He held on for dear life, though he would only admit this later. His friend’s coiled body pumping furiously at the pedals over rough pavements, down and up well-worn hills used to such transgressions, and worse. Deftly managing the traffic and hazards, the pedaler knew her wares: a cold dose of reality.
“What do you mean this kind of thing happens?” is what I said to the assistant principal. “Don’t you have any kind of control over these kids?” is what I thought. How naive I was.
I pulled up at the other school and immediately recognized E., though we’d never met. She was still on the bike, a tomboy with a sullen, dark look. High alert. Hair up. Baggy clothes. The smiles would come later. Whatever she’d gone through, she was still going through.
School was already hard for him and then the pandemic hit. He never really felt successful at school, academically nor with friends. ADHD and unspecified “learning disabilities” meant school was just harder for him. Math was a bunch of nonsensical symbols that did random things. He hated not being able to “get” things and soured on the idea of school fairly early on. During his first week of kindergarten, he nearly hyperventilated after going into the “red” zone; we kept him home the next day. He had a unique creativity and his classmates’ relationship varied from indifference, jealousy, to subtle hostility. The time he “accidentally” tripped on a kid’s leg at lunch in 3rd grade and split open his lip on a table was no accident.
COVID set him back academically, just like millions of others. He did his best but on-line just didn’t cut it. He’s a much more hands-on, interpersonal kid. For that reason, E. and her friends were the perfect fit.
In middle school, which starts in 6th grade here, he found a group who welcomed him into their fold. They were rough-edged Latinos and Latinas, the kids of parent(s) working two jobs, if they even had 2 parents, some with or without papers. These are parents who tried their best but were nonetheless caught up in the expanding cycle of poverty, one of the cogs in the capitalist machine. These kids long ago figured out school wasn’t for them and, whether they realized it or not, were already planning to follow their parents’ footsteps of hard work and quiet desperation. E. was their defacto leader.
He says it was because he wasn’t afraid to stand up for himself that they accepted him into their group. Indeed, he got in a few fights he didn’t instigate and this, apparently, impressed E. enough to accept him into her “gang.” For a group of kids who likely had to do a lot of “standing up for themselves” just to get by, this seems a logical criteria. Their favorite pastimes included skipping class and smoking weed, plus hanging out in “downtown,” roaming the isles of Five Below and taking selfies of their antics. Not exactly the most upstanding activities but our son couldn’t get enough of it.
The summer school opportunity was recommended to us by the school’s “ritsee” or RTSE (resource teacher for special education). An affable guy with whom our son had a good relationship, we were grateful for his suggestion. It wasn’t so much Adrian’s grades which left us in dismay but his apparent apathy towards improving them. Looking back, it wasn’t that he didn’t care about his grades (though he told us that plenty of times over) but that he couldn’t figure out how to improve them, so why bother? If you know your chances of success are slim, why get your hopes up?
The school wasn’t too far but beyond a feasible walking distance so we’d drive each way. Not a small feat considering the heavy population density and perpetual construction. I’d pulled up to no kid and asked around to discover he likely hitched a ride with E. to who knows where. E’s batting record for stable decisions was a solid 0.00 so the blood pressure shot up pretty quickly. There were no real safe spaces to bike let alone for two 12 year-olds sharing a bike. We hadn’t yet given him a cell phone and after a few more of these “disappearances” we finally broke down and got him one. I know, we are terrible parents, rewarding bad behavior and all. But to all the critics out there, we have an atypical kid who requires atypical parenting. At least now we have a better idea of where he is.
I “knew” E. from stories I heard from a colleague. Her mother would report back school fights, mental breakdowns, and other disturbances centering around a certain E. At the time, she didn’t go by E. but by a different name, a name which means ‘star.’ At the same time my son’s friendship with E. began to blossom, and I’d also hear stories about this “E” from him, and it didn’t take long to connect the dots. So this is his best friend now? After 7 years of finding little meaning in school, the main reason he got out the door every day was to be around a troubled girl leading him to perdition. This is proof positive that God has a wicked sense of irony.
