A Hope in the Unseen (10 page)

Then the dial tone. That’s the way the memory always ends, with the dial tone after Lavar slammed down the receiver. That was the last time they talked. Cedric has thought of calling his son a hundred times since then, though not so very much in the last couple of busy, engrossing months.

But now he’s back to it, sitting here on the bed with nothing left to distract him from mulling it over, again and again: the phone call, the screaming. His son had blown up at him before but never that bad, and the thought of it has left his whole body rigid, like he’s in a vise. Here he is, a master at playing people, at managing their needs
his
way and on
his
behalf, and yet there’s no appeasing this boy, nothing works. Nothing, Cedric Sr. thinks, as he feels the bitterness coming on. Just look at the boy, he says to himself. Could he be more different than me? All nerdy and faggy, a straight-A momma’s boy who gets no respect from any of the kids at school, least of all the tough kids.

He shakes his head, unable to quiet his agitation. Is Lavar that way in spite of me, Cedric mulls, or to spite me, or both, or neither … or do I not really register at all in who he’s become?

The questions are unbearable, maybe unanswerable, and Cedric tries to pull away from them, searching now for a quick way to lance it, to reach out to Lavar but not compromise himself. He unearths something he’d thought up last year, in the weeks after the phone call. Figuring that he’d be paroled by the time Lavar graduated from high school, he planned to find out the time and place of the graduation
ceremony. He’d enter through the back of the auditorium, quiet and unnoticed, once it started. He’d see Lavar graduate and then slip out, not letting anyone know, not wanting to disrupt his son’s big day. But maybe he’d let him know about it later, that he’d made it. That way, Lavar might see that his father cared about him and all.

It might still work, Cedric speculates, feeling a welcome sense of closure. But then it dawns on him that any prospect of parole might be changed by this work/release cancellation. With only nine years gone on a twelve-to-thirty-six-year term, there’s a chance he won’t be out in time for Lavar’s graduation from college, much less high school. He puts his head back and lets out a deep breath.

With the sun starting to set, people are coming in from their evening constitutionals in the cement courtyard. Cedric jerks back to the present. He looks at his legs stretched out on the bed, at his best Lee jeans, argyle socks, and stylish brown Clark loafers.

What’s the point of wearing this nice stuff now? He should store it away in his footlocker like everyone else, folded and safe for when someone might visit. But he can’t bear to slip back into his pale-blue two-piecer, with its drawstring waist. He simply can’t. And he sits for the longest time, trying to decide what the hell to do.

L
ook everyone, Cedric handed in all his vocabulary cards. Isn’t it amazing!” says Janet Johns-Gibson, the teacher in SAT-PREP, a required course for juniors at Ballou, as she holds high a pack of ninety-six index cards bound by a thick rubber band.

Cedric slumps at his desk in the back as a roomful of teenage eyes turn toward him, several of them clearly scornful. He stares forward, expressionless, fighting the urge to shake his head, disgusted that the teacher would make such a fuss. The vocabulary card homework—a simple exercise of looking up ninety-six words from a handout and writing their definitions—was assigned nearly two weeks ago. “Amazing.” Her word echoes in his head. Why should it be amazing, he wonders, that someone actually did their homework? Isn’t the whole idea that you’re
supposed
to do it?

He looks out the window and takes a deep breath. It’s raining hard,
which accounts for today’s strong showing in SAT-PREP, one of the afternoon classes that on sunny days is half empty. He watches the drops of water run down the long pane, snaking into canals before disappearing onto the slate sill outside. It’s the end of March, with still no word from MIT, and when he looks at the raindrops—at anything these days—he always sees the same huge question mark.

Cedric has finally rationalized that his chances of being accepted there for the upcoming summer are slim—about as slim as his chances of ultimately ending anywhere other than some no-name college.

Looking out the window, he thinks back to his last days at Jefferson, how different it was, with him and his three friends, LaKeith Ellis, Torrence Parks, and Eric Welcher, all jockeying for the best grade. He sometimes came up short—those guys were demons—and pressed to catch up. It was sort of fun. And he learned more in a year there than in two, maybe three, here.

