Relentless Pursuit (21 page)

It felt so good to be home and to have his parents taking care of him. Learning to cook, clean, and shop for himself in Los Angeles had been a shock to his system—yet another thing that made him feel old. But he had quickly gotten into a routine. On Sundays, he went grocery shopping for the week. He bought chicken, tortillas, and the fixings for salad. Then he cooked up all the chicken and stored it in Tupperware. He was careful to keep his food separate from Mackey's. It was kind of weird. Hrag and Mackey never shared a meal. Although they had attended Boston College together, they hadn't come into Teach For America as close friends. Hrag had tremendous respect for Mackey, but theirs wasn't a I'll-cook-tonight-you-take-tomorrow type of relationship.

The only TFA Locke teacher Hrag really felt a connection with was Rachelle. They had a lot in common. They both taught biology, and they seemed to approach the job in the same way. Rachelle didn't appear to be working herself to death, even though, as a special ed teacher, she had her hands full. Like Hrag, she did her work, but she was realistic about the job.

He and Rachelle had been invited to attend a weekend science conference in Palm Springs. They got to know each other better on the hundred-mile drive, and when they arrived at the hotel where the conference was being held, they sunbathed by the pool before checking in. It was so liberating. Hrag could joke around with Rachelle. Everyone else at TFA was so wound up and so on top of things. Take Taylor Rifkin. She acted really laid-back, but at work she was fiercely engaged and efficient.

Hrag hadn't bonded with any of Locke's male TFAers. Though he and Phillip shared the same hallway, they rarely spoke. And Mackey and he were friends, but they were very different people. They had stopped carpooling to school fairly early on. They weren't on the same clock. Mackey liked to get to school early and didn't mind staying late—he was the kind of guy who went out of his way to stop and chat with other teachers. Hrag, on the other hand, didn't want to spend any more time than necessary at work. He was never late for school, but he wasn't exactly an early riser. He had difficulty making small talk, and when he was done working, he wanted to get the hell out of Locke.

The Monday after Thanksgiving, Hrag arrived at school uncharacteristically early, well before 7 a.m., so he could get to his room and prepare for the day. But after he parked, he couldn't get out of his car. That awful knot in his stomach was back. He was so nervous, he couldn't bring himself to open the car door, so he tilted back the driver's seat, closed his eyes, and just lay there, half asleep, half awake. When Mackey arrived twenty minutes later and saw Hrag stretched out behind the wheel, eyes closed, he panicked. Pounding on the car window he cried:
“What are you doing? What are you doing?”

Hrag asked himself the same question again and again. Time and experience didn't make it easier to answer. It just kept rattling around in his head, growing louder and more insistent as the days passed.

The question was loudest during fifth period. He had had trouble keeping order in period five from day one, when Cale and José got into their fight. He had yet to get it right. He couldn't figure out how these kids thought. They had all kinds of issues. He discovered that one student who was driving him nuts couldn't understand a word of English and belonged in a bilingual class. Another girl had the same problem, but he couldn't get her switched out. He didn't know what to do; he didn't speak Spanish well enough to teach biology in that language. Hrag noticed that kids came into class cut up. One boy brought Hrag a book of his poetry and it was filled with blood. The poetry was pretty good; the blood was disgusting. And José had a huge scar on his cheek. Hrag couldn't bring himself to ask how it got there.

José was already in the juvenile court system, on probation; a school suspension would send him to jail. Hrag liked the kid. If they were the same age, he thought, they would probably be friends. But as a student, José was Hrag's worst nightmare. The kid couldn't sit still, and he was an instigator. On the days he came to class, he brought trouble with him. And Hrag's newly adopted classroom-management policy, in which he sent the errant student to a nearby classroom to write a one-page reflective essay, didn't work with José. Other kids hated writing; just the thought of it whipped them into shape. Not José. If Hrag sent him out and demanded three pages, José would dutifully come back with three pages. And the thing was, his work was thoughtful and surprisingly well written. A reader would think the kid was a choirboy. Far from it; José was a failing student who lived with his mom and had some kind of problem with male authority. Managing him was exhausting. Hrag toyed with the idea of switching him to Vanessa Morris's class, thinking that José might perform better for a female. But he was reluctant to let him go. He didn't want Morris to think he couldn't handle the kid.

