Against my wishes but not outside of my will, my coworker details the history of our newest boy, one who is too young to be in the detention system by a wide margin. He came to us shivering because the reception center tried to scare him straight by promising him that he would be raped and turned gay (our facility tends to care for vulnerable populations in juvenile justice, including the LGBTQ, overtly mentally ill, and cognitively limited populations -- occasionally all three in one resident).

What happened to him at so young an age is fodder for nightmares. It is explicitly forbidden under the Geneva Convention to treat an enemy that way, but parents are not required to follow that for their children. Profound sexual abuse, constant physical and psychological abuse, attempted murder, kidnapping, torture, and pimping are commonplace for my students. I don't care to know how long the list goes on. I have had residents who have known only one girlfriend: their own mother (who still had parental rights because no one reported this). Before a child commits the crime that gets them placed with us, they absorb a hundred others that made them this way.

Vicarious trauma is internalizing someone else's pain and abuse and is my occupational hazard, one inadequately assuaged by a system to whom we are all replaceable. Whatever the worst thing you can think to do to a kid, someone has done to one of my students.

Did you know that boys who have been anally raped from an early age lose bowel control and will defecate upon themselves, which might help to keep from further rapes (although usually it doesn't, because the rapist just beats them for being disgusting before raping them)? We discuss this at staff meetings, along with grievances about the Keurig being left messy. The meetings are the worst part because then I am unable to avoid what has happened to my students. Yes, they have committed crimes, but some of them literally don't understand or trust a life that doesn't involve horrific abuse, many of whom will perpetuate this abuse on young family members because that's what you do with people you love. When the world of your birth is Hell, of course you act like a demon out of instinct.

To my coworker, I reply something glib, then return to planning a lesson. I pause, playing back my comment, and say aloud, "Sorry. I don't think I have that fuse anymore. The one that tells you what isn't appropriate to say?" I care about what this boy went through, but partly in an analytical way. Because he went through actual torture at the hands of someone who should have loved him, he won't be easy to teach. I had better prepare for the potential behavior and confront it in the present tense.

Before I started this job, I had a dark sense of humor, but nothing like this. I don't think I am broken as much as adapted. A newer coworker is burnt out. He asked how I could deal with having been here so long. I told him what I see as the truth: I care only about my classroom and am otherwise unconcerned with bureaucracy that I have learned will reverse or forget itself before long. I don't get stressed out about deadlines or office politics. I try not to know what my residents have done or what was done to them, because that is not my classroom. I treat them as normal students -- not victimizers, not victims -- and warrant I am sometimes the first adult to do this since they hit their teens.

If I cared about these other things to the extent I should as a feeling human being, I would not be able to work this job. So, I can either a functioning, talented teacher who can help these boys or a man who pities them and is unable. You haven't lived as an educator until you've told a girl, prostituted since she was prepubescent, to knock off her melodrama until her essay on "The Tell-Tale Heart" is finished to your satisfaction.

I am not looking for sympathy. In a sense, it has made me The Teenager Whisperer. I cut through the angst immediately and dislocate their expectations, so I can have a real conversation about Julius Caesar. It is a better way for right now. If I move on with my life -- and I suppose I may one day, if it became convenient or necessary -- I have a toolkit few outside concentration camps do. I can care utterly for this child in this moment, giving them what they need, and then let them go back into the world. When their stint is up, I actively forget most of them because I can't contain all that happened to them once they are out of the four walls of my classroom. I've cared for them as much as I can. We won't talk again, in all likelihood.

Occasionally, issues overlap in such a way that I cannot brush off when I come home. Too many tumblers turn, and I am possessed by powerful depressive angst. I get a thousand-yard stare, hypersensitivity to all stimuli, lose the ability to feel pleasurable sensations, and sometimes just constantly cry (not weeping, just this trickle from the corners of my eyes that starts and doesn't want to stop). These spells are notable by their rarity.

I don't want to take their problems for my problems. I am not their sin-eater, and they don't need some other helpless white person to pity them instead of helping them.

A friend asks if there is anything do like about my job. I casually suggested the paycheck is nice, and the life it allows me to have. But I like that I can try to help children on whom most of the world has given up, that I am uniquely suited to the task. I do wish for more academically involved and simpler children, but I do not have that blessing. (As an English teacher, it is not likely I will have these angelic normal children as students unless someone became aware of my overwhelming charm, publications, and decade in the field and offered me a job.)