Eric Welcher lives just across from Ballou in a little cluster of tidy single-family homes. His dad is a computer programmer. A few days ago after school Cedric went over there to try out Eric’s new Supernintendo. It had been a long time since Cedric had seen Eric, who now goes to Banneker, the District’s magnet math/science high school. Each year, Banneker sends a few kids to the Ivies and plenty to other top schools. They talked a little bit about school, enough to give Cedric a glimpse of Eric’s classroom life: coursework more advanced than Cedric’s, lots of tough competitors, kids scoring in the 1500s on their SATs. Cedric felt anxiety creeping up on him. “So, are we going to play Supernintendo or what?” he groaned after a bit.

Ms. Gibson passes out the
SAT Vocabulary
workbooks to the class, delighted to have so many kids present.

“Cedric …. CEDRIC?”

“Oh, yes, Ms. Gibson,” he says, coming to.

“I’m dividing the class into teams—into two groups—would you lead one of them?”

“Yeah, sure,” he says quietly.

To lead the other group, she chooses Phillip Atkins.

“I’d like to thank a lot of people—so many of them such little tiny
people—for this honor,” Phillip says, with the perfect pitch and rhythm of a stand-up comic. “And, of course, the academy.” This draws hoots from everyone, even Cedric.

The day’s exercise is to match vocabulary words with definitions, and Cedric begins swiftly completing matches as his seven partners mostly recline, one of them spreading cards on his desktop for a game of solitaire. “He’s not letting us do any, he knows all the answers,” one of his teammates, a boy on the football team, complains a few minutes later.

“Thing is, Ms. Gibson, Cedric’s getting them all right because of me, I worked with him just before class, using my amazing grasp of the language. So can I leave early?” cracks Phillip from across the room, and the class breaks up again.

This time Cedric looks up from his book. “Don’t you have anything better to do, Phillip?” he says as his light-footed nemesis, clearly on a roll, frowns like he’s in pain.

“Ms. Gibson, Cedric hurt my feelings.” More laughter.

“That’s enough, Phillip,” snaps Ms. Gibson before she turns to chat with a colleague who’s just wandered in from a neighboring classroom. Time passes slowly as Cedric presses through the pages. Some of these words he already wrote out on his ninety-six cards. He hears a giggle and looks up. It’s from a pretty girl in Phillip’s group. She seems to be looking at someone in the hallway. Cedric cranes his neck. It’s Head. He’s standing back a few feet, so Ms. Gibson doesn’t see him as he makes hand signals and mouths words to the girl. Cedric tries to make out what he’s saying—seems to be something about her going out with him after school. Or God knows what. All Cedric knows is that she’s very cute. And so is this other girl sitting in that group who’s leaning forward across her desk, whispering something to Phillip. She’s so close to him, her lips right against his ear, then she pulls back and they both laugh under their breath. She seems to like him. A lot of girls like Phillip.

Ms. Gibson spots Head and shoos him away, chasing him into the hallway. She returns to the class, checking gingerly on the groups, which should be almost finished with the assigned pages from the
workbook. Phillip, losing track of where she’s standing, flips to the answers in the back of the workbook. Ms. Gibson, who gives daily grades for in-class performance, is incensed. She gives his group an F.

Phillip is undaunted. “Help me, I’m taking the fall,” he yelps, clutching his chest and slipping from his chair. The class howls, and Ms. Gibson can’t resist a smile.

And then something dawns on her. She excitedly tells the class the name of a Ballou junior, one of those rare middle-class kids from Bolling Air Force base, who took the SAT in January and got a 1050—an unspectacular score out of a possible 1600 but noteworthy around here.

“Cedric’ll do better than that,” says Phillip, now back in his seat, in a tone that actually sounds a little awed. “He’s such a brain. If he don’t do even better than that, people’ll be shocked.”

In the back of the room, Cedric flips shut his workbook and again looks out the window, this time to avoid Phillip’s gaze.

The bell rings and Cedric leaves the class feeling tired. He lopes into the math class of Mr. Dorosti, an Iranian immigrant like Mr. Momen, who teaches Cedric computer science in an independent study program.

“Looks like you just lost your best friend,” says Mr. Dorosti, a youthful, effusive man, folding his arms across his linebacker-wide chest. “Want to talk about it?”

“Be nice if I had a best friend,” says Cedric, who slumps before a computer at the room’s rear and starts working the keyboard, showing the teacher he’d rather just stew.