But José was incorrigible. One Monday in mid-November, right before the parent-teacher conferences, Hrag walked into his room to find “FUCK YOU MR. H” scrawled across the board. The message was signed “SNAPS.” At first, Hrag was unfazed. Yet another
whatever
moment at Locke. He got some alcohol and wiped it off—only to discover that Snaps had tagged the entire classroom. “Snaps” was scribbled on the walls, on Hrag's desk, on the door, on José's chair, and on the table where he sat.

It was José. Hrag
knew
it. But just to be sure, he started making casual inquiries. “Anyone know Snaps?” he asked the kids in another class.

“Why?”

“You guys tell me,” responded Hrag. “Does the name start with a
J
?”

“No,” came the answer, accompanied by a knowing smile.

When everyone had left the room, a girl who sat in the front row, a quiet girl who did her work, confided that she had seen Snaps. It was clear that she was referring to José.

Hrag confronted him. “I don't have proof,” he conceded. “But kids talk, and I know you did it. I'm trying to help you, José. I don't appreciate an FU on the board.”

“Yeah, man, you've been disrespected,” allowed José. “But I didn't do it.”

When Hrag called José's mother, she wanted to know if Hrag had proof that José was the tagger. Then she said she didn't know what to do with him and gave Hrag his father's number. Hrag told José that he had called home.

“Man, why do you care so much about me?” he asked. “No one else cares. You know I come [to class]. I wish you'd lay off my back. Stop caring.”

José had caught him off guard. Hrag had already typed a letter to the dean detailing his offenses. Now he decided not to hand it in.

Unlike José, Cale was not an instigator. He was a reactor. There was something about the kid that scared Hrag, and fascinated him, too. Cale should have been failing biology. But he came to class fairly often, and when he wasn't there, he made a habit of coming in at lunch and making up the work he had missed. Like so many other kids at Locke, Cale had never been trained to sit and learn; he had been trained to get through the system. So he was getting a B.

He wasn't a bad kid—yet. But he seemed to have deep-rooted problems. Again, Hrag thought it was a male thing. The kid was looking for a father figure. As far as Hrag could tell, he lived with his aunt and his grandmother; he couldn't figure out if he had parents around or not. Every time he asked, the grandmother or aunt would mumble something about what a rough childhood the boy had had. Still, Cale was always fashionably dressed. And when he applied himself, he could do anything that was asked of him.

When Cale came in at lunch, Hrag would shoot the breeze with him, trying to build a rapport, trying to get him to understand how to behave in class. Like many of the other boys, Cale didn't know how to act around girls—he was always putting his hands on them and being surprised to find his touch unwelcome. One day when Cale came in during lunch, he asked for Hrag's phone number. Hrag told him he wouldn't give it to him until he had earned his trust. After Cale left, Hrag realized that the kid had stolen three different things from his desk, random things like a glue stick and big markers, but still, it was creepy. Later Hrag learned that the petty theft had occurred on the day Cale's father was getting out of jail.

Not long after that, Cale was suspended. He had gone into a new teacher's room holding a pair of scissors behind his back. The teacher was a big guy, but he was freaked out. He didn't know Cale, and Cale apparently didn't know him. The teacher pulled his desk in front of him to put some distance between himself and Cale, and then asked the kid to put the scissors down. Cale just grinned and ran away.

Of course, he was caught. He was another kid who had already had brushes with the law—exactly the kind of kid Wells was happy to show to the door. Knowing that Hrag had had trouble with Cale in the past, the dean asked him to prepare a list of Cale's infractions.

