I drove down South Hairston, on my way to work. It's brighter in the mornings now and I could see clothes strewn down the yellow line, all of the way down the road. I made the left by the Sikh temple and pulled into the parking lot by the trailer where I work. The school's dumpsters were full of household goods and baby clothes, stuff from people who had been evicted.
Jaime's mom warned me that they were moving. He'd been such a dick lately, I was almost relieved. They were moving to Rockdale, which I knew would be better, and I told her so. Better schools, better services for English learners. I was surprised when they called me to the front office Monday morning, because a student wanted to say goodbye to me. The whole family was there and Jaime was nearly in tears. I could tell I was about to cry too, so I asked him if he wanted to visit his second grade teacher. We said our goodbyes and Jaime ran out of the front door of the school. I walked slowly away, feeling a pit in my stomach.
May only the best come to you and your family, I repeated over and over in my head while I walked to the trailer.
Teacher Appreciation Week happened. Mya brought me a card, telling me how much I "slay" and a creepy looking clay egg. I wrote her one back, telling her that I will miss her terribly because she also, slays. Eduardo made me a card and brought flowers, picked from someone's front yard, and a bag of Doritos. Ariel brought me a pink flower from her Plant Cycle project. These things are better than some stupid Starbucks card, any day of the week.
They make me proctor a lot of testing at work. Sometimes I get to test my own students, which is awesome and sometimes, I don't. I had a large group of my students in the trailer, testing, when I received a voicemail from Adan's mom. We had been texting back and forth since she and Adan moved. She told me they found a new place and I helped her look up which school she should enroll him in. As soon as the kids finished the test, I listened to the message.
It was DFCS. Mom had given the agent her phone and told them to call me. I argued with the DFCS woman on the phone, in front of my kids. How there was no way in hell that I would help her take Adan away from his mom. How insane it was that they didn't even have a Spanish speaker to conduct an interview with a mom while they were threatening to take her child. That everything I was hearing was wrong and I WOULD NOT PARTICIPATE. The agent's voice softened a little bit.
"Look," she said.
"I want to close this case. It seems extreme to me. I don't think mom has papers and I know that she is scared. Can you verify what she said, that she has been in constant contact with you, attempting to enroll her child in school?"
"Yes. She has been in constant contact and has even Ubered to the school already, trying to enroll him."
"Okay, I'm going to do what I can." she answered.
"Who did this?" I asked.
"Someone named Ingle. A social worker from your school system. She said he had more than thirty absences....."
"I can send you a screenshot of the absences he has had from my school and believe me, it is no where near thirty. I have never even heard this person's name."
"Are you saying her information is incorrect?"
"Yes. Yes I am."
My fifth grade group of students is now five Spanish speaking boys and one Karen girl. Pway is very patient with their antics and the fact that they ditch English all together when they are together. I have this image of the first time some high school Spanish teacher tries to get Pway to say what she knows about the Spanish language and she responds, pinche wey, no mames, pendeja. And then, threatens to fuck their mom.
I kept trying to get the kids to do some work. I sat next to Eduardo, while he clipped away on his Chromebook. I heard chupa-something, and made a Chupacabra joke.
"That's not the kind of chupa that I was talking about." he said slyly, and kept smacking his computer.
I laughed. Even though it is at the least wildly inappropriate to tell your teacher to suck your dick, I like it better when they're wily instead of sad and wondering when you are going to leave them, too.
It was Career Day, but I still went to see my students while various people presented their professions. As soon as I came in, Danny and Eduardo turned around and stopped listening to the presenter.
"¡Me gustan!" Eduardo scream-whispered, touching one of my silver-painted finger nails.
I told them to turn around and pay attention. They next time both boys turned back around, they had colored their fingernails with pencils so that they would be silver, too.
I raced through the cafeteria, my entrance to the school from my trailer, trying to get to my next class.
"Ms. Wagner!" an administrator called.
"Yeah?' I responded, caught of guard.
"You gonna have to respond to them." she said, smiling.
My fifth grade boys were all waving furiously across the cafeteria, even the puerto rican kid they recently recruited was doing it.
I watched Rafael slink across the trailer one morning, his eye catching something. It was a long pink fake finger nail, part of a press-on set Ariel had worn one morning. I watched him glance around and clandestinely put it in his pocket.
"Why do you talk like a baby? You're stupid, a child." Arecely hissed at Eduardo.
