A Hope in the Unseen (16 page)

The hour’s about to end. The worksheet lies on the desk, barely
touched. Cedric takes his pencil and, pressing hard, scrawls “I AM LOST” across the sheet as class is dismissed. He drops it on the teacher’s desk and rushes quickly toward the door and through the crowd.

Jenica runs to catch up with him, to commiserate. But it would be difficult for her, or most of the kids here, to know what to say. She had a meeting with Professor Trilling a few appointment slots after Cedric. He encouraged her to apply to MIT. She shrugged off the invitation. “Actually,” she told him, “I was planning to go to Stanford.”

O
n a sweltering day in late August, all three air conditioners are blasting in the apartment on V Street. Cedric sits on his bed, piled high with clothes. The suitcase on the floor has yet to be unpacked, even though he returned home from Cambridge three weeks ago.

He thinks a lot about MIT, grouping scenes in clusters, running through them from different angles. The last days of the program were fitful. He didn’t go to the final banquet, where awards were presented, because he didn’t want to see Professor Trilling again. But, on the last morning, as vans were loaded for trips to the airport, his whole gang got up at 6:30 to see him off. Ramsey, standing alongside the van, handed him an envelope with the certificate saying he’d completed the program and warmly wished him luck.

It felt funny coming home—like he’d been away for a year—and he was surprised that he actually felt sort of happy, or maybe just relieved, to get back to this rutted street, with its abandoned cars and people making noise all night.

Since returning from New England, he has spent almost every day either at church or just knocking around the apartment while his mom is at work. There’s stuff to do. Barbara brought him a scholarship book from her office. It’s full of application request forms and addresses. She’s been on him, so he’s been sending off some letters, halfheartedly.

Then there’s Torrence, who has been joined in his passion for Islam by Cedric’s first cousin, Aisha. Mostly, Cedric just listens and doesn’t
argue with him, figuring that Torrence will think that silence means agreement and just lay off a little.

It’s near the end of the month—a while before next month’s rent has to be paid—and last night he and Barbara had a nice chicken dinner. Thinking about it, Cedric gets up from his bed and goes to the refrigerator. He pulls out the carcass—plenty of meat still left—and sits down with it at the dining room table. He thinks back on what his mom was saying over dinner—sounded like she’d rehearsed it—telling him he has to stop sleeping so much and start thinking about what he’s going to do next about school.

There have been some scholarship offers from private schools, including Phillips Exeter in Exeter, New Hampshire, and St. Albans, the exclusive Episcopal boys school in Northwest D.C. Barbara, having done some research, told him that “it’s something a lot of kids from not such great high schools sometimes do. They go to a place like that for their senior year, and maybe even another year after that, then they end up doing real well at the best colleges.”

Cedric just shrugged. They are both schools with lots of rich kids, almost all of them white, and you have to wear a coat and tie. As he got up to bus their plates, he told her he’d think about it but she looked at him like she knew he’d already made up his mind.

Sitting there, picking at the chicken, he remembers that he had the bad dream again last night. He’s actually had it a couple of times in the past few weeks. It’s always the same: he’s thrown himself into a deep gulch. All alone at the bottom, he shouts for help. The bluff up ahead is too steep to climb, the safe, grassy ledge impossibly high. He turns around, toward the cliff behind him, his jump-off point, and yells for someone to save him. There is never an answer by the time he awakens.

He rises, puts the carcass back in the refrigerator, washes the grease from his hands in the kitchen sink, and returns to his bedroom. Face down on the floor, half covered by a large white sock, is a ten-page letter from MIT that came about a week ago. It is his final evaluation for each subject: evaluations that turned out better than he—and perhaps even Professor Trilling—had figured. He showed improvement up until the very last day.

