Xavier Stops By
“I just came to say goodbye,” he said through the nine-paned glass door. I struggled to understand, not only because one usually comes by to say hello, but also because it was after midnight and the words were coming out of Xavier, a student in my third period class. We stood there for a heartbeat, the import and incongruity rippling between us like a fold in the bed sheets from which I had drowsily emerged. All I could think to say was, “How did you know where I live?” The answer didn’t come because we both already knew, and so I let him in without another word. Xavier was as smart as he was troubled.
Finding me in the school directory and then tracking down the rest via the Internet would have been simple for him. After all, he spent more time on the Web than in the real world. I can’t blame him, as his real world was a dry rub of pain and disappointment, seasoning him for a future that promised little more than more of the same. His mom worked hard to keep them fed, but that meant he was on his own most of the time, his stomach full but the rest perilously empty. In his eyes, you could see the raw and elemental need of a teenage boy growing up alone.
He sat down on my couch without asking, just as he had done on my desk during the countless lunchtime detentions and afterschool lectures grown out of missed assignments, misbehavior, or both. Xavier was the kind of student teachers quietly despise. He rarely did homework, never studied, and yet managed to ace all the tests. Except mine, of course. He managed only solid B’s on my quizzes, which I handed back to him with a cheeky, “Imagine if you actually tried.” We’d both smile and then mock frown. He knew what he was doing. Slipping by. Sliding through. He never got A’s, but never F’s, either.
Failing grades meant parent meetings and formal interventions. He was too smart for all that. Xavier’s marks kept him in that comfort zone of mediocrity wherein there wasn’t much his teachers could do for him, in either direction. The kids at the top get praise and support. Those at the bottom get admonishment and support. Too often, the kids in the middle get nothing. That was just fine with him, as escaping notice seemed his primary objective. He knew that, as long as he kept his standardized test scores at grade level and his class grades steady, he would get by. He would get over.
Xavier would get through, like he quickly did the juice and cookies I scrounged and silently proffered. “Talk to me, X. The hell you doing here, man?” There was no point to maintaining a false formality now. Twelve fifteen AM and my living room obviated that need quite laughably. Besides, I’m the “cool” teacher anyway. I’m the hard-ass they love. Because I talk to them like they’re actually people. Because I care about them and my job is my life. They can tell.
Most kids are keen truth detectors. Steeped in the lies and bravado that characterizes most adolescent interaction, they can smell the truth on you just as sure as they can taste the falsehood they are fed daily. When they come across an adult with the temerity to play it straight, it’s akin to a magnetic field. Some are repelled like a mismatched pole, while others are attracted, their electron spins quickly aligned with my own. The X-Man, as the other kids called him out of both respect and fear, knew his field strongly overlapped mine. I always told him the truth as I saw it, good or bad. And, lately, it had been almost all bad.
During one recent, pointed exchange, I had accused him of giving up on himself and on me. I told him that he was wasting my time and how it was very difficult to care about him when he clearly didn’t care about himself or his mom. This stung him. He was fiercely protective of his mother, as the bully a grade above had learned the hard way earlier that year after a careless “Yo Mama” joke. The black eye and chipped tooth would help him remember, too. Xavier was small, but always angry.
He simmered visibly in the hallways. His thin, angular face held back his energy like an ill-fitting pot lid, always threatening to bubble over and douse his own flame. You didn’t talk about Xavier’s mom without reprise, so that’s exactly what I did.
I snapped, “Reina know you’re here? Does she even know you’re gone?” I figured she likely found out roughly around the time I had, walking into their bare apartment after another night shift. Knowing him, he probably hadn’t even left her a note. Perhaps an extra-long hug or meaningfully glanced goodbye that morning was hitting her recollection now as she collapsed on his futon. I had never been in their place, but I knew the picture in my head surely matched. I knew his apartment because I had lived there in my own way, in my own version years ago. There was food in the fridge, clean clothes in the dresser, and maybe even books on the shelf, but not much else. The only thing he said was, “I found my real dad,” and smiled a crooked crescent as he one-eyed me through greasy bangs.
He had clearly hoped for a smile in return, but I had nothing but rage to give back, “So what, Xavier?” I was genuinely angry then, finally fully awakened from under the pile of papers I had fallen asleep grading. My near-shout roused my wife, but I shooed her back into the bedroom with a look over his shoulder. He didn’t turn, but clearly knew she was there because he apologized to the ceiling above him and drew a deep and heavy breath. “Look, I came here because you’re my friend and –,” he tried to finish, but I couldn’t let him.
“We are not friends, Xavier,” I growled, “Don’t get it twisted. I’m friendly, but I am not your friend!” I wasn’t, either. I know all too well that I walk the fine line every teacher does. I have to care about them to help them care about themselves, but I eventually learned to not get too attached. It makes my hard job harder. It makes watching them fail too difficult. Even when they succeed, it’s too painful to watch them graduate and move on without me, as they naturally should.
If I’m lucky, I’ll be dubbed their favorite, and I try to make them each feel special and important, but all the while knowing next year, there’ll be another one in their seat, just as hungry for a piece of me. I have to save some of myself for the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. Being a teacher is like working at the post office. The packages never stop coming and it’s my responsibility to make certain they end up anywhere but here.
Tonight, Xavier had postmarked himself for a Modesto father who hardly knew he existed. This fourteen year-old going on forty had decided that he was going to deliver a new life in a place that wasn’t waiting for him. I laughed bitterly at his earnest idiocy, “You stupid little bastard, how dare you?” I told him that he was destroying his mom, the only person who truly cared about him. And for what? Some stranger who had basically donated some sperm and then disappeared. “That’s not a father, Exxy,” using the childhood nickname he had only barely outgrown, “Your mom is more of a man than that dude.” This allowed us both a break to smile. Humor to the rescue again.
I make jokes, almost as raison d’etre. No one seriously misbehaves in my room because I am the real class clown. I’m an iron fist in a comically oversized glove, dealing daily a verbal slap and tickle that comes both from confident experience and a nearly pathological need for the spotlight. I’ve managed to find the perfect career for myself, a stand-up comedian in a club where laughing is not only mandatory, it’s graded. Amongst the curricular content, I put myself out there, hard and fast, every day. I hate to be bored, so I strive to be anything but boring. I’m sometimes strident but always consistent, often acting as the only constant for kids whose worlds sadly lack it. That’s why Xavier trusted me. That’s why he was sitting on my couch after midnight, trying to explain to me why he was about to throw his life away.
He was also there because I knew I wouldn’t let it happen. We talked for over an hour before he gave in to the inevitable. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was walking out that nine-paned glass door, alright. If he was with me, we were getting in my car and I was taking him back. If he left alone, I was calling the police and his mother, in that order. There was no Modesto in his near future, at least. There was no way I was letting him go anywhere but home. The only choice he had was how it would go down.
“Don’t you know me, son? You have to know me better than that. You are many things, but stupid isn’t one of them,” I said gently, reaching out my hand. He bypassed the offered handshake and embraced me. I held him tight enough for every student I have ever had to feel it from their own beds and couches in college dorms strewn across the country. Ten years multiplied by one hundred and twenty kids a year passed between us. I can admit that we both cried more than a little.
Neither of us spoke again until we reached his door. I had left the phone number with my wife and she called ahead. His mother threw it open almost before I even knocked. The first thing she did was slap his face hard. When she hugged him, he cried and apologized for the second time that night. I left them with the assurance I wouldn’t report these events after midnight. This would be just another secret, yet another story wistfully told among the many, as long as Xavier finished out the year and moved on. Which he did. Like they all do.