Cale was clearly living on borrowed time, but he still came in at lunch and tried, in his awkward way, to connect. “Have you been to Jamba Juice?” he would ask. “Wanna go with me?” And Hrag would say, “Yeah, behave for a week and we'll go to Jamba Juice.” It seemed to be working. Cale started working on the class stem-cell project, and his behavior improved. Then, ten minutes into class one day, two African American girls warned Hrag that he had better shut Cale up. Hrag did not want to interrupt the lab; he asked them to ignore Cale. Seconds later, one of the girls shouted at Cale: “I'm gonna have my brother fucking kill you!” Then all hell broke loose. The girl bolted out of her seat, screaming. Hrag had no idea what Cale had said or done to provoke her. “I'll kick you out, Cale, and you can't afford to get kicked out!” he warned. But Cale was unreachable. When Hrag did send him out, Cale announced that he
wanted
to go to the dean's office.

The dean called, Hrag told him what had occurred, and that was it. Cale was gone. It took multiple phone calls to his grandmother to find out what happened to him. Hrag figured he'd just been recycled—kicked out of Locke and given an “opportunity transfer” to another poorly performing school in the district. And he was right. Hrag felt terrible, like it was his fault.

Then there was the cutter. You didn't have to be a shrink to know that cutting was rampant among America's young. It was a form of release, a stress reliever. Hrag had a friend in college who did it. It relocated the pain. So it wasn't like he had never seen it before. It was just that he had never seen lacerations so deep and so disfiguring as the ones he noticed on the young girl in his second-period class one day. She was late (he didn't know it, but she spent first period every day across the street with her baby at the day-care center), and he yelled at her. Instead of giving him crap like most kids would, she just sat there and hung her head. That made Hrag feel rotten, so he kept going over to her, trying to make up. He sensed she had problems. She had a big scar on her face, and she was always saying outrageous things and putting on shows for attention. At one point, she claimed she could speak Japanese. Another time, she bragged that she was going to France. “Are you okay?” he asked again. She wouldn't answer.

Then he noticed her wrist. There were deep cuts, carved in a pattern, and they were starting to scab over.

He kept her after class. “You need to talk to someone,” he said.

“Nothing's wrong,” she said.

“Then what happened to you?” he demanded to know.

“It's a burn.”

“I want you to talk to me,” he pleaded. She left.

Later that day, she handed him a note with a phone number and a name on it. “It's my mom,” she explained.

Hrag had graduate school that night, but in between classes he called the number. The person who answered the phone was a basketball coach from another school. She said that the young mother had been through serious trauma, but she refused to give any details. “I'm trying to get her help, and it would be great if you could help out, too,” she said.

“I don't know what I can do to help,” replied Hrag. “I'm a biology teacher.” The next morning the phone rang at six o'clock. It was the coach. She and Hrag worked out a plan to get the girl counseling. But after that, she stopped coming to class. Hrag fretted over her safety—and the role he was so ill equipped to play.

Who am I kidding? I don't know what I'm doing. The fact that it's left to me to identify a girl who is on the verge of killing herself is ridiculous. You can fake the teaching, but when it comes to this stuff, you can't. How can it be that I'm the one diagnosing or even realizing that this girl is in trouble? I don't even know who her guidance counselor is. If something happens, I could be held liable. I don't know who to go to. And if I don't write it on my hand, I won't remember to even report it. It's crazy. Oh God, I hope she's okay.

It wasn't just the troubled kids who kept Hrag up at night. It was all the kids at this dysfunctional school who were consigned to live in this crappy neighborhood in this screwed-up school district. The parent-teacher conferences in mid-November had him questioning anew what the hell he was doing.

Only eight parents showed up. It was strange. Some kids were there all alone, and Hrag didn't want to ask why, knowing that a sizable percentage of the students at Locke lived in foster homes. Most of the parents who did show up had kids who were model citizens. But not all. One boy, a very social African American kid in fifth period who fancied himself a ladies' man, walked into room 308 with a big black man who introduced himself as Norman. The kid was having some academic issues, and Norman wanted to know why.

“He talks a lot in class,” explained Hrag.

“SHUT HIM DOWN!” thundered Norman, pounding the desk for emphasis. When Hrag explained that the talking prevented him from doing all his work in class, Norman pounded the desk again and repeated: “SHUT HIM DOWN!”