Cedric steps over the letter on his way to lie down, not bothering to pick it up. He can’t chew over the whole MIT thing again. The summer left him feeling battered. It was weird up in Cambridge, meeting black kids who were so much different from him left him confused about what being black means. He struggled to keep up and didn’t quite make it. Still, after a while, he sort of felt like he belonged with them, that strange crowd of smart, secure, casually confident blacks. Sort of, but not really. Maybe just not yet. Maybe not ever. Before he went, it seemed like he was infused with hopefulness, that he had a plan: he’d go to MIT for the summer program, then, in the fall, he’d apply to some top colleges—MIT included—and it might all work out. But it’s a lot harder to imagine all that now. He’s not even sure, at this point, if he even belongs at some top college. For what? To have this summer replicated for four years? He rubs his eyes and sits up, quickly, shaking his head. Every time he goes down that path, trying to figure out where he belongs, it feels like he’s coming apart. He just can’t stress about it.

He hears a police siren approaching and, by reflex, rushes over to the window. He parts the venetian blinds and watches it pass, the blare muffled by the whir of the air-conditioning. He thinks again about his mom’s look last night—a look of resignation, like she knew he’d already made up his mind about what to do next.

Then, suddenly, he smiles, a funny grim smile with his lips tight together. Of course he’s decided. He’s going back to Ballou. All he has to do is to talk himself through it. The scenes instantly take shape in his mind—the graffiti in the hallways, Mr. Taylor’s classroom, the bus stop on Martin Luther King. At least at Ballou, he knows where he stands. Not much of a place, but at least it’s his. And maybe being back there will help him get his bearings back, give him something to push against. People are comfortable with what they know, and, in an odd way, he feels sort of comfortable there, at his miserable old school.

“Comfortable,” Cedric Jennings whispers in disbelief through the dusty white blinds. “Comfortable in this place that I hate.”

O
n a crisp autumn morning in late September, Cedric rises with a secret purpose in mind and gingerly opens the bedroom door to poke out his head. All quiet. His mother said she’d be leaving early for work this morning, and she’s already gone.

After a quick shower, he’s back in his room, prowling through the closet. A new uniform is swiftly assembled, and he appraises himself in the full-length mirror behind his closet door: a plain white polo shirt and black Dockers pants—if not exactly baggy ghetto chic, at least comfortably loose. Rather than his usual black, felt-covered bucks, today he opts for a pair of white Nikes.

Then he plunges his long arm through clinking wire hangers and suits that no longer fit, until his hand touches leather. He jerks out a double-breasted black leather jacket with a longish cut. Cedric pressured his mom into buying it for him last Christmas, and she immediately regretted it. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t afford it. She worried that on V Street and at Ballou, kids are sometimes killed over leather jackets. She knew of mothers who had lost their sons over clothing of lesser quality. Almost every time Cedric has donned the jacket, she has managed to block his path out the door. He strokes the leather, which still smells fresh, and slips it on, turning up the collar, disapproving, and turning it back down. Finally, the coup de grâce: a jaunty “apple cap,” a pinwheel of black leather with a tiny stem in the center. He pulls it down, cocks it a little to one side, and looks at himself approvingly, pushing out his hairless chin.

Forty minutes later, he saunters into Ballou’s cafeteria, doing a sort
of hitch-stepped “pimp roll.” Kids are hanging out at the long tables, killing time before homeroom, a few doing homework, some drinking juice from a free federal breakfast program. Cedric slides to a small table, his face squeezed into a glower.

The new principal, Dr. Kenneth Jones, approaches. When Mr. Washington retired as principal in the spring, exhausted and frustrated, he was replaced by the more diplomatic Dr. Jones, formerly head of an adult education program at another D.C. high school. A tall, light-skinned man with generic good looks, Jones was quick to learn that Cedric is a star student.

“Cedric, what are you doing? Take off that hat,” he says. “You know hats aren’t allowed indoors.”

It’s a well-known rule. Hats, sometimes used to identify crew membership, are piled in a corner of the principal’s office, even though most kids can identify who belongs to what crew without sartorial cues.

