1.
Khalil told me he could not find his backpack.
We are standing in the main lobby where the students enter each morning starting at 7:30. This is an important if not tedious part of my job. To greet students and stand sentry as the students file in one by one through the “scanners1,” depositing their phones first in a little labeled bin and then putting their backpacks, belts, etc. through the scanner before swiping their ID and making their merry way to advisory for check-in.
We confiscate what is not allowed and over the course of a few weeks I amass a tidy collection of iPads, cheap perfumes with names like Pleasures Intense, sherbet-hued vape pens, rolling papers, lighters, Arizonas and Frappuccinos (no glass), metal hair picks (no sharp objects), unidentifiable pills (no unidentifiable pills), basketballs, and once, to my great delight, a skateboard.
It is not uncommon for things to go missing in the scanner. A set of keys or a bag of chips will get snagged inside on its dark journey, and occasionally I will watch as a student and school safety agent peer into the scanner’s mouth, puzzled, the conveyor belt rolling and rolling but nothing emerging while the other students in line shift from foot to foot and throw their heads back with impatience — Bro. — knowing their loathsome advisors will deduct points if they miss check-in and it is already 8:08.
(It is also not uncommon hours later to spot a left AirPod or an unopened bag of Sour Patch Kids discarded beneath the scanner as if the machine had deliberated a long time before rendering its final judgement.)
But a backpack? An entire backpack lost in the machine? Impossible.
However, Khalil’s backpack is not a priority. Not at the moment. Disorder was assembling in the lobby. This was the first day of school.
The students were filing in one after the other and loitering in the lobby, as they do, chatting with friends they hadn’t seen since June, or scrutinizing their schedules, the girls clasping hands and jumping up and down while the boys did their little handshakes without looking at each other. Many awkward teenage one-armed hugs were exchanged. The 9th graders gaped like visitors from another planet. The teachers and school aides who were supposed to be helping direct the students to their advisories had also not seen each other since June and so were now chatting with each other. I bellow at the upperclassmen to go to their advisory — Good morning to you, too, sir, damn! — and pushed the 9th graders toward the teachers and catch the school aides’ eyes, snapping my fingers fastidiously like a majordomo.
Order prevails.
From the corner of my eye I see Khalil pacing. Khalil, I remembered, could get angry. So with order restored, I step over to see about this missing backpack.
Khalil is tall, maybe 6’2, and skinny, with broad shoulders, straight backed, pants perpetually low slung. One might call him svelte. His manner was wherever the Venn diagram of Jeff Spicoli and The Wire’s Marlo Stanfield overlapped. He had not been the easiest boy to deal with, and like many of his male classmates was at once laconic and surly, years behind where he should have been, with abysmal grades, spotty attendance and little interest in school. It was impossible to overstate the negative impact the pandemic and the legalization of marijuana had on him and boys like him, to say nothing of smart phones and the relatively recent meteoric success of his female peers, which unavoidably and tragically cast education as a zero-sum game. He had refused to join a boys group I had formed and when that group, much to my enduring shame, dissolved, and I found an outside organization to come in to mentor the boys, Khalil had refused to participate in that, too. In a fit I remember asking Why not? I think I literally stamped my foot. He ignored me. That group, composed of older, reformed versions of those very boys, had also fallen apart. All the boys got in turn were snazzy t-shirts and evasions from me about why there were no more meetings at lunch with “those O.G.s” or even me.
The boys haunt me. The sadness I feel thinking about their bleak futures is eclipsed only by the anger I feel thinking about the greater hypocrisy around their plight. Society tolerates, ignores or fears them until it is socially fashionable or politically expedient to do otherwise. And within the field of education it seems it is always the teachers with the loudest politics who bail after just a few years from the schools with the student populations who are the ostensible objects of their Nalgene stickers and sanctimonious hashtags.
But Khalil’s obstinacy infuriates me, too, and I am unfortunately in my worst moments at the mercy of my emotions as much as they are, despite appearances to the contrary. After school one day I watched him unwrap a candy bar and flagrantly toss the wrapper to the ground. I called after him to pick it up but he coolly walked on, wagging his finger in the air like Dikembe Mutumbo. He caught me on the tail end of a bad day, on a day I’d already dealt with his obstinacy over some other picayune thing, and so I ignored him for one month.
