Turpentine

"Miss?"

"What?" It hadn't snowed for days but the wind ripped the crystals around off the streets and into your face, your hands, and your lungs where the cold tore at you.

"Miss?"

They always called me Miss, or Miss Pika. At 19 I didn't feel comfortable with anybody calling me Miss Chu, but they didn't feel comfortable calling me just Pika.

"Miss you have to hurry!"

"I'm coming as fast as I can, and it isn't time for practice yet. You're going to have to learn to be patient Trinh."

"No you have to hurry! There's gonna be a fight in the machine shop!"

I burst into the room to find the team in halves standing around the robot, sharpies on the floor, shouting at one another. I had told them they could decorate the robot any way they wanted, and apparently the girls had formed an argument which cleanly divided them by the high schools they attended.

I slammed the door so they turned and looked at me. "What the fuck is going on?"

There was a pause, then all the voices started at once. "You know what?" I bellowed, "I don't give a fuck, you're all going to clean every inch of this robot and take all the markings off it, and I'm going to have a little chat with each and every one of you." I nodded to my co-mentor, and she understood that she was going to oversee the cleaning. We were both terrified that a newspaper reporter was showing up in two hours to do a heartwarming story on how our team was bringing two sides of a bad city together and help high school girls get their lives back in line.

"We haven't named the robot yet, for the paperwork."

I brought a pile of rags from the corner of the machine shop and put it next to the bottle of cleaner. "Robot's name is turpentine," I said pointing to the bottle, "because this is the day you're all going to learn that this is one team, and you're all going to work hard alongside each other."

Dramatic moments normally don't make sense anyway after the fact.

When Mechi came up for her talk she hid the knuckles of her right hand from me, under her left. I asked her to show them to me, and they were swollen and red.

"What is this?"

"I punched a wall."

None of the other students looked like they had been involved in a fight, so I let it pass.

"Why?" I asked.

"I was angry."

Mechi was always boarderline too angry to work. She was the sweetest girl, but her emotions often tangled her up when she was frustrated, and then fell out as rage. It isn't hard to imagine how. I know she once left practice to pick up her brother from a gang fight and get him to a hospital, and I know that like so many little sisters she idolized her big brother. I knew that if she had been born to a different family that her teachers might have noticed her tendencies, and that there might be therapy and medication for her. Now they just saw another at-risk-kid slipping, and threw her in suspension.

"You need to work on dealing with your feelings," I said.

"And what? Count to 10? Does that actually work for anybody?"

I smiled, "Not for me. Just remember that in a few minutes you'll care less, that it isn't worth being upset about, and that you just need to hold on until then."

"I'll try."

"You're a good kid, and I know that. You always give me 110%. We're going to show everybody what a good kid you are inside."

She smiled.

The next girl who I had a talk with looked scared and upset. She was the best friend of the girl Mechi had most likely been about to punch when she took it out on a wall instead.

"What... did I do wrong?"

"Oh, I don't think you did anything wrong. I just said I was going to talk to all of you about your behaviors, and it is important that I be fair and do not appear to play favourites, but I think you're doing fine."

"Oh."

"We've got about 5 minutes to kill here, is there anything you want to talk about?"

"I don't like to see them disrespecting you."

"We're working on it."

"They don't realize how much you're giving us. You came from winning teams, you like winning, you deserve a winning team, and if we behaved, you could make us win."

"Yeah, well this is the team where I can make a bigger difference."

***

Mechi and Trinh were crying. "We can't write like that, all fancy like you talk, and like our teachers want us to."

"Then write it another way, and we'll translate it."

"We can't do it!"

"You can do it, you're going to give me 110%, and I'm going to give you 110%, always. I will sit here with you for as long as you will keep trying. Whatever group of people finish this essay will be the co-captains of the team."

The sentences came back garbled and rambling, with the word "with" substituted for "wid." The essay was about four pages, but after hours and hours, we had translated their intentions into a proper essay. The girls were beaming. They showed their essay to everybody they could find. I was so proud of them, and so terrified. At 14 this should be easy, and they had so much catching up to do if they were ever going to make it against the kids I went to high school with.

Mechi couldn't go to the competition because she was suspended, but we told her how we were doing each day. The robot did well though, right up into the semi-finals.

The city was thrilled. They threw us a dinner which all sorts of fancy people attended. A member of the school board who had sometimes attended our practices gave little speeches about of us and thanked us as he gave us awards, except for Mechi. When he came to her he poked fun at her and her disciplinary issues, and asked her to promise to do better next year.

I could feel the girl's eyes on me. I had always promised them that as long as they kept trying that I would fight for them. To stand by as this man humiliated Mechi would mean they would never trust me again, and it would be the end of my ability to help them. However, to do something now would mean our funding would never be renewed. We had two sponsors, and the regional director of the league at that dinner. The team was over, and the only remaining question was how I wanted it to end. I stood up, and I finished the school board member's speech for him, highlighting all the good Mechi had done, and thanking her for her contributions to the team.

