It was sometime in October, and I was in the fetal position on the floor, shaking. Every nightmare I had ever had about not being able to dial 911 was rushing back to me. In my nightmares, the phone falls apart. The buttons fall off. The numbers aren't in the right order on the phone. In one nightmare, truly characteristic of a high school teacher, I found that I had been attempting to dial 911 on a calculator. Suffice to say, my nightmares rarely end well.
Thirty seconds earlier, I had been sitting in the living room singing along to the Beatles with a stack of student work by my feet. All at once, as if I were inside a house scheduled for demolition, my living room window imploded inwards. The unbelievably loud popping noise was intermingled with an involuntary scream.
My brain was taking in information as if it would later be used for a photo montage. Glass all over the floor. My dog scrambling away from her spot by the window. And then, my overdramatic brain started giving me images that weren't happening. Warnings. Someone bursting in through the back door, taking advantage of the distraction in the livingroom. Someone dying of a gunshot outside my house. Someone else holding a gun in search of witnesses.
I grabbed the golf club in the corner and settled into a crouching position with my back against the door. I held my phone with my shaking hands. Nope, this isn't a nightmare. I dialed 911 successfully.
I remember giving my address to the dispatcher and telling her "someone shot through my window." She told me that officers would be there as soon as possible and that I should stay on the floor. Then she hung up.
It was quiet then, except for the tinkling of what was left of my window falling to the floor. The silence made me remember the unwanted parade of images marching through my mind. Someone with a gun. Someone bursting in the back door. I called my parents while I waited for the cops.
"Hey, babydoll!" My dad's jovial voice was barely audible over the surround sound in my parents' living room. Whatever they were watching on the flat screen TV had a lot of explosions in it.
"Someone shot at my house."
"What?"
"Someone shot at my house."
"Pam, turn the TV down. Someone shot at her house."
The background grew quiet.
"What happened? Did you call the police?" My dad's voice was the special mixture of serenity and urgency was reserved for the most dire of emergencies.
"Yeah, they're coming. I'm fine. The window's just not fine."
"Are you sure it was a gun?"
"No, I have no idea. The window just imploded and I figure better assume the worst."
My dad and I ran through a number of possibilities less frightening than a bullet while we waited for the police. The seconds ticked on. Then the minutes crept by.
"Are you sure you called the police?"
"Yes. Yes I'm sure."
I saw headlights outside and told my dad that I had to go.
The police were friendly enough and informed me that it didn't look like a bullet as there was nothing embedded in the wall behind the window. After some searching, they found a large piece of brick under a pile of glass.
"It's just a brick."
"Yes, I see."
"Do you know who could have done this?"
"I have no idea."
"Do you have any enemies?"
I paused for a moment.
"I'm a high school teacher."
The police officer looked at me expectantly.
"I wouldn't be very good at my job if everyone liked me."
I would find out later that, indeed, not everyone likes me. Two bricks were thrown that night: one through my window, and one through the window of the only other white lady in the neighborhood.
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The police took some pictures of my window and radioed it in as an act of vandalism. When they left, I was alone in my apartment, barefoot, eyeing the glass that covered the floor. I was left holding a "victim's rights" card with the case number on the back.
As I picked up my phone to call my parents back, I glimpsed the time of the last call I had made. I was on the phone with my parents for nine minutes. It took the police nine minutes to get to my house after I told them I was being shot at. By guns. Nine minutes.
This has since been the standard for what I refer to as the "nine minute rule." If I made the decision to live in an urban neighborhood, I had to live with the consequences. Like waiting nine minutes to see the red and blue flash of lights reflected in the glass on my floor.
I could have lived anywhere. Most teachers at my school live either in Oakland or in San Francisco. In return for a three minute commute, I had to wait three times that long for the police in an emergency. I guess I knew abstractly that it was dangerous, but the particulars of the situation were lost on me. In the days after the vandalism, I felt naive. I felt like what opponents of Teach for America must imagine corps members to be. I picked up the glass off of my floor that night, but kept finding shards of it in my jackets, in my purses, stuck in anything and everything that had been in the livingroom that night. The glass was also stuck in my psyche; the days and weeks that followed were some of the darkest of my life. I wasn't safe in my house.
There were more attacks on my house after that, but the first one always sticks in my mind as the one that changed my relationship with my students. Bleary-eyed and late to school the next day, I had explained to my students what had happened the night before. One by one, they each shared with me their stories of waiting on the floor for the police. Sometimes the police would come. Sometimes they wouldn't. When the bell rang to go to their next class, they didn't get up.
One student watched my face for a few moments before he spoke.
"You want me and my boys to ride by your house tonight to make sure everything's ok?"
"Nope. Thank you."
"Damn, I can't believe you came to school today. You're pretty raw."
"Thanks."
"You gonna move?"
"No. I don't think so."
"Why?"
"Are you gonna move?"
"No."
"Okay then. Let's just promise each other that we'll get up and go to school no matter what happens the night before."
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