Last year I ignored a student for an entire 3 months because I couldn’t say a word to him about his (lack of) uniform, his (lack of a) bathroom pass, being late, head down, etc. etc. without him sneering at me and murmuring emasculating curses beneath his breath. The source of his anger was unclear and why I was the target of it was beyond me. Humor didn’t work. Stern orders were ignored. Entreaties were nonstarters. His defiance hurt. His armor, amazingly hard. What had I done? I cut my losses and determined he was a waste of time and sailed pass him in the halls and pointedly joshed with his friends while he stood nearby. Not my finest moment.
In the spring we passed each other in the empty lobby. A warm sun lit the marble floors. In an inspired moment of magnanimity I called after him and asked if everything was okay. He said Yes, Why? I said, You haven’t been at school for a few days. He said, Oh, I went to see my dad in Florida. Are you okay, he asked. I said, Sure, why? Because you haven’t talked to me all year, he said, and gestured like, duh. I made some sounds and said some words and he smirked and walked back to class, abandoning me in that bright lobby with my own shame. The students see you. Always. And that you work with children is not so difficult as remembering that you are an adult.
What color is your backpack? I ask Khalil.
Black.
I look at the backpacks of the students passing and note nearly all of them were black.
Anything else? Nike? Adidas?
I dunno.
You gotta give me more than “black.”
It had a… He drew a shape in the air with his fingers. A silver…
A triangle?
Nah, like… He redrew the shape.
A diamond.
Yeah. That.
Is…that it? I say this with a flourish, as if I were a magician who had made his card reappear across the room. I point to the table near the scanner where someone had left a backpack. A black backpack. I step over to grab it and walk back over to Khalil, holding it aloft by the top handle, victoriously. I was Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa. True, this backpack did not have a silver diamond on it but it did have a white Adidas logo on it (the one with the 3 bars, not the flower) and if you squinted or perhaps had not done very well in Geometry last year as I had on good authority Khalil most definitely had not, then you could be forgiven for mistaking the trilateral logo for a diamond.
Khalil holds the backpack in his hands and studies it. He studies it for a long time. Too long a time. My hopes fall.
Nah, he says.
It’s no problem, I say, looking at my watch and noting 1st period is about to start. Simple mix up. Head to class for now. We’ll find your backpack.
I do not say this with confidence because confidence implies doubt and why would I have any doubt that we would find this backpack? This simple, silly backpack?
I mean, how hard could it be?
2.
Inside the Adidas backpack there is a composition notebook, a folder, a few pens and pencils. Everything is brand new. The notebook cracks when I open it. There is nothing identifying an owner. No name written on the inside in black Sharpie. The backpack looks fake. A prop you’d see in a play.
3.
The next step, then, is to make an announcement. This would summon the backpack from one of the 1st period classrooms.
Welcome back. A very quick announcement here: Someone picked up the wrong backpack at scanning this morning and left theirs behind. It is a black Adidas backpack. So if you’ve got the wrong backpack in front of you, or if you’re missing yours, make your way to the main lobby! Thank you! Have a wonderful first day back at school!
The PA-version of myself sounded like a youth minister.
I walk back to the lobby to oversee scanning and wait for some daffy student to come moseying around the corner with the backpack. Most likely a confused and repentant freshmen, holding out the backpack like a 5-year old who’s taken candy from the store without realizing he’d needed to buy it.
After ten minutes, no one appears.
I make another announcement and return to the lobby and wait. Late students straggle in and the shrink beneath the look I give them that only a school administrator could give, the one that welcomes them and rebukes them at once. But no students from classes with the wrong backpack.
By the third announcement, I sound less like that cheery youth minister and more like a father pleading with this child’s kidnapper to let his sweet baby girl go free.
I return to the lobby and wait for another 5 minutes. Nothing. I look down at that black Adidas backpack at my feet and sighed.
Fuck me, I whisper. Watts, the school safety agent sitting at the desk, looks up from her phone.
This is now officially a thing, and this is exactly how the days got real hectic real quick at school. It wasn’t even 8:45 yet. But one thing happens and then another thing and you had to deal with them with assiduousness because no matter how small or seemingly insignificant a thing is that thing demands immediate attention because a thing when left alone always transforms into a big deal and the last thing you ever want on your hands is a big deal because a big deal summons principals and parents and those are creatures who are safer for everyone when they are very very far away, like colossal squid.
Thus I have become very much annoyed, and very much annoyed with Khalil and whichever absentminded student is party to hijacking this morning and now possible the day.
