamed and stupid, as if I was supposed to know more than I did.

“No,” I said softly; then “No,” more loudly.  Then, “No!” with the breath and energy I had left.

I kept waiting for Alex to hear what I was saying but it was if he was listening to music on headphones and I wasn’t there with him.  It was as if he was an actor performing a solo act on top of me.  I don’t think he ever actually looked at me until it was over.

I might have temporarily blacked out or it’s too painful to think about, but the next clear moment was when he rolled off of me.  I went running, crying into the school and immediately went to the girls’ bathroom.  I remember adjusting my skirt, washing my face and fixing my hair.  Two girls, friends who were discussing their respective dates,  entered the bathroom, looked at me and started to laugh.

“Looks like she’s been having some fun,” one of them said as she pointed at me. 

“A lot more fun then we’re having,” the other one said.

I wanted to cry but I didn’t know them and I wasn’t sure what to say so I played it off.

“Yeah, yeah.” I said softly.  I exited the bathroom, looked for a payphone and then started to call my father for a ride home.  But the dance had only just started, and I didn’t want to tell him why I wanted to come home so early, so I went upstairs and looked for my locker.  When I found it, I sat down and cried until it was a reasonable hour to call for a ride home.  When my father picked me up, he asked,

“How was it?”

“It was fine.” I said, not looking at him as he drove.

“Did you dance with that boy, Alex?”

“No. I don’t think he likes to dance.”

“Oh. Well, your mother is up and waiting for you. She’ll be glad to see you.”

When we got home, I told them both that the dance was “okay” but that I didn’t want to talk about it.  And so we didn’t. For the next two years I’d occasionally accidentally see Alex in the hall and turn my eyes away from him as quickly as I could.  In those moments when I did see him, he always seemed to be staring at me, but we never spoke again.

And then I was pulled out of my sadness by the young couple that had been snuggling in the car to my right.  They were tapping on my car window.  As I rolled down the window, I realized my mascara was running and that I had been crying.

“Are you all right?” the young lady asked.

“Yes.” I said, I’m fine.

“We wanted to make sure.  It looked like you were crying,” the young man said.

“I was crying, but I’m fine now. Thanks.” 

“You’re the lady from Downtown who’s investigating us, aren’t you? The young man asked.

“Investigating you?  Who told you that?”

“Nobody.  I just heard.  A lot of kids saw you taking notes.”

“Well, I’m not really investigating, I’m more or less reviewing.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?  You want us to get you some water or something?” the boy asked.  In the distance, the sound of the school bell ringing could be heard.

“No, I’m telling you I’m fine.”

“Are you coming to the assembly?” the young girl asked with some urgency.

“What?”

“The school assembly.”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Okay, well, if you’re okay, we’ve got to go.”

The students had heard the bell and knew that the last period of the day would begin in a few moments.  The two walked towards the school arm in arm.  I started my car, put it in reverse and started to back out of my parking space. I was sick with my memory. But then I stopped the car, put it in drive, drove a few feet and re-parked the car.

                                                       

Chapter Seventeen – The Assembly

            A horde of students who had been outside, headed back into the Arts Building.  One held the door for me. “Coming in?” the older looking boy asked.

            “Yes,” I said, “What’s going on?”

            “It’s a school assembly.  Three students who are running for President are making their speeches.”

            Any other day and I would have politely declined.  But today was clearly not an ordinary day.  I had a very quick flash of my mother and father and headed for the auditorium.

In truth, the day had been exhilarating and I wanted to hear what each of the students had to say.  Every student I met at the school had impressed me in some way, not always as an academic or as an athlete, but always as someone who had overcome something and had somehow made it to school that day.

            If I were honest, I would say I recognized that it wasn’t easy to be a student at the school or any other school for that matter.  But at Sojourner Truth, everyone, from the administration on down to support staff seemed to be giving it a shot.  They fought through the voices in their heads and their personal pain histories to come and maybe learn or teach or a little o both.  I recognized that sometimes just making it to school from some remote corner of the City was an achievement were admiring.

            I felt a profound respect for everyone I had met that day, including the homeless gentlemen I had just met.  I realized that every person I had encountered was giving their respective lives their best efforts, even if some of those efforts were not immediately apparent.  It occurred to me that maybe the world hadn’t changed since the morning, but that I had.  Maybe, just maybe,  people weren’t the  universal fools or crooks I had imagined them to be.  Maybe, just maybe, the burdens of their respective childhoods or the pains they had endured since their childhoods, had taken their toll and what was left were human beings doing the best they could with what they had.

            I had a flash that my own victimization trumped everyone else’s, but I quickly discarded that thought as ill considered and a product of an ego that was trying to strangle me.

            I didn’t know what the Presidential candidates would have to say, but I assumed each would give an earnest effort at winning the votes of the students.  Each one of them, regardless of how well they dressed or spoke, was putting himself/herself up for criticism, was risking the possibility that people who didn’t know better wouldn’t be impressed no matter what they said or did. As I walked into the theater, students of all kinds were filling the seats and the candidates sat on the stage looking nervous.  Melvina Soto stood at the podium waiting for the student body to settle down and listen to their colleague’s speeches.  I took a seat in the front row next to a student who was busy working on what appeared to be his math homework.  To my right, an empty seat was shortly filled with none other than Ms. Julie Glass.  She looked at me and asked, “How are you feeling?”

            “Impressed,” I said.

            “But you haven’t even heard anyone speak yet.”

            “Yeah, well, sometimes you don’t need to hear or see it, you can just feel it.”

            Ms. Glass just nodded as the audience drew quiet for the first speaker.