Breaking Night (42 page)

But standing in that supermarket, recalling our Town Hall meeting, I was beginning to identify more clearly the connection between my own cause and effect. At best, the impact of people stealing from this store would cause prices to go up. Families would have to pay more for their groceries to compensate, if they could afford to pay more. At worst, the store could go out of business and the cashiers and this manager would lose their jobs. People’s trust in people would be tarnished, I imagined. I looked at the manager again and thought of Perry’s words. Then I approached the register with the chicken cutlets and the jar of cheese.

It was not that I never stole again, because truthfully, I did. But that day was the
beginning
of my never stealing again, and it was the start of a long process of me understanding that I was not, in fact, an island unto myself.

I walked over to the register with my groceries and dug out some loose bills from the bottom of my book bag. The cashier smiled and gave me some change. I stopped to watch the man at the end of the counter pack my bag, filling it in two quick swipes. It felt like ages ago that I was packing bags in the supermarket myself. On my way out, I gave the guy my change. “Gracias,” he said, and I went on my way.

The poster boards were bloody with red ink, wet with blues and yellows that lit up the white page, bringing the biology lesson to life:
“The B-cells tell the T-cells to fight illness and disease.”

As part of a student team of three, Eva and I selected an original design for our presentation depicting the roles of cells at work in the immune system’s fight against HIV/AIDS. Together, we stood back to take in the image our team had chosen: boxers in a boxing ring, red gloves raised chin-high. On the outskirts of the ring a coach with a towel wrapped around his neck, water bottle in hand, was the B-cell, the communicator. The smaller boxer represented the T-cell, the hopeful fighter. The largest contender represented HIV itself, and it stood tall and menacing in opposition.

Crouched down low, lifting her long hair over her ears, hoop earrings dangling, Eva puffed out her cheeks and blew on the ink. Sam, now in her second semester at Prep, passed her a Sharpie to deepen the bold headline:
“Empower Yourself, Fight the Spread of HIV.”

“Shoulda made ’em the Crips and the Bloods fighting. Like, ‘
I’ll cut choo!
Ya feel me?’ ” Sam said, motioning a knife-swing through the air. All three of us laughed. Living in the group home, Sam was full of gang and prison references, and her slang now had a deeper street twist to it. Having her at Prep was like having a piece of my family back together again. Sam didn’t come to school every day, but she came in often enough to enjoy the experience of our little community; she made friends and was well loved by our teachers. I was so happy to have her there. That afternoon was a big day for us, and Sam had dressed for the occasion: her long skirt was tattered, and she wore a man’s blue button-down shirt with a pinstriped tie and combat boots.

“The boxer thing is cool, though,” Sam conceded, shrugging her shoulders and snapping her gum. She leaned down and spontaneously penciled a black eye onto HIV’s face. “Forget this guy,” she said, etching it in deeper. “He should get knocked out.”

“Word,” I said to Sam, smirking. “Good idea.” Suddenly, I was on my knees, too, pencil in hand, giving HIV a busted lip. “Let’s ugly him up,” I told her. Side by side, we vigorously scratched our pencils to the page.

We had a presentation to make; a small crowd of students waited for us in Prep Central. Our job was to use these characters to engage our classmates in HIV/AIDS awareness, to have the cellular struggle between HIV/AIDS and the immune system jump out from the page to create prevention in the lives of others. Bobby, Josh, and Fief were also in the waiting crowd, sitting among the other Prep students. It was their second semester at Prep, too. It had taken me only a few weeks at Prep to understand how welcoming the environment was, for me to feel and trust the safety that these teachers were. But as soon as I knew what Prep could be like, what high school could be like, I went back to my friends and encouraged them to interview. They got in, and now several of us were enrolled. Sam, Bobby, and I even had a few of the same classes together.