At the end of every year I make a list of things I want to do better, learn to do, or read up on for the following year. Every single list, both as a teacher and an administrator, includes the exact same item at the very bottom: Boys.
Just that word. Tagged on resignedly like the last relative you add to your wedding’s guest list. The word is shorthand for all the ways I failed to show up for the boys the previous year. It means be patient, check in more, learn their names first, be affable, don’t take it personally, be there, just say what’s up, forgive, be patient, don’t take it personally, ask about their lives, be patient, don’t take it personally, take a breath, learn every single one of their names, forgive.
A cool avunicularity is what I aimed for, but instead by October I always reverted to a schizoid composite of schoolmarm, Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest and your dad gallantly bringing all the damned bags in from the car. My resting pose was baseball coach.
Related: a great loss of innocence happens during a teacher’s first year when they finally acquiesce to the reality that they cannot actually be themselves in front of their students. That in order for their students to learn they have to become an Authority Figure. Their face hardens, their back straightens, their register lowers. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Children’s ability to forgive makes them Enlightened Beings, but their natural instinct to detect and exploit lenient adults makes them demons who will turn your class upside down. And so you learn very quick that a functional classroom must be calibrated to the minute and requires a scrupulous insistence on mise en place bordering on psychotic. You develop a three-dimensional situational awareness that makes air traffic controllers look like parking attendants. You realize wearing t-shirts to work just won’t do.
You shock yourself the first time you stand in front of your class and with a gravity you didn’t know you possessed and a feeling of disappointment you have never felt so deeply in your entire life and tell them that the work they have turned in is “unacceptable,” that their “behavior” has been “atrocious” and that you know they are “better than this.” You dramatically drop all of their papers in the trash. Their faces freeze in shock and the lips of the girls sitting in front tremble but now you know they know you mean business, that your classroom is a place where they will work hard and learn and you will tolerate none of their Mickey Mouse bullshit. When the students pass you in the hallway they straighten up, bid you a somber good morning, and walk purposefully to class.
But something is lost when educators elevate academic achievement to their primary goal. Students become a constellation of data points which, paradoxically, are individualized but depersonalized. Their school work, daily attendance, lateness, GPA, test scores, literacy and numeracy levels, credits, post-secondary college and career plans are monitored. This monitoring invites analysis and this analysis invites theories. Every achievement-focused educator is also a psychologist, sociologist and policy wonk. The students themselves become objects of study. And in spite of the fact that so many factors which affect student achievement lie far beyond the school’s control, an achievement-focused educator does not give up but instead holds tenaciously to the view that a student’s achievement is a direct output of his or her own individual decisions at school, all of which are encouraged or discouraged by the right school and classroom culture and not one of which is so trivial — getting to class on time, remembering to put their name on their work, not losing backpacks at scanning — that the achievement-focused educator doesn’t see that decision as increasing or decreasing the student’s overall achievement index, however slight.
The students, in other words, are problems to be solved. Fires to be put out. Another thing to do among the millions of things you must do. And when you have a million things to do it’s hard to give proper attention to all of those million things you must do.
So it gets that you forget to pull a boy to the side and ask apropos of nothing how he’s doing. Like, just, how are you doing, Jaylen?
That’s all most of them need most of the time. Just that.
But complicating matters even more are the socio-economic, generational, racial, linguistic, cultural and (in certain cases) religious chasms that exist between me and these boys and the head spinning way in which the importance of these categories is not the same from boy to boy or even given the situation. We have sneakerheads and Jehovah Witnesses and boys who run the streets and manga nerds who don’t know drill from jazz, and the Marlon in the cafeteria saving face in front of his crew by dialing up the culturally and age-specific machismo with a Jamaican patois inflected with a Brooklyn slang I can barely parse when I rebuke him for calling Arianna a bitch requires a different touch than that same Marlon who levels with me in my office that the reason he is late to school every day and therefore in jeopardy of failing his science class (and possible not graduating in June) is that by decree of his mother he must drop his two sisters off at school every day and, no, sir, this is non-negotiable, say no to mommy, are you crazy, sir?
The guilt that comes from your failure to show up for the boys in the ways they need keeps you up at night. June comes again. Your write your list. You quickly write Boys at the bottom. Again.
4.