Before you think there was anything romantic between them, let me assure you there wasn’t. In a different universe where E. had not been sexually abused and tormented by demons of her past, it’s quite likely things might have been different. E. was very much your typical sloe-eyed Latina with dark hair and slender limbs, and our son wasn’t shy of girls. if you saw them together, you would have thought they were siblings. I’m not exaggerating. It was well known even among teachers how close the two were. However, for reasons I suspect are mostly out of self-preservation than anything else, E. steered clear of heterosexual relationships and made that well known to her friends, who were mostly boys anyway. She pursued girls much to the dismay of her step father who at one point, I am told, threatened to send her to El Salvador if she didn’t stop “being gay.” E. was very typical of children her age exploring their sexual identity. However, she didn’t have a safe place to do that and therefore “stood up for herself” as best she knew, even if her efforts were ultimately self-destructive. It’s a familiar story played out too many times in our world.
So there she was, straddling the bike, my son close by, trying to avoid my eye contact. I pull up, weighing my options. “Hello. Nice to meet you,” I remember saying to her, or something to that effect. “Thank you for bringing him here.” I don’t think she said anything but I’m sure it wasn’t what she was expecting. Kids get yelled at enough already, why add to that? Besides, I had zero rapport with her and felt like I didn’t have much to go on in terms of admonition. To that extent, shortly thereafter we started inviting her to various activities that summer, things she’d never experienced before, it would turn out; baseball, MLS soccer, duck pin bowling, the indoor pool, ice skating, and an Indian restaurant. Her swim gear was shorts and t-shirts.
Once when I drove them to an especially nice indoor pool E. and another friend C. were agog over the larger homes and open spaces in that part of the county. Whether serious or not, they were making plans to move out there together some day where “everyone is safe.” It occurred to me that E. and C. likely never much left the square mile or so between their apartment complex and school.
The last time we were together we went bowling and ordered Indian, her first experience of that cuisine. She liked it and we tentatively had made plans to try an outdoor “Adventure Park” when the weather cooperated. I found out she’d died the same time my son did, while he played soccer with a small group of friends. “E. died,” one of them said. “Something about a train.” I fell to the ground sobbing. The one friend in the world Adrian found a connection with, gone? Just like that? She’d been skipping school with a few other boys and took some risks on a Metro train and didn’t win. “Subway surfing,” apparently, streaming the video for likes. Our son suspects she had a kind of death wish, taking many such risks in the past, and generally living on the edge. He says that if he’d have been there, he would have told her to stop, to not do it. But he was a follower and might he have joined her too? Knowing his tendency to listen to E. instead of us boring parents, it was a very real possibility. We set up a Gofundme for her Mom and soon a funeral was planned. Hundreds attended, from teachers to members of her soccer team, to family and friends. It was an open casket and her good friends were upset she’d been dolled up with makeup, nails, and a wig; she never looked so feminine. Maybe it was the way her Mother wanted to remember her for the last time.
The funeral was incredibly sad. Her mother sobbed hysterically at the coffin; I imagined she wanted to curl up there beside her first born. She attended a small fundamentalist church and was buried in one of their plots. Their church was a Moose Lodge. The preaching was completely awful, and although in Spanish, I could pick up enough to know that the preachers suggested such was the “fate of sinners” and those who “disobeyed their parents.” Not one mention of the responsibility of adults to protect their children and listen to their cries for help. I couldn’t blame E. for not attending those services much.
E.’s friends did their own things. Their makeshift memorial of flickering candles blowing out in the wind and her soccer ball were quite touching. They took pride in seeing the Gofundme take off, although looking back I probably could have doubled our goal. In the last months, their friends held a simple ceremony at her grave site for what would have been her 14th birthday. Our son has a picture of E. in his room, taken at his own 14th birthday party earlier in the year. He’s still good friends with her sister and two other friends. They do a lot together and have actually begun participating in a Police Explorers program which E. began but left saying it wasn’t for her. Perhaps this is our son’s way to participate in her stead, to do the things she couldn’t do? Kids shouldn’t have to deal with such things and yet, they do so with resilience and hope. I want to believe that since she doesn’t have to stand up for herself any more, she’s doing that for her friends down here.