Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Chain of Command

   We reached Westchester Community College in Valhalla a bit after nine am on Sunday morning 28, 2010, and I was jonesing for a soda. I was not used to being deprived of my every morning Dr. Pepper. The good doctor takes care of me, just as I take care of Nervy, but this morning, I had left Nervy to her own devices or RoAnn and Ivanna’s ministrations and I was on my own as far as the good doctor was concerned as well.

   Worse yet, I got a big chewing out from the chain of command. Dr. Angelus asked me why my stepmother was not present. I told him that RoAnn could not leave Ivanna alone. Dad was probably out of the country, and my mom was in Herkimer county with my younger brother. Dr. Angelus shook his head. Then he sucked on his mustache. “Your stepmother needs to read what is in the current issue of Achieve!” he told me.

   “You mean the one that never published my article  and didn’t send me a rejection letter,” I snapped back. Without the good doctor, I was in fine form. I’ll admit it.

   “Have you seen the latest issue of Achieve!” asked Dr. Angelus.

   I said I hadn’t. He gave me a copy. It was aimed entirely at parents which is why none of the student articles had appeared. The adult publishers had pulled rank. “This isn’t fair!” I complained.

   “Yes it is. This information needs to get out. Look carefully, Kore.”

   I did and there were articles on abductions and another called When Love Gets too Tough. The abduction article cut way too close to the bone for comfort. I thought of Ivanna. The tough love article was even worse. In the face of support, priviledge deprivation fails and extreme or longterm deprivation is torture. It really was that simple but it took an article in a monthly glossy to get the point across. As for abductions, they happened in families where a kid went with ECBAS and one of the parents went with Young Acheivers. The other  parent, usually the noncustodial spouse or a grandparent, went with ECBAS too. You can see where this led, and often these “spousal kidnappings” were legal especially when the child concerned was over fourteen and both parents definitely fit.

   “I hope you can see why we did this,” Dr. Angelus told me.

   The rest of the meeting was no less stressful. We covered something very dull called strategic planning. Now you can ask me what we kids had to plan. We needed to take care of the academic migrant, as Dr. Angelus called them. An academic migrant can be a kid who transfers out of an academic optional school to a full academic program. In some counties in New York it would mean enrolling in the program at BOCES or in each district’s full academic program in the high school. It might mean a long bus ride. It might mean  having to make new friends.

   You get the idea, but it gets even better. If all the “academic migrants” were just kids who trasferred schools that really would not be a big deal, but there were states like North Carolina and Texas where a large percentage of the school districts had fallen. That meant kids were being shipped to relatives in nonfallen areas to continue their education. That meant there were kids a long way from home. Worse still, or maybe better, Young Achievers wanted to set up group homes so that more kids could leave fallen areas to continue their educations. There were not enough Georgia Wolfsons to establish charters everywhere.

   This made my head feel dizzy. Responsiblity can make you sick sometimes. There would be no out of state academic migrants at Brooklyn Tech due to the New York City Specialty High School Exam but they’d be at IS 179, the middle school we supported. Finding them, I realized would be a challenge. Would the teachers or administrators give us names? Could we advertise at the study center to get such kids to come forth? I wrote down my ideas and then decided to call a meeting to see if other kids could solve this problem better than I could because I knew I sucked hands down.

   I slept on the bus back to Brooklyn, and finally bought a Dr. Pepper at the Calliope before heading home. Piper waited for me, and we rode the subway together. I told him about Nervy Worm and he told me about his little brother. “I try to teach him stuff, but he doesn’t always listen. I don’t think he has my head for math and he just wants those stupid  Pokemon cards. Those are good but only so good. I mean there are no real Pokemons.”

   “What do you think we should do for the ac-a-dem-ic  migrants?” I asked.

   “Shit, I think there’s going to be two in our building. My neighbors upstairs are going to get a niece from Florida and my neighbors down the hall are getting newfews from Louisianna, but the schools there suck anyway.”

   I nodded. “I think I just need some sleep,” I said to no one.

   “Who sleeps?” Piper asked me.

   “I don’t,’ I told him.

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