I go back to my office and toss the anonymous Adidas backpack onto the table already cluttered with busted laptops and two confiscated trucker hats still unclaimed from last school year (yes, trucker hats are in again) and various policy guidances I have neatly stapled and stacked to coax me into reading but which I know I won’t for another week at least, and also the folder labeled “Resumes - Foreign Language” that has remained empty since June since Foreign Language teachers are Yeti. Also: the Algebra teacher’s broken document projector which in approximately one day will become the subject of frequent, passive aggressive emails inquiring into the status of; a sample Physics textbook; a box of unlabeled Ziploc bags with keys to lord knows what; printer cartridges for the poster maker; and, most dishonorably, a few greasy Tupperware containers I keep forgetting to take back home and which in a fit of Marie Kondo-inspired nihilism and disgust, I will end up throwing away. I want to light this table on fire. I often tell myself there is a parallel universe in which I am sitting in a sleek office at a dark walnut desk that has, like, just a laptop and a glass of mineral water on it. My pants fit perfectly and I don’t have to pack a lunch every day or even carry keys. But I know this is a lie and that, hilariously, in all of the infinite universes within the multiverse, I am sitting in an office with a table heaped with the responsibilities of a harried school administrator. Even in the alternate universes where schools or tables don’t exist.
Wherever you go, there you are.
I sit down and check my email and then spin in my chair to look at the backpack. The annoyance I feel at realizing what I have to do next is only tempered by the relief I feeling knowing that this is what will bring the matter to a conclusion.
So, I wait for the second period to start and then take the backpack to every single classroom and say the following:
Whose backpack is this?
And when no one claims it, I then say this:
Everyone take their backpack and hold it out in front of yourself like this. Look at the backpack. Then ask yourself, Is this my backpack? If the answer to that question is no, please stand up.
I actually insist that every single student does this. There’s an edge to my voice, a slight condescension. I’m peeved they didn’t pay attention to the three previous announcements, but I’m also losing my mind. Someone has Khalil’s backpack. It has to be in one of these classrooms. The school has 25 classrooms on one floor. Not exactly a needle in a haystack here.
Most of the kids are confused but comply. The upperclassmen carp, as if I’m their dad who has made them go back to the kitchen to put their dirty glass in the sink. I riposte and say Oh I’m so sorry for interrupting your close reading of the class contract. This earns me an ambush of kissed teeth. A few students look intently at their backpack and inquire ironically Are you my backpack??? A few make kissy faces at their backpacks. In every single class one person stands up and then quickly sits back down, har har.
I have conscripted into my services my most loyal school aide, a former student named Rouse who, as a student was rather unindustrious (to put it lightly) but as a school worker is a workhorse. Whether it was the case that my class was so deadly dull that he couldn’t be bothered to so much as shift in his seat, or rather that he has found his life’s purpose in hourly remuneration of low-skilled quasi-grunt work, I do not know. I’ve never asked. But he gets the job done. He is invaluable to me.
I had sent Rouse on a recon mission to the gym and to the empty classrooms to search beneath the desks and bleachers and the backs of chairs for Khalil’s backpack — it is amazing how often students just stand up and walk away from all of their shit — and now he has caught up with me on my way to the very last classroom in the far reaches of the B wing. The school is not large but it is long. He’s practically jogging next to me. I slow down. I have not yet mastered the untroubled stride of a Person of Authority and instead still hustle from place to place like a batboy. It is undignified.
I look down at his hands: empty.
Nothing?
Nothing.
I chortle like a deranged man.
You good? He asks.
What are the chances this backpack is in this very last classroom? The laaaaast classroom we visit? Zero. So, like, where the hell is this thing?
He shakes his head consolingly, as if he just found out my sister had relapsed again.
Our walkies crackle as we turn the corner into the last classroom.
A roomful of 9th graders in vibrant yellow polo shirts immediately stop what they’re doing and look up at us. Mr. Munson, their Biology teacher, yields the floor but I detect a sigh. I have mixed feelings about these uniforms, but the argument that they engender a certain esprit de corps is especially difficult to refute in September when the polos are still so spectacularly crisp and clean, and the students still so eager to please. By June, these polos, just like the floors the custodians will wash and wax over the summer, will be so pallid, the students so thoroughly reprogrammed to follow all of the school rules and drink up the school culture that you can’t help but reconsider Nineteen Eighty-Four as a useful how-to.
I say my thing. This is literally the 25th time I’ve said it. I deliver it with a stripper’s detachment.
The students stay still.
