Need closure. Ugh.

Sunday morning Stephen and I went to a different church. It was an inner-city church that meets in probably the most inner-city type high school in all the area. It was a great experience, but what I came here to write about is the school, not the church.

Steve and I went into the visitors' room after church to hear a bit more about it. The room we met in was just a small classroom of the school. Teaching in an inner-city school has always been in the back of my head as a job that would be close to my heart with practical benefits (all my school loans would be deferred or canceled or lessened in some way), but I know I don't have the constitution to teach in a school like that. To be amidst teenagers with serious emotional problems all day? I don't know if my heart could handle it! I'd get overwhelmed.

Nonetheless, the idea remains at the back of my head. So whenever I enter an inner-city school I have to stare, wondering the while, How do they do it? How do they teach kids with serious emotional problems all day? How do they handle it? How could I?

This is what I was doing after church Sunday when I noticed yellow butcher paper on the walls with a picture of a black boy, titled "Notes to Michael*." On it were short sentences and paragraphs written by the high school students who met in the class. At first I thought Michael must be the teacher. I wondered if that was a way the teacher got feedback from his students--but there were lots of names signed on the paper, and I assumed that high school students would prefer anonymity for something like that.

Before I could study the paper further, the visitors' information thing started. It wasn't terribly exciting, and I found my eyes wandering around the room again. Behind Judd, the man who was speaking to us, there was a bulletin board with a lot of brochures pegged up on it, plus a few posters. One poster said, "Talking to your parents about sex can be hard" and had a number for an AIDS and STDS hotline. Under that poster was one that said, "I can talk about..." with tons of words and phrases listed underneath. A few that I caught were "sex" and "faith."

On the side of the classroom opposite the yellow paper was another sheet of yellow butcher paper like the first. This one was titled "Notes to Michael's family." This totally debunked my theory of Michael being the teacher. I'm pretty sure teachers wouldn't put a poster like that on the wall of their classroom--privacy and all that. And it suddenly occurred to me that writing notes to someone's family usually means something tragic has happened, and that that was a highly likely thing you'd find in an inner-city classroom. I glanced back at the first poster--although I couldn't make out the notes, I could see very clearly three letters printed by various hands: R.I.P.

"Steve!" I whispered at a break in Judd's talk. "That boy died!"

"Oh my" was all he said. (We couldn't really talk about it just then.)

When we exited the visitors' room, I began a more thorough examination of the school's halls. There were posters on the wall put up by kids selling bracelets that said "Michael West, 1992-2009" on the front and "Hakuna Matata" on the back.

I couldn't stop thinking about the boy as we walked to our car in very cold rain. I kept wondering how he had died, and when. It had to have been in the last week.

"In a book, the students who knew him would think of themselves as doing the boy who died and the family a favor by remembering him in whatever ways they can, because he probably wouldn't be in the news," I told Stephen.

"I'm sure the news would report about something like that," Stephen said. I wasn't so sure.

Today I've been researching him like crazy. There are no news stories about him. I only found one that even might be about him, but I don't think it is, because it said the boy was struck by a car on Sunday night, but we saw those signs for Michael Sunday morning. And the article said that the boy was in critical condition, but the high school we were at obviously knew he was dead. So I think they are about different students.

Anyway. I need to get off the computer...My eyes are tired from being on the computer for so long, looking for this boy.

-Stephanie

*Name changed.

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