I tried to keep in touch with Trinh, but it was difficult. She went into AP US History as a junior. I was thrilled. I got stacks of books from my high school AP US History teacher to tutor her through the exam online, but I never was able to make enough time to memorize everything to answer all her questions, and I couldn't get her to practice essays. Eventually, she said she didn't want to talk about the exam anymore, then she didn't want to talk at all.

I saw one of the girls bagging groceries near the school. I asked her how things were. She was doing great and had the part time job to help her family. She was applying for some pretty good colleges in the fall. I told her I was so proud of her, and she shrugged and looked at me and asked, "What, isn't that normal? You didn't think I could do it?"

Mechi was thrown out of the school before I had even finished the paperwork of the season. I remember the school board member showing me a photograph on his desk. He explained to me that it was of a student who he had tried to save, but who was in juvi now. I didn't recognize his kindness, and was rude to him a second time, insisting that I would never give up on Mechi, and that she was a good girl, and going to make it. In the coming months Mechi was thrown out of her second school, and out of the special disciplinary school. I continued to write to her, but eventually she said she was worried I was ashamed of her, and stopped writing back.

I've still got the newspaper article they wrote the day we cleaned the robot with turpentine. The reporter was thrilled with us, and really believed we were going to save these kids. It breaks my heart.

Making Captain Planet Proud

I was eating dinner with some of my kids. When I say "my kids" I refer to students who I mentor, not as in legal dependents. Normally the kids I mentor are in either high school or middle school. Its a rare circumstance that I have a single group with both ages in it.

I'm not sure why they are called "my kids." My mentor when I was in high school called us his kids, and my peers now who volunteer their time to other teams do the same. I think its just an idiosyncrasy of the league we all compete in.

Anyway, so I was with my kids. We were at a BBQ with easily 400 people at it which was hosted at my university. They had mostly finished their food and so I brought out the bags of candy I had purchased for them and opened them. One of the girls sat down next to me with her candy

"I don't want to put my soda can in the trash," she said.

"If you're willing to walk a bit I know where you can recycle it."

"They are throwing out a lot of soda cans."

"Yes"

"Do you think if I got another shirt from the car and put it on so nobody knew I was from our team...and maybe was really sneaky...that I could pull all the cans out of the trash and put them in a bag to be recycled?"

"I don't see why you would need to hide the fact that you're doing a good thing."

"I've always wanted to do it but I'm too nervous to do it alone. I'm afraid people will think I'm weird if I do it all alone." She looked contemplative for a moment and then turned to me as her face brightened up. "Will you help me?"

"What?"

I was at this point pretty stuck. I'm not altruistic enough to want to go digging through the trash just to make mother nature smile, but this seemed like it was a pretty big deal to the kid. Acting like her idea was childish seemed somehow emotionally the equivalent of stomping on her face. Besides, how many high schoolers do you know who give a flying fuck about anything that isn't themselves? How could you possibly discourage the one kid who does in front of all of her peers, and in doing so potentially even embarrass her for it?

"Yeah," I said, "sure I'll help you."

Two more kids followed us around and assisted with holding the trash bag and various other things while the first girl and I started pulling cans from the trash. It was absolutely nasty.

The kid seemed absolutely thrilled though, and seeing how happy she was doing this pretty much made up for how nasty it was to go through bins of Styrofoam plates and half-eaten burgers. Thankfully they had only been there about...half an hour tops. I'd also like to take this moment to announce that people who jam their napkins and the rest of their meals into the tops of their sodas are dickwads. I was kinda amazed though how much food was in that trash can. It seemed a crying shame that they had taken that food in the first place and not just left it for somebody else if they did not want to eat it.

We filled the better part of an industrial trash bag with cans. One girl stopped and mentioned she had been considering doing the same thing, and by the time we were wrapping up a reasonable number of high schoolers had showed up from various teams and begun asking if they could help us too. The student who originated the idea was pretty much beaming.

"Hah," one of the mentors laughed, "this your new team fund-raiser plan?" The girl waved the bag proudly about for a moment and the mentor laughed. "We can be team 'can do', one can at a time." I rolled my eyes because I loath puns but not an hour later I found somebody had written the new slogan on the back of our team's robot in black sharpie. The students were thrilled about it. They toted their trash bag of cans around with glee. If I had thought I could have gotten a picture of it without wrecking their moment I would have.

So today I either taught some kids a valuable life lesson about doing the right thing when you think you know what it is, or possibly simply exposed them and myself to a variety of communicable diseases. Perhaps both. Whatever, I'd do it again. The look on the kid's face was pretty worth it.