Munson is impatient to resume class. I hear him capping and uncapping the dry eraser marker. He is one of those passionate teachers who so strongly believes in the sacrosanctity of his own subject that a student graduating without knowing what a mitotic spindle is surely qualifies as educational neglect. Thus his class is boring and he cannot see that it is boring and he rarely remembers to take attendance or complete any of the simple administrative tasks that teachers must do that are not directly related to instruction. He mainlines Diet Coke all day long. He is a pain in my ass.
Anyone? I say.
After a long beat, Munson steps forward to seize control of his class again. Okay, folks— he says. The age, ethnicity, gender and politics of a teacher determines whether he or she refers to the class as “guys”, “people”, “class”, “folks,” “my friends,” “peeps,” “children,” or the deeply irritating “humans” and “y’all.” While I roll my eyes, thinking, It’s the first day of school for goodness’ sake, something happens: a student stands up.
And sits back down again.
It happens so quickly anyone could miss it.
You see what I just saw, I ask Rouse in a low voice. Two cops on a stakeout.
Hmm-mm.
The student stands up again, hesitantly. He is a very large boy, but gentle and soft. Ursine is the appropriate word. His brow is furrowed. The backpack is black and has a silver reflective diamond on the front and I feel a rush of relief. Euuuuuurrrreeeeeeekkkkkkkaaaaaaa, I sing in my head.
Is that yours? I ask.
He is confused.
The class stares at him.
Is that backpack yours? I ask.
He says nothing and sits back down.
The class looks at me. They look at the boy. I look at Rouse. Rouse looks at me. Rouse is confused. Although I have become skilled at keeping my face fixed in one expression no matter what is happening, in this moment I have failed, and so I, too, show Oscar-winning confusion.
Can you come up here? Bring your backpack?
The boy lumbers toward us with his backpack and we step outside the class. He makes no eye contact and I can’t discern if the look on his face is one of vacancy or annoyance, as if I am TSA insisting on a thorough search of his carry-on for what he can promise me is just a wine opener. Almost all of your initial impressions of the 9th graders are wrong.
Munson resumes teaching immediately. Okay, folks . . .
I cannot for the life of me understand why there would be any confusion as to whether this backpack is this student’s or not but consider 3 rational explanations: 1) I saw what I wanted to see and upon closer inspection will find that the backpack is navy blue or does not in fact have a silver reflective diamond; 2) The student speaks another language and didn’t understand me; 3) He was too embarrassed in front of his classmates to admit he’d taken the wrong backpack.
All three are immediately ruled out.
It’s mine, the boy says flatly once we’re out in the hall.
His confidence throws me. It turns out he’s not quite the oafish naif I suspected he was, and for a half second I’m in high school again talking to one of the hulking hockey players whose unreserved masculinity I feared, envied and disdained. Transference is psychoanalytic term that describes the projection of your feelings related to one person in your life onto another, and it is not acknowledged enough as a phenomenon between educators and students in schools2.
(But which hasn’t teacher hasn’t subconsciously graded a student down to a B- when she easily could have given her a B simply because that student reminded her of the mean girl who once mocked her in the cafeteria?)
You’re sure?
He nods again.
I sigh. Okay then. Go back inside.
I look at Rouse and shake my head like What now? He doesn’t say anything. He just stands there and stares at me blankly like he used to in class when I would ask him to take his notebook out and get to work already. I hated that look.
5.
It is now lunch and I am standing in the cafeteria which after so many years still feels as chaotic and disorienting as an exotic city’s outdoor market. But it only seems frenzied. It only feels loud. Yes, there are shouts and explosions of laughter and the hyperactive boys for no reason jump a lot (when is the last time you jumped?) and there’s a lot of sitting down and standing up and then sitting back down again but it’s not that hectic. Not really. And this is one of the illusions of working with teenagers, this impression of madness and disorder where there is none. If they were paintings, they’d be Jackson Pollocks.
Most students are simply talking quietly at tables or standing in tight little groups or promenading arm in arm around the cafeteria like Victorian ladies at the park. Some students play Uno or draw. No one has brought their own lunch in the traditional sense, but some rip into room temperature deli sandwiches they’ve pulled from their bags. Some eat the free free3 off beige, biodegradable lunch trays, but more students daintily nibble at Sour Power Straws or Doritos or sip warm Sprite. The vast majority eat nothing still. How they are able to function all day by eating complete garbage or nothing at all is not quite the physiological mystery it seems once you realize that high school students spend most of their days staring at Google Slides and filling out worksheets. A student needs only so many calories when school is a crashing bore.
