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Published on 9/4/08
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As the other children begin to leave the classroom in a hurry, Miss Marble begins to get more than a little worried. Although Buddy can be likable sometimes, usually during art class, where he likes to be left alone, he generally prefers to express himself through violence. He will flick the ears of the girls who sit in front of him. He will slap the boys who are smaller than him on the backs of their necks. He will curl his fingers into the shape of a pistol and take aim on the rest of the students in the class, telling them, “Bang. You dead.”
When he gets in trouble for doing that, he will spend an entire afternoon drawing an incredibly realistic-looking sketch of a 9 millimeter—so detailed that Miss Marble has a feeling the boy may actually own one or two of his own—and threaten his classmates with the drawing instead. He will hold up the piece of lined notebook paper and point the graphite weapon at the students nearest him and whisper, “Bang. Bang. You all dead. You all dead.”
At moments like that, Miss Marble will regret her decision to join Teach for America. She will regret not going directly onto law school as she had originally planned. She will regret not quitting that very first day of the school year, which was the very first day she knew she would not be able to handle it, as she is only 22, a white girl who grew up in the suburbs, with red hair and very fine features, now teaching on the South Side, at an all-black school. Miss Marble knows she will not make it to the end of the year, which is more than seven months off, and more than she knows she can do.
Miss Marble finishes cleaning off the blackboard, swiping at the chalk with a belabored urgency, feeling more and more desperate as the other children leave, the classroom now becoming completely empty. She sets down the eraser, pretends to check her lesson plans, glances up, sees the boy is still staring at her, then quickly glances down again. Is he smiling? Or is it a frown? Is he leering? Is he staring at her right now with something like criminal intent? Miss Marble does not know. At her school, Miss Marble is often stared at like a ghost. The eighth-grade boys, tall in basketball jerseys with full-grown mustaches, pricey watches and gold chains about their necks, sometimes whistle at her in the hallway. She ignores them, which does not help, actually. Every day, like her students, she sits in the classroom completely terrified, hopelessly watching the clock, wondering why she is doing what she is now doing.