Cedric stares back at Dr. Jones, wondering what a person in a fine leather jacket and jaunty cap—clearly a player—might respond to such a command. He auditions a new rap. “No way, Dr. Jones, this hat is phat.”

Dr. Jones arches a brow, perplexed. He plucks off the leather lid and drops it in Cedric’s lap. What’s a player to do, Cedric thinks, looking down at his fine lid? The only response, in this context, is to escalate—to not give in, not ever. So, as Dr. Jones turns and walks away, Cedric quickly puts the cap back on. He knows it’s the sort of in-your-face behavior that will merit serious punishment—detention, certainly, and maybe suspension—if Dr. Jones, now just a few feet away, happens to turn. A brazen act of defiance? A black-leather hiphop get-up? From Cedric Jennings?

On this sunny morning, what saves Cedric is a fight that breaks out on the far side of the cafeteria. Dr. Jones, just as he begins to look back in Cedric’s direction, must sprint across the wide room to break it up.

Cedric, sitting like a mannequin, breathes a small sigh of relief. This rebellious posture, he thinks, feels all right, but thank God he didn’t get caught.

Across from him at the narrow table, James Davis lifts his nose from
calculus homework to watch, visibly bemused, the spectacle of Cedric trying to look “baaaad.” James is a familiar high school type: the popular scholar-athlete who steadily goes about the business of getting good grades, playing football, and avoiding trouble. His brand of modest well-roundedness is plentiful in most high schools but in short supply at Ballou, where most boys face Phillip Atkin’s choice:
either
social acceptance
or
academic achievement.

If, to some degree, James is allowed to have it both ways, it may be because he’s 220 pounds of muscle, and crew members, who tend to enforce the school’s social order, are friendly with his equally imposing twin, Jack, who sometimes runs with them. Basically, the tough kids have given James a bye.

Up to a point. A few weeks ago in physics, James told Cedric that he’s hoping for a college football scholarship rather than notice of his academics. He and James have discussed this before. James understands that to get an academic scholarship from a barren school like Ballou you have to be as blazing and conspicuous as Cedric—all A’s, dense extracurriculars, special programs, behavior that would even make James a target. He and Cedric understand each other’s choices. Which is why Cedric, trying to look tough, can’t maintain his composure in a stare fight with James for more than a few seconds. Both of them descend into big, howling laughs. James reaches out his python arm, takes the hat gently off Cedric’s head, and lays it on the table.

“Boy, keep that hat off,” he says, sounding almost rueful. “You don’t need to be doing all that. You’re supposed to be a role model. You’re fine, just the way you are.”

A smile crosses Cedric’s face—the first real smile in a month. Didn’t know it until now, he thinks, but that’s something he’s wanted to hear since ninth grade.

“All right … forget the hat, but I’m keeping the jacket on,” Cedric says with a self-deprecating chuckle before sliding around to help James with calculus.

After morning homeroom, Cedric stops by his locker. The river of kids flowing through the halls crowds close to him, but he doesn’t pay any mind. He puts the books he’s carrying on the floor, opens the locker, and slips off the jacket, with the apple cap now tucked in the
pocket. He strokes the leather collar once, intently, before hanging it on the hook. And, a moment later, he’s surprised to feel relieved as the metal door slams shut.

A
t the start of this afternoon’s college prep class, a kid whom Cedric thought was pretty tough sort of blushes as he hands in a rough-hewn personal essay. Near the back wall, a few boisterous and obnoxious kids grow quiet, flipping through the glossy applications book. Every time this class meets, Cedric is surprised by this silence, like a spell has come over everybody.

In some ways, this class—the senior year’s complement to junior year’s SAT-PREP—is the cruelest offered at Ballou. Many kids take it, spending a casual hour each day leafing through books listing colleges and scholarships and filling out applications, even though few are actually college bound. Many of them won’t even graduate from Ballou, but it’s hard, still, not to be curious about what might have been.