If I taught normal children, how much would they would adore me, this quirky, compassionate author who takes a genuine interest in them and is authentic? But I don't have those kids. My students can't even read my books, and don't understand why I don't write "thug books," the only genre they do understand and desire.

I am given my freedom because no one really cares about me at my job if I persist in doing enough. I teach, I work toward that. When I started here, there was a guard who was working on a special project to prepare for an upcoming audit. For three years, she would sit in a closet office, left alone. When the audit was coming up, she told them that she had never done anything about it and had just been sitting there, collecting a paycheck. They asked her to resign. She took it up with the union. She got a payout and unemployment. Other people scrambled to pick up her apathy, but no one noticed until that point.

I do not expect most of my coworkers to be there in a year, maybe two years. My supervisor tells me he is on a ten-year plan, in that he expects he will be exiting in the next couple, and that I am on the same plan. I do not agree with him. I will continue to work as long as I am paid, as long as something better doesn't offer itself to me.

Change is a constant at my facility, which is one of those things I hold onto. I am not eager to see what it will be like when my coworkers are replaced and how slow that process will be until they hire all new education staff. Most educators aren't going to work there, won't even apply. I only applied because I had been unemployed so long and I needed a job. I expected to be hired at a middle school, but I wasn't. I put my adult life on hold to that hope, and I am not eager to do that again, so many years later.

What I want is a group to whom I can confess what is going on with my job, but that would be suicide on social media, and I do not otherwise see people often enough. Other people cannot truly understand what I am going through. There was a time in my life where I would have doubted the severity of my stories from other's lips, or I would have been moved to utter horror. Now a story of child abuse bordering on murder is Tuesday.

My students can be annoyed that their English teacher is so rigorous, but they don't have to worry that I am so tainted by White Saviorism that I no longer see who they are, or who I want them to be. I give them an aspect of a normal childhood. Not all of them see that. Kids who have voluntarily placed themselves with us act as though this is a jail staffed by Klan members, even though most of our staff is African American (all the teachers are still white; we can't seem to shake that).

The kids don't appreciate what they have with us, Three hots and a cot, as they say, but they also have a group of adults who go out of their way to care about them, or pretend they do. I am overwhelmingly positive to them (with just the right seasoning of sarcasm and truth), but I am also clear which children I wish I could shout at until they were dust, then try to build something out of that dust. We get kids who I understand will commit atrocities and there is nothing I can do in my professional context. When I've told people what I do, I've heard a few times the whispered implication that it might be better for the world if that kid were euthanized. People never say it full throated, and I don't mind what they say this. They can't understand because they haven't lived it for seven years.

I occasionally have one or if I am very lucky two kids whom I like. They are not usually easy children to be around and their crimes are often egregious and unforgivable, but I find something in them I can like, some way where I can see a future for them that doesn't involve wanting to be Kobe or Kanye, and turning to gangs when the world doesn't give them this without their effort. Maybe I do it for these few likeable ones, because dealing with them gives my job some direction. When I can actually teach, and the kids are involved, that energizes me. I could have that almost every day in a real school -- the kids are always adamant that our facility doesn't count as a real school, even though we attest to credits, and we tell them they are wrong. We have master's degrees and are teachers. That should be enough.

But it isn't. It isn't a real school because they aren't real students. For most of them, they have never been real students, keener to truancy since kindergarten, encouraged by parents to skip or disobey. Facility schools are really all they know, which means that they get socially graduated because no one believes they should suffer their consequences, even though letting them run free has only made them worse.

I fail kids. Not often. Probably not as much as they deserve, but we are expected to be flexible. If a kid tries on an essay, I will tear it to shred with my criticism, but it will earn a 65. I mostly fail those students who, in a class with two other people, still try to do no work, as though they could be overlooked. I don't like it, but there is nothing else to be done.

My supervisor asks as a meeting what we are doing to keep emotionally healthy and I want to tell him that not attending meetings would make me feel more emotionally healthy. Being left in my room so I could prep for the next day, maybe write and watch a YouTube video to decompress, would do more for me that telling my colleagues that my job is not the easiest thing I have ever attempted.

Soon in Xenology: A new year.

last watched: The Umbrella Academy
reading: The Art of Asking
listening: Marshmello