The last thing Phillip said really hit home, but Cedric, curiously, doesn’t feel his usual swell of anger. He knows that Phillip is smart. You can tell, if you really get to know him. He’s made his choices, Cedric mulls, as he thinks a little about Phillip’s life—the girls, the friends he has from lots of different cliques at school, always making people laugh and have a good time.

When the school day finally ends, Cedric decides he’s not going to work on the acid rain project for the citywide competition today. He just doesn’t feel like it. He decides this in the stairwell and considers whether he should go tell Mr. Taylor. He’s sure the teacher is expecting him, but if he goes, Mr. Taylor will have him in there an hour, asking
all sorts of questions about whether he’s feeling confident and if his faith is intact. He’ll be quoting Scripture; he probably has some passages already earmarked.

No way, Cedric decides. He sits down on a step, figuring he’ll wait for fifteen minutes until most of the kids are gone and the bus stop isn’t so crowded. He puts his calculus book on his lap, making like he’s reading it so he doesn’t have to look at the other kids as they pass on the graffiti-filled stairwell.

Ten minutes later, one of those kids happens to be LaTisha, on her way upstairs to visit a teacher. “Hey, what’re you doing here, Cedric?”

“Nothin’, ummm, just nothin’,” Cedric says, jumping up. The book thuds down two steps.

The stairwell is quiet. Most of the kids have already fled in the rush following the final bell. She leans on the railing next to him, as always picking up on his mood. “Look at the face on you,” she says. “You sick or something?”

He pauses a moment. “It’s time I got a life, you know?” he says quietly. “I mean, what kind of life is this? Me killing myself, getting ridiculed, and for what? I’m not gonna make it anywhere special.”

He tells LaTisha that a few days ago he asked his mother for a pair of extra-baggy, khaki-colored pants, a style made popular by Snoop Doggy Dogg. “But my ma said no way, that it symbolizes things, bad things, bad people, and murder,” he says. “It’s just a pair of pants. I mean, I’ve gotta live.”

“You
are
livin’,” she says in feigned exasperation. “You just don’t see what I see. You
got
something special. Something you got from your ma. It’s a thing. I mean, I wish I had it. It’s this thing where you know what it’s going to take, and then you get it done. You push yourself and you get there. For whatever reason, I didn’t get it, that thing. Maybe, you know, my home life didn’t give it to me, with my folks splitting and me always fighting against my mom rather than hearing what she has to say. I don’t know ….”

LaTisha looks down the stairwell, distantly. Cedric doesn’t say anything, mindful that LaTisha is confessing things, opening herself up to try to help him.

“It’s really simple,” she says, looking up and right at him. “You’ve
worked too long, too hard, to give up now.” She puts a pudgy hand on his forearm. “You’re a special person, Cedric. It’s not like you’re so much smarter than everyone else, necessarily. It’s just that you know in your heart that you’re gonna make it—and that’s the key.”

He looks back at her for a long moment and, suddenly, they hug. He feels the warmth of her face against his chest but keeps his chin up so—good God—they don’t start kissing or something.

They separate, and Cedric, flushed, tries to nod her a smile to let her know he appreciates her being around for him. But he just feels quiet and kind of sad, like some fire has gone out of him. There’s nothing more to say. He lifts his bookbag, heavy with homework, and walks slowly down the steps, not bothering to look up at the message scribbled with thick black Magic Marker high on the plaster wall, a proclamation he’s walked by a thousand times—“HEAD LIVES!!!”

I
t works! Phillip Atkins marvels as he turns up the volume on a tiny transistor radio. He bought it for a buck out on Martin Luther King. All it needed was a new battery.

He finds an oldies station he likes, puts the radio to his ear, and drops his jaw in astonishment: “Elvis, my man …. Oh yes, it’s a sign!”

The hallway is crowded between periods, and Phillip, always mindful of his audience, begins to twirl and sway to “Love Me Tender.” A passing girl, tall with braided and beaded hair, asks who he’s listening to. “Elvis—the King,” says Phil, all charm, looking her up and down. “You know, he met me for lunch just yesterday—and he ate like a damn hound dog.”

Teachers here, looking for ways to praise and motivate poor achievers, will pick any characteristic and try to inflate it into a career path. So the school is full of kids who are told they’ll be the next Carl Lewis or Bill Cosby or Michael Jackson. That Phillip is tagged as the next Richard Pryor and rarely as a student who could excel academically is testimony to how effectively he hides so many parts of himself.