"No me importa." he responded, blowing her off.
They continued coloring in their journals.
I don't know what this girl's problem is. One second sweet, the next, a salty mess.
I did a little sleuthing on my own, trying to figure out the leak in the Adan situation. At least one person, and possibly two from my school were involved with the social worker with a hard-on that had been stalking Adan's family since a previous school. I am not a confrontational person, but I guess I had questions.
"Hey there, I was trying to find out why you couldn't provide ANY Spanish-language resources for a housing-insecure family, but could find a way to send DFCS to scare a mom to death?"
Her response: Call me. And dumbass didn't even leave a phone number.
I did end up calling her. It wasn't pleasant.
"You sound angry." she said, baiting me.
"Well, maybe I am. Are you telling me that the only social service our school system can provide to non-English speaking parents is DFCS?"
"They're trying to help." she responded.
"DFCS?!"
"We got the address from an entry you made in the parent contact log."
My skin started to prickle. So, I helped? That crazy cunt from the other school dug through my contact log?
"Do you think it's a choice for you to NOT give up that information?" she continued, a threatening edge to her tone.
"Let's just chalk this up to lesson learned, thank you for your time." I said, and hung up.
I didn't want to admit it, but it was chilling. States across the country are passing anti-immigrant legislation. Much of the anti-trans legislation has focused on schools. In the 80s they tried to bar undocumented children from attending public schools. I believe they tied it to the AIDS crisis, similar to the measures Biden and Trump used with COVID to deny entry to the United States. We are living in a dystopian time and I feel like it is only going to get worse for us, for my kids. It really is us against them and I will never make the mistakes I made with Adan again.
"Do you get to talk to your dad much, since you left?" I asked Eduardo one day.
"My dad?" he responded.
"Yeah, you know your other dad?" I know that he lives with his mother and two sisters and her husband. The family that was created here while he grew up down there, before she sent for him.
"No, I have only met him once."
"Who did you live with?" I asked.
"Mis abuelos."
"I'm sorry, I didn't realize....do you get to talk to them sometimes?"
"Not really." he answered.
"What are these?" he asked, looking at some tickets I had on my desk from some drawing the school had done.
"We used these in the alburgue...."
"Wait, what? They sent you to one of those places? HOW LONG?" I asked. The detention centers on the border, the ones with kids lying on the floor under tin foil emergency blankets.
"Only a week. My aunt was with me in the group when we crossed through Mexico. Hot cold, hot cold! We got to the border and they took me to the center and deported her."
I stared back.
"Then, they put me on a plane and flew me here. A month walking in Mexico and a hours to get to Georgia!" he said, smiling.
It was early and the kids were tearing through the trailer, getting journals, colored pencils, eating funky breakfast from the cafeteria. I saw Arecely sidle up to Eduardo, whispering something.
"¡PERRA!" he yelled in her face.
I guess she had pushed him far enough.
I walked up the hill with the walkers. The hispanic contingent is less now, after Adan and Jaime moved. No more groups of "Spanish moms" as Jaime called them, waiting at the corner for their kids. Eduardo's mom stood up there though, with a couple of little children around her. Sometimes I find it hard to communicate with her. I don't know if it is because my Spanish sucks, or if it is because she thinks every communication that comes from the school comes from me. She'll ask me abruptly about things and I have no idea what she is talking about. She started asking me about a T-shirt Eduardo's sister had wanted for Field Day. I looked at her blankly and Eduardo started trying to pitch in, translating the few words he knows into English.
"Mi hija pensaba que no tuviera yo bastante dinero." she said, bitterly.
I felt really stupid, confused and everyone was looking at me and it was raining. I tried to explain and she seemed annoyed. There seemed like an implication that I wasn't doing my job, which bothers me because I try really hard to get my families everything that they need. Eduardo seemed weird, too. Not my normal, no mames wey boy. He had the face on that he uses when he is around his homeroom teacher. Kind of serious and blank. I walked back down the hill in the rain, feeling beaten down. I glanced back up at them, but they all walked with heads forward.
I sat at my desk in the morning while the kids filed in. I greeted them, while they set themselves up for our morning together. Eduardo walked behind me, wrapping his arms around my neck. I felt his face burrowing into my shoulder.
"I hated yesterday." I said.
I felt his face push harder into my shoulder and he just stood like that for a very long time.
*Title, Gordon Lightfoot
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