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My fortune cookie from Pei Wei this evening:

“Endurance and persistence will be rewarded”

It’s helpful to be reassured of this sometimes, even if a cookie has to tell me.

On Halloween, I got a few treats and one nasty trick:  A student stole my phone.

Here’s pretty much how the day went:

• Shortly after 8:00 am, I think to myself “I’ve been having a rough week.  I should go talk to someone so that I’ll feel better before classes start.  I’ll go see Ms. N for just a minute.”  And I go see Ms. N for a few more minutes than I intended, leaving my room unlocked.
• Around 8:25 am, I walk back towards my room, and pass one of my students (I’ll call them X) walking in the other direction.  “Hey, X, were you coming to see me?”  “Yeah, but I have a question for Ms. B, so I’m going to her now.”  “Oh, ok, I’ll see you in a bit.”  “Yeah, see you”
• When I get back to my room, I look in my purse (sitting next to, but not yet inside, my desk) for my phone, so that I can send a text.  I can’t find it.  But you know, I’ve been leaving things at home all week.  “Surely I left it at home, charging next to my bed.”  Besides, my iPod, keys, USB drive, credit cards, and other valuables were there.
• X comes back, and we talk for a bit.  We chat about how he’s been working hard to keep his grades up, so that he can play football.  We chat about what a good job he’s doing now in math, even though he wasn’t doing well at the beginning of the year.  I answer a couple questions about decimal division.

Fast forward a few hours:

• During 4th period, I notice X has his head down, kind of hidden in his sweatshirt.  I walk over, to wake him up, and notice the glow of an electronic device from inside his shirt.  “X, you need to give me your cell phone.”  “What??”  “I see your cell phone, you need to give it to me.  You aren’t allowed to have them on in school.”  I catch a glimpse of the screen, and notice it’s an iPhone (just like my phone, only the picture on the screen is different).  “But I was just turning it off, Miss.”  “Really?  So if I check the recent calls and texts, it won’t show anything?”  “Recent calls?  It’s just an iTouch, it’s not even a phone.  Really, Miss, I’m just making sure it’s off.”  And he put it away, so I let it slide.
• I thought about emailing my boyfriend, to let him know that I didn’t have my phone and couldn’t call or text him until I got home.  But I closed the message without sending it.

Fast forward to the end of the day:

• Around 5:15, I got home, and immediately went to look for my phone by my bed.  It wasn’t there.  It wasn’t on the bed.  It wasn’t in my car.  Thankful to have a landline, I called it.  I couldn’t hear it from anywhere in the apartment.
• I call my boyfriend, since we had plans that evening.  “Why didn’t you answer my texts today?  Why are you calling from a different phone?”  “Well, I think I left my cell phone at home, but I can’t find it.”  ”When did you leave it at home?  I got a weird text from you at 11am.”
• Clearly, my phone was NOT in my possession at 11am.  The text was something ridiculous, like “wat up wit it u n me?”  I knew a kid had taken it when I was talking to Ms. N.  I immediately thought of X, and how he had an “iTouch” and had been to my room to see me in the morning.
• I called my principal, who told me to file an incident report on Monday.  I called ATT, to suspend my service.  They told me how to see the texts being sent out.  I called the Houston police, to see if they could help me, but they didn’t.  THEN I called the school district police, who said to come down and file a report with them any time over the weekend.

On Saturday morning, there was a TFA PDS thing.

• At 1pm, I drove to the district’s police department, and filed a report.  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but they’ve probably already sold the phone.  I’m not sure we’ll be able to get it back.”  I refused to give up hope–if the kid was really just trying to get money, they would have taken other valuables in my purse.
• I looked up the phone numbers that had been texted.  One number was texted repeatedly.  I looked up the number’s owner, but that was fruitless.  So I called it:  “Hey, you sent me a few texts yesterday, and I was just wondering who this was.”  “Huh?”  “You texted me, at ***-***-****, and I was just wondering who this was.”  “Oh, those weren’t meant for you.”  “I know, but who is this?”  “Uh, my name’s L.”  “Ok, L.  Who were you texting?  Who has my phone?”  “Um…um…Do you know X?”  “Yeah, I do.  He has it?”  “Yeah…don’t tell him I told you”  “Ok, thanks.”
• I called X’s mom.  All the numbers I had were bad.
• I called the football coaches.  They couldn’t get to another number for her–they were all in the gym.
• I called the police back, and told them X’s name and address.  They paid him a visit and got my phone back.

I didn’t want it to be X.  There are many kids from whom this would make sense, or at least seem reasonable.  But not X.  I even looked up his schedule and saw that a text was sent during his gym class.  “Surely he couldn’t have sent a text during gym–so it can’t be him.”  X is one of the kids I talk to more frequently, one of the ones I’ve given extra help to.  He’s told me about his family, and going to a Haunted House and getting really scared.  We were talking that day about how hard he was working in school, and how proud I was that he brought all his grades up and was passing everything.  I liked him.

And then he did something really, really dumb.