At times, having my friends at Prep could be rocky. More than once, a couple of them wanted to skip class and they urged me to come with them. It was so tempting, seeing them huddled by the exit door, slipping out into the bustling streets of Manhattan. I wanted to hang out, like the old days. And it could feel so stale in the classroom compared to the fun I knew they would have walking all around Greenwich Village and Chelsea, sneaking into a movie or sitting in the park. Plus, I didn’t want to be the uptight one in our group, serious and obedient of school regulations. There were moments when it was hard not to cut class too. But I kept thinking about my transcripts, the neat little columns of A’s that I’d written in blue pen sitting in the stairwell that night, and that woman running track, jumping hurdles, checking off one A at a time. They were adding up, and I was writing my ticket; no one could get me into college, but me.

Still, my group at Prep was my family, and meant everything to me; it made the school feel like a kind of home. It reminded me of those late-night episodes of the TV show
Cheers
that Daddy and I used to watch sitting on the couch together, how whenever the character Norm walked in, everyone would call out his name in unison. As a child I didn’t understand the show much, but I understood the sense of belonging shared by the characters, and I longed to have it for myself, a place where I could belong. Before Prep, and especially before my friends came to Prep, I’d never had a place where everyone knew everyone’s name, a place where everyone was welcome and working on their goals together. And now here we were working to make our lives better, side by side. It meant everything to me.

“Let’s go, guys, I think they’re ready for us,” Eva said, lifting a poster board up high. The characters she’d drawn were a worried couple seated bedside, troubled because neither could remember whether or not they had used a condom during a night of drinking and irresponsible sex. Eva had given the girl bee-stung lips, a nose ring, and eyebrows arched in concern. Their thought bubbles were decorated in glitter, highlighting words like
trust, choice,
and
consequences.
Armed with our materials, the three of us, Eva, Sam, and I, stepped through the doors of the meeting room.

“No one ever expects to contract HIV,” I said, opening our discussion to the room of students. I wore a green sweater and blue jeans for the occasion, one of many articles of colorful clothing that I’d begun to trade in place of my standard black uniform.

“But it happens anyway, and it breaks up families and it takes lives. We’re here today to keep it from happening to you. That’s what this is about.”

For a half hour, Sam, Eva, and I used our posters and the information we learned with CASES for our presentation. When it came to the part about exactly how HIV spreads through the human body, I saw Ma. But not the sick version of Ma in the hospital—instead I saw a smiling one, full of life and love. I saw her laughing with me, clasping my hand on Mosholu Parkway, blowing dandelion fluff into the sky and making wishes, the HIV virus already multiplying in her body. Her wish for me to stay in school, her wish for me to build a life of options, her wish for me to be okay.

The Xerox machine spit out ten clean copies of my transcripts. Sitting in Jessie’s empty guidance counselor office, I ran my fingertip down the columns of grades: 92, 94, 100, 100, 100, 98—more than ten classes per semester in total, many of which were high A’s. As I’d planned, I was moving at a pace of one full school year per semester. That morning, the rest of the school was in an assembly in Prep Central, just on the other side of the wall from Jessie’s office. My task that Friday, I decided, was to finally deal with scholarship applications. I wouldn’t fill out college apps until later in the year, but my plan was to have the funds gathered ahead of time.

Jessie Klein, my guidance counselor, helped me decide this. Throughout the last few months, we’d sat in her small office during lunch or after school and talked about college.

“With your grades, Liz, you have so many schools to pick from. You’re in great shape,” she’d said. “But you want to think about how you plan to pay your tuition, and sooner rather than later.”

On one of those afternoons, Jessie had handed me a manila envelope packed with scholarship applications that she had personally taken the time to select as well suited for me. State schools, Jessie explained, would probably give someone with my grades full funding, no problem. I just had to fill out something called a FASFA form, Free Application for Federal Student Aid. But, Jessie explained, tuition for other types of schools could be much more expensive, so the best thing to do would be to fill out lots of scholarship applications so that I could secure all the funding possible and keep my options open, which sounded great to me.

