baby daddy

the first time i saw him he was putting his fist through one of those glass panels embedded with chicken wire, the kind school stairwells had in the fifties. he shattered the glass pretty impressively but the chickenwire kept it from spilling all over the place. he cut his hand and bruised it a bit. he was mad, i heard later, at his girlfriend. i saw her in class a day or so after, tiny, eyes cast down, and she told me he has an anger problem. she smiled when she said it, shyly, like she was in awe of such power, like she was glad he'd expressed his feelings for her so well. high school girls like boys who will hit things for them.

so when i see him a few days later in the same stairwell he starts yelling at me, saying i ratted him out. evidently he got himself suspended for this impressive bit of drama in the stairwell. i tell him i don't even know his name and he continues to yell a little more, maybe to prove to me he has this anger problem i've been hearing more and more about over the weeks. but i was raised by wolves, or at least by people with a stubborn streak, so i let him yell himself out and tell him maybe he ought to go to class instead of wasting so much time standing in a stairwell that smells like broccoli farts. it really does, by the way. he is mad that he thinks this is even the tiniest bit funny and he stomps off so i will not see him smiling.  i see him.

i hear the tiny girl who smiles when she thinks about him is pregnant. she sits in one of the classes i share with another teacher. she never raises her hand. she never talks. she sits quietly and hands in papers and reads short stories and might be focused enough to get into a college if she didn't have any other challenges staring at her. she stares down at her belly a lot lately.

when i walk through the halls and stairwells between classes i sometimes encounter clumps of children, most often boys, huddled together. usually they are doing nothing more than cutting class and when i walk up, especially in the stairwells, they look sheepish and scatter. there are seven in the group i see today, sitting all together in a stairwell, reeking of something that smells like cherry cough syrup. there is much shuffling and muttering and then a few of them shoot up the stairs. one or two just stand there, smiling the sort of dumb-faced grin i hope nobody ever has to see outside a school. and then there is mr. anger management. he stands up and starts to walk away.

i motion for him to stop and mention i hear he's going to be a dad. he looks at me funny because he doesn't have the skills with inferencing to know where i might be going with this. he nods, glares. tries very hard with his glaring to remind me he has anger problems. this is what you're doing? i ask him. this is what you're doing to get ready to be a father? i can see the confusion. i'm not fighting fair. the other boys are gone and i say softly your baby deserves a good dad. this is mean. every baby deserves a good dad and not many get one and it hardly seems fair of me to expect something from a fifteen year old boy most people don't expect of thirty year old men. but it's his baby. his choice. he yells back that he's going to be a good dad. i shake my head, tell him that if the best he can do is sit in a stairwell with a bunch of losers while he ought to be learning something, he will not be a good dad. your baby deserves a better dad than this, i say.

he looks less angry, more tired. he doesn't have even a tiny idea what is happening inside this small girl he might love. he has no way to know what a baby is all about or what it will need from him. he does not know he will need to teach it things. he does not know he can easily kill a baby when he is mad and not even see it happen. but i am not really worried about that. i know his anger is an excuse. it's a way to turn his back on responsibility for things. but it won't work here. he shoves open the stairwell door and stomps through, yelling over his shoulder that he will be a good dad. he will. he knows it.

i think about what i can tell him. what he might listen to. i have to plan ahead because i only see him times like this, when i am on my way somewhere else and he is where he isn't supposed to be. he must be a little scared, even if he doesn't really know how scared to be yet. he isn't the monster he pretends to be, but he tries so hard. maybe i should be asking instead of telling. is the baby a boy or a girl? what will you name it? what color sweater do you want me to knit?

wasting time

in 8th grade he walked up to a group of older boys in the street and said something very bad in spanish. he waited for the fight to start but the boys, who were not the gang members he'd hoped they were, simply looked at him the way you'd look at a yappy puppy behind a fence. this frustrated him, as you can imagine, so he threw rocks at them. handfuls of gravel, really. they walked on down the street, talking and laughing. he was not pleased. one of the older boys came to me the next day and asked me to do something about him. they didn't want to hit the child, he said, but eventually they would have to try to teach him what nobody else had been able to. 

he was not in my class in ninth grade but i would see him regularly roaming the halls in the colors of a latino gang that had no idea he existed. he was, in ninth grade, the sort of child whose name would bring shudders of boredom from teachers. he was bad but he was not very good at it.

so this year when i see his name on my class list i feel tired. i see him more often on the back sides of empty stairwells than in his desk. he is always wearing pegged jeans three sizes too small for his stubby self. he has no idea how unpleasant this is for those who have to walk behind him up stairs. his jacket is still always that same color, the way middle aged guys will sometimes wear the colors of a sports team that never considered them.

he smiles when he sees me lately, a slow smile that tells me he won't hold a grudge if i drag him to whatever class class he should be in. i have chased him up three flights of stairs, through silent hallways and back down again. i am quick for a fortysomething knitter and he is wearing his too-tight pants belted at the knees so i smile always when i drop him of at class and he smiles right back.

but when he is in my class some days i am fed up watching him trudge into the room fifteen or twenty minutes late, hat perched cockeyed on his head, earphones blasting something awful and so loud i can hear it. he drags his hand across desks. and i am through watching him slam three or four desks aside to settle himself into his own. it is to much to watch him take ten more minutes to root around in his backpack so loudly i have to raise my voice to be heard over his rustling. because inevitably after he has done all this he will say, loudly, i don't have a pen-paper-book-handout or i need to go to the bathroom. his smile is only getting him so far.

this time of year we have the conferences, the ones where parents come around scared or angry and wait in lines for us to tell them what is wrong with their children. that's the fear, that there is something genuinely wrong, that it is their fault. it is in the evening, after the parents are home from work. they dress up, speak in overly formal, tortured sentences. i try to make myself seem less scary but it never works. the boy is here, sitting at one of the desks outside my classroom. he is here, he tells me, to help. i try not to look overly shocked in front of the parents. i do not want to seem mean. he moves from door to door, this child, checking to see if anyone needs a translator. he helps parents find the right rooms and sign in with the right teachers. he chats with them a little and puts them at ease. he is here to help.

i do not recognize this behavior, do not recognize him. when he saunters into my classroom about five minutes before it is time to go home, i ask if he's here for a conference. i am joking. he does not quite get the joke. he motions the girl standing next to him toward one of the chairs and the three of us sit down. and we have a meeting. a real one. he says he didn't realize how much of his time he'd wasted. he looks shyly over at the girl and says he can't afford to keep wasting time. the girl thinks he is magnificent sitting there in those ridiculous pants and that tedious jacket. he is serious. i tell him what i've known for a while, that he's pretty smart, that i suspect he can read a little and when he says things in class they actually make sense. he shocks me by nodding, by saying he knows. he says he likes thinking about what we read. i turn to the girl, tell her she better keep an eye on him, say she ought to expect him to be smart if she's going to be seen with him. she nods very solemnly. she smiles over at him. he failed every class he took this marking period. every single one. but he has been in every single class for a week. he's never done that before.