There’s a piece of paper in my mailbox at school.

Without even looking at it, I know what it means.

Damn.

Michael hasn’t been in class for eight days. Michael with the big smile, the gangly limbs, the obvious lack of impulse control. Michael who transferred into Pioneer from Detroit at the beginning of the school year. Michael who I was worried about at first, who I thought might be a disruptive force in class. Who couldn’t sit still and, during the initial week, looked like the absolute last thing he wanted to be doing was listening to a middle-aged knucklehead pontificate about how if we wanted people to take risks in their writing, we needed to establish an environment where everybody felt safe, where everybody felt respected. At least twice an hour, I had to tell him to knock off the goofing around, to delay attempting to flirt with the girl in front of him until class was over. Once, I even played my only-when-I’m-really-fed-up card. Michael, I said, where’d you go to middle school?

He mentioned a school in Detroit and I asked him to describe it. He did and then I asked him if Pioneer looked different. He agreed that was the case. Then why, I said, are you behaving like you’re still in middle school?

That shut him up, and erased his smile too, at least for the rest of the hour. At the time, I thought it was a pretty decent trade.

The next day, Michael came to class early. He was scheduled to present a piece of writing to his peers for the first time and he didn’t want to do it. Mr, Kass, he said, I feel like it’s too personal. Can I just show it to you?

Sure, I said, thinking it’d be some hamball poem about a girl he had a crush on. How it would be filled with a bunch of cheesy end-rhymes and clichéd phrases like you were always there for me. All the stuff I’d explicitly talked to the class about trying to avoid. I figured I’d skim it, then tell him he needed to trust that his peers would treat his words with respect. That he should go ahead and read it. He should plunge in like everyone else in the class was doing and he should pay attention to whatever feedback he received, that what I suspected was that his classmates would, in fact, encourage him to add more specific details, that the biggest problem with his piece was that it wasn’t personal enough.

It wasn’t poetry. It was three-and-a-half pages of prose and the story it told was riveting. And horrifying. A year earlier, Michael had witnessed his brother killed in a drive-by shooting. The bullets had been meant for his father who was a gang member and was trying to leave his gang. His father blamed him for his brother’s death because Michael had answered the phone moments earlier, inadvertently letting the killers know the family was home. His father stopped talking to him and abandoned the household shortly after the shooting. Is all this true? I asked.

Quiet, tears in his eyes, Michael nodded.

I’m so sorry this happened to you, Michael, I said. I understand why you wouldn’t want to read this to the class. I’m sure writing it was very difficult and I salute the courage it took you to remember these events so vividly and to try and describe them. This is powerful stuff. I hope you’ve had the chance to talk to a professional person who can help you process it. If you haven’t, or even if you have but want to do more of that, let me know and I will connect you to somebody who can hopefully help you in that way. In the meantime, I’m glad you’re here with us in this class. You’ve got a lot of potential as a writer and an important story to tell. Here are some ideas about what you can work on.

Michael nodded some more as I offered suggestions and I emailed his counselor to ask him if she knew anything about his history and if she knew if he was getting help. She did know, she wrote back, and she’d already enrolled him in an in-school grieving group and was working with the school psychologist to make sure he was getting support.

The piece of paper in my box is a photo-copy of a PIONEER HIGH SCHOOL WITHDRAWAL NOTICE.

In the section marked “Exit Reason:” a hand-written note says Out of District. At the bottom of the form, additional clarification reads: Was removed from PHS due to out-of-district status.

After Michael showed me that first piece, I never again had to say anything to him about his behavior. He became a vibrant participant, offering generous feedback to his peers, working hard on in-class writing exercises. He even showed up at lunch for the initial meeting of Overtones, Pioneer’s literary magazine. Said he wanted to work on poetry and art. 

Each day, he seemed to be having more and more of a dynamic effect on his peers. Based on comments he would make, we held numerous impromptu discussions that felt vibrant and interesting. On his assigned day, he shared his second piece with all of us, a poem about how his father had called the night before, the first time in a year he’d spoken to him. His father hadn’t asked him anything about how he was doing or what he was up to, only informed him that his grandfather was in the hospital to have surgery and then hung up. The piece was vivid and moving and his classmates applauded it heartily. He’d already integrated some of my suggestions into his writing and it was clear his voice was growing more confident.

When asked by another student who he was living with now, Michael said he was staying with an aunt. He said he was happy in Ann Arbor and never wanted to go back to where he used to live. Three days later, he was absent. When he wasn’t in class the following day either, I asked if anybody had seen him in school, if anyone knew what was going on. Nobody had. Nobody did. After a week, someone else sat in his seat.

Today, a student wrote in her reflections - Our class is too quiet. People need to talk more. It’s affecting our class negatively.

Out-of-district.

Removed from PHS.

** Note - A new community literary endeavor kicks off tonight at the Teahaus @ 204 N. 4th Ave., near Kerrytown as Ann Arbor Wordworks presents Loose Leaf Readings, an open mic reading for the general public every second Tuesday of the month. Mike Moriarty will feature. 7pm Free. Free tea too while supplies last. **

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at PIoneer High School and Eastern Michigan University and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone. He will post new entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.