“Um . . . so if tuition at top colleges is really high,” I said, taking the envelope in my hand, and opening it to thumb through the stack, “like more than thirty thousand a year . . . are these scholarships about that much? Enough to cover tuition?” I asked Jessie.

Her look told me I had no idea what I was in for.

Weeks later, as I set out to spend the afternoon by myself working on my scholarship application process, I quickly found out why Jessie had given me that look. In her empty office, I flipped the fluorescent light off and worked only by sunlight, which shone in through the crisscross window guards. For nearly an hour, I sorted through leaflets and brochures decorated with glossy photos of students from racially diverse backgrounds, all smiling, giving their thumbs-up endorsement of company-sponsored loans, scholarships, and grants. Every other moment or so, on the other side of the wall that separated us, the whole student body broke into applause, cheering on a series of teacher’s announcements that I couldn’t quite hear. I’d decided to skip the gathering because I knew deadlines were approaching, fast, and I had to get this taken care of. With so much information to sort through on the application forms, I began flipping past everything in search of only the most pertinent info, the amount of funding they were offering.

These people had to be kidding! What a disappointment! The applications requested far too much time-consuming work for far too little money. And the whole thing was confusing. A financial products company offered $500 to the winner of an essay contest about “free trade in the free market.” Another round of applause sounded next door. Someone whistled loudly. I set that application aside for later; it would require time at the library. Another company gave $250 to the student with the best politically based short story about any prominent politician who had held office in the last one hundred years. Another scholarship was for $400, and another for $1,000. These scholarships would barely cover food at top colleges, I thought. I began to wonder how it was that poor people managed to get a great education without thirty scholarships per year. Finally, I turned a page and found the one I’d been hoping for, one that Jessie had flagged with a Post-it marked “
PERFECT FOR YOU
,” in deep blue pen strokes. This application was issued from
The New York Times
College Scholarship Program, and it offered “$12,000, per year, every year of college.” Clearly, they had some idea of how much top colleges cost. On the form, apart from questions of GPA and after-school activities, it simply asked for an essay in which I was to describe any obstacles that I may have had to overcome in my life in order to thrive academically.

My eyes widened. Seriously? I mean, really? It was so ridiculously perfect that I laughed. With a sweep of my arm, I pushed everything to one side of the table and set down a blank sheet of notebook paper to begin outlining my essay. My hand raced across the page, making bullet points to work from. I laid down a paragraph in only a few short minutes. This was it, I thought. I decided to take a break and step out of the office for some water. Just as I did, the meeting broke; students were swarming out of the large room, talking to one another. Bessim, one of the seniors, came up to me and patted me on the shoulder. “Good job,” he said. Holding my cup I looked at him, totally baffled.

“Mm, okay,” I said, confused.

“Congratulations,” he told me.

I continued to stare blankly at his face, until I finally asked, “For what?”

“For all the awards,” he said. “They called your name for everything. So, congratulations.”

I walked away in a daze. I hadn’t even realized that it was an awards ceremony.

I ran to see Perry in his office. He was on the phone, but paused and said, “We missed you in there,” before handing me a folder with my name on it.

Back in Jessie’s office, I opened the front of the folder and lifted my awards out. They were made of decorative white paper framed in an intricate blue design with “Liz Murray” spelled out in calligraphy. There were almost a dozen awards inside, including ones for best onstage performance for my role as Hamlet in the school talent show, commitment to community service for the HIV/AIDS peer education program, and outstanding achievement in various academic areas.

I immediately picked up the
Times
scholarship application again. Outside the first-floor window, I saw students mingling, smoking cigarettes, snapping bubble gum, and talking. Class had let out for the day.

I held my pen to the paper, trembling. I worked in some kind of trance, pouring everything I had onto that page. My frustrations, my sadness,
all
of my grief, they pushed the pen across that page; they wrote the essay, or the essay wrote itself. Whatever it was, it wasn’t me writing because I wasn’t there. I was floating above looking down on myself, watching my hand move feverishly across the page, watching everything in my life that had ever held me back, breaking.