Khalil sidles up and stands next to me. He says nothing. I know the ways of the boys enough at this point to know it is incumbent upon neither of us to initiate conversation. Instead the conversation, whatever it is to be about, will emerge incidentally after a casual exchange of ‘sups or dabs or an undefined lapse of time.
This is what the boys do when they want to talk to me. They do not approach head-on or look me in the eye or indicate in anyway that they need to ask me something. They just cooly saunter up and stand there next to me, barely in my peripheral. It drives me crazy. Not necessarily because this reads to me as dodgy since I know in the world the boys move through the exact opposite is true. (See also, wearing hoods.)
No, it drives me crazy because it is perfectly emblematic of what can be so difficult about working with the boys. Which is that they are so blasé about what they need. They won’t tell you shit. They could have lost a leg in gym and they’d just balance on the other one next to you. A former honors student has to fail all of his classes and get into a shoving match in Global over a misplaced pencil before you learn his mom absconded to Virginia with her boyfriend over the summer, not to be heard of since. The quiet 12th grader who draws a lot lives in a shelter. The boys sometimes relay these pieces of information with an unsettling matter-of-factness that indicates not their own indifference but their youthful incomprehension of the magnitude of their trauma. What sends me back to my office with my head low lest anyone sees me with tears in my eyes is not the fact of their trauma but the knowledge that these boys will only really deal and feel the effects of it many years later. We see the explosion across the water before we feel it in our chest.
To help a boy requires the sensitivity and intuition of a horse whisperer. My ability to read them, honed after years but still not sharp enough, waxes and wanes depending on the busyness of the day and my mood and the boys’ moods and a thousand other variables that throw up noise (see above), and the pitiful irony that threatens the connection is the one that threatens all relationships: just when they need it the most I’m able to give it the least.
In this case, though, I know exactly what Khalil wants.
We haven’t found it, I tell him.
Bro, he says.
I wince and resist the urge to 1) remind him who he’s talking to and also 2) tell him don’t bro me bro it’s your fault you lost your backpack I’m the one trying to help and you don’t know how much time I have spent already this morning trying to find this thing as if I don’t have fourteen thousand other things to do you children can be just so exquisitely ungrateful sometimes it really is something and instead of standing here expressing your disappointment about how I do my job for you by. the. way. why don’t you take a quick stroll around the cafeteria where all of the students in the school are and see if you can find—
Let’s go, I say, suddenly inspired, and I’m off. After a few steps I look behind and see Khalil still standing there just staring at me.
Vamos, amigo! Let’s go! He trots after me and soon we’re side by side, briskly moving through the cafeteria.
Yo what are we doing?
We’re going to find your backpack.
He immediately gets it and falls in stride with me and we’re weaving through the crowd, two comrades on a mission. No one can stop us. He’s looking left. I’m looking right. I’m looking right. He’s looking left. No backpack escapes our scrutiny. Backpacks buried in the corners of the booths are exhumed for inspection. Students wearing backpacks are made to turn around. A group of students leaving the cafeteria for the library is briefly detained so we can inspect their backpacks first. Khalil actually holds his hand up to them, like a border guard.
We stalk through the entire cafeteria and finish our search in the 9th grade section. Along the wall I see the large boy sitting at a table with the black backpack in front of him. My hopes swell. My adrenaline spikes. Though the boy confidently stated the backpack was his I’m suddenly not so sure, and so I wait for Khalil to spot the backpack. There’s a final showdown feeling around this, an inevitability, a moment of truth — two boxers who’ve been talking trash for weeks finally stepping in the ring together. A conclusion is nigh.
Anything?
Nah.
Khalil has his hands in his pockets and looks out at the 9th graders like you might regard the available cars at a used car lot.
I look directly at the black backpack on the table and catch Khalil’s eye and pointedly look back at the backpack.
Nothing?
He shakes his head.
I give up the charade and point directly at the backpack.
Khalil, that’s not it?
Nah.
No?
Nah.
I sigh. The camaraderie is gone. We’re back to our natural states. Antagonists. Two people pulling in opposite directions toward the same goal. If he says nah one more time I’m going to scream.
That one? The black one with the silver diamond?
Nah.
He walks away.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Be patient, check in more, learn their names first, be affable, don’t take it personally, be there. . .
This, I realize, is not a search for a backpack. This is a search for truth. For what is known and not known. It is ontological. Or epistemological. Or whatever. Either way this search, by nature, then, is endless: a slow spiral downward toward THE BACKPACK which itself recedes further and further away, contingent as it is upon the answer to the question How do you know? which only invites yet more questions. This it is not so much a search as a free fall into an abyss. I have no choice but to embrace the nothingness. There is no backpack.
Liberated with this knowledge, I exhale and open my eyes just in time to see a crew of 10th grade boys simultaneously free throw apples into a trash can from 15 feet away. Most of them miss and the apples ricochet and roll in a thousand directions.
I smile like a guru and drift out of the cafeteria.
6.
When the final bell of the day rings, I am outside in front of the building.
The students stream down the stairs and out of the front gates pecking and scrolling through their phones, which they have picked up from labeled bins at the end of the day. My school has never allowed phones and in an interesting irony the metal detectors we were criticized for years ago as just another racist component of the school-to-prison pipeline have become in an entirely new way indispensable to maintaining a positive culture of learning.
A few teachers scamper out with the students and I think, You couldn’t wait 5 minutes? A few of the boys lean against the parked cars and I have the same conversation with them that I had with a different groups of boys yesterday and that I will have with a different group of boys tomorrow: Is that your car? Yeah, bro. What’s the make and model? Beemer, bro. Not in your wildest; get off of it4. Three of the girls set a phone against the gate, hit record, jump back and dance wildly. Like quick-change magicians, many of the students are already out of uniform, the boys in hoodies, the girls impossibly in black tights, a few in Crocs or slides. Among the throng of Nikes and Vans and daddish New Balances we have one iconolast who wears Hokas — a Ghanian boy named Adom — and he strides by, bidding me a droll Au revoir. More than a few of the boys still wear masks, but loosely over their chins, just a different version of a hood, a thing they use to hide themselves from the world. Students huddle in bunches at the bus stop across the street or walk slowly down the sidewalk, aimless and with no hurry; they don’t want to be in school but they don’t want to go home. A police car sits silently with its lights on at the four-way stop down the street.
From the corner of my eye I spot the large 9th grader as he trundles through the gate. He is wearing the black backpack with the silver reflective diamond. Since I have not thought of this backpack since lunch, I wince as if I’m looking at an exorbitant unpaid credit cart statement that I’d hoped would just go away.
I consider making one last ditch effort. I could make him stop and open his backpack. Just a double triple check to make double triple sure. It occurs to me that we never asked him to open the backpack. Students all of the time insist something is theirs — a jacket, a notebook — until you actually make them look at it, at which point they realize, Oh. The student recedes farther and farther down the sidewalk until he is gone.
Then Khalil and his crew walk past. They are the last of the students leaving the school. Khalil’s hands are in his pockets and he is, of course, without a backpack. I will call his mom and let her know. I will offer to pay for a new backpack. Not the worst thing in the world, but just not a good way to start the year. Stop draggin’ it, I can hear my students say. It’s not so deep.
I call out to Khalil. He turns around and is slowly walking backwards to keep up with his friends.
I’m not sure what I’m about to say but before I do he speaks.
I never had it, he says.
What?
Remembered I didn’t have it today.
I laugh nervously. Your backpack?
Forgot it at home.
You’re joking.
Nah, he says.
My mouth is open. He spins back around and catches up with his friends.
Nah. I think.
But it’s just a backpack.
Nah.
It’s despair, too.
Above image: Clifford Denim Backpack from National Museum of American History.
The New York City Public Schools’ cyberpunk euphemism for “metal detectors.”
If it is, it’s often recoded as “bias.”
This is the New York City student’s pejorative for the school lunch. Though the food nowadays is not half bad, the “free free” isn’t considered just gross, it’s also considered deeply uncool since it’s a signifier of poverty (even though schools wisely dropped the slightly onerous lunch form requirement and decided to just give everyone lunch, no questions asked.) Students use the term as a joke and its reduplication is funny and I’m guilty of having laughed at more than once, but it’s a pretty pernicious term when you get down to it, and its use has no doubt contributed to countless children sitting through their afternoon classes hungry.
Given how protective New Yorkers are of their personal space, they are, to a citizen, quite brazen about leaning on other people’s cars.