by Liz Murray
I spent almost a week in this one girl’s place. The guys were all crashing there a lot, hanging out with Danny, a friend of Bobby’s who had always come and gone through our group of friends over the years and had become someone I counted as a friend, someone in my tribe. He was a tall, light-skinned Puerto Rican guy with large hazel eyes, handsome. Like Bobby, Danny loved video games and hanging out with our group. He always had a different girlfriend, and several other girls who thought they were his girlfriend. Paige was his latest. He had just moved in with her, and brought the group of us along with him to hang out.
Paige was twenty-two years old, a former runaway, grown up. Danny told me she’d done really well for herself, had a steady job and her own apartment, which she could pay for without a roommate. It was a tiny, one-bedroom apartment above a Chinese restaurant, so small that you could roll right out of the living room and into the kitchen because they were actually the same tiny room. But it was all hers. She made it happen herself.
When Paige cooked chicken and rice for all of us, the smell and the heat filled the small space like a sauna. That was when her curly hair moistened to her temples, making it cling. She wiped it back before speaking.
“Are you sure you’re not looking for a GED?” she asked me while lowering a steaming dinner plate onto my lap.
“No. I’ve been thinking I want to get my high school diploma,” I told her. “I’m really not interested in a GED. I’ve heard they’re great, but it’s not what I’m looking for. . . . But it’s hard for me to be in school, ya know? It’s crowded, and I feel really behind.”
“Well, my old high school might be the perfect place for you then,” Paige said as she filled a dinner plate for Danny.
From Paige I learned what an alternative high school in New York City was like. “It’s a place like a private school, but for anyone who is really motivated to go, even if they don’t have the money. The teachers really care about you,” she told me.
I scrawled the name and address of her school down in my journal while she went on, speaking about her experiences in high school, trailing off into a story about an ex-boyfriend. As she spoke, I took my pen and darkened in the phone number to her school, until I gave the digits dimension, a life of their own that soared up from the page.
Later, when the apartment was dark and everyone was sleeping, I took over her loveseat and wrote by the nightstand light.
On one page, I made a list:
Things to Look Forward to When I Eventually Get a Place:
1. Privacy
2. Being warm all the time
3. Food, any time I want
4. A big bed!!!
5. Clean clothes, socks especially!
6. Sleeping and no one wakes me up
7. Warm baths
I turned to the next blank page and tapped my pen down a few times. The hall clock was ticking. All over the walls were Paige’s abstract paintings from her high school art class, vivid reds, yellows, and greens splashed across big, beige canvases. I studied a photograph tacked up beside the paintings; a woman who looked like an older version of Paige with curlier hair was wearing her Sunday best, standing beside a stout man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a tie. Paige was sandwiched between them. “That was at my graduation,” Paige had told me earlier. “We took a million shots that day. Yeah, my art teacher cried, sad to see me go,” she’d said.
I tapped on my journal’s empty page again, and wrote:
Number of credits required for graduation from high school
40? . . . 42? (find this out)
My age when the next school year will begin
17
My current address
Wherever I am staying at the moment
My current total of high school credits
1
It would have been zero credits, except that every now and then I used to swing by John F. Kennedy High School with Sam. She didn’t even officially go to my high school, but with more than six thousand students enrolled, who would notice one extra? Together, Sam and I sat in the back of Ms. Nedgrin’s overcrowded social studies class and performed an act you could call “I’m totally weird, look at me.” Sam’s hair back then was fire-engine red, held in a bun with large chopsticks, and her black makeup was caked around her eyes like a raccoon. I was Goth and wore all black, as I had almost every day since I got out of the group home. For a matching accessory to my outfit, I shoplifted and proudly wore a black leather dog collar, crowned with silver studs. Our clothing was torn up in holes that were “cool.” It just so happened that on one of the days when I sauntered into Ms. Nedgrin’s classroom, I took a social studies test and passed. This is the reason I was given the one high school credit. Well, that and the pity Ms. Nedgrin took on me.
With no in-class preparation, I had scored an 81 out of 100 on an exam, and this got her curious enough to pull me out in the hall one day to plead with me to come to school. “You’re a smart girl,” she said. “I read your file. . . . Your mother is sick, isn’t she? You’ve been in placement before?” Her eyes were watery and sympathetic.
“Yeah,” was all I said, avoiding eye contact.
My whole life teachers had acted that way, like they felt sorry for me. The Westchester-living, string-of-pearls-wearing ladies took one look at my life and it always made them sad. And anyway, if she thought I was so smart, she was mistaken. The only reason I passed the test was because I read one of Daddy’s books that was on the same subject, the Civil War. And the questions on her test were super basic. Really, what I did wasn’t as impressive as she thought it was. And why was she crying? She stood there with her crisp, royal blue dry-clean-only dress and her eyes filled with worry, wiping away tears. She hugged me and said something, words that I held on to for years: “I understand why you don’t come to school, and it’s not your fault. You are a victim of these things, I understand, sweetheart. It’s okay.”
For all of Ms. Nedgrin’s good intentions, I’d heard only one thing she said, and that was that I didn’t have to do my schoolwork, for reasons that were not my fault. I was a “victim.” She understood. Well, I didn’t want to do my work anyway, so, great.
That was the last time I showed up to school at Kennedy, and when my report card arrived in the mail at Brick’s place, there it was, a row of F’s and a single D, just one passing grade from Ms. Nedgrin’s class. I was the same age as someone getting ready to enter college and this was my entire high school education so far—one pity credit.
Under the light of Paige’s end table lamp, I used my pen to continue darkening in the phone number and address in my journal, and along with it some new words, alternative high school.
When I woke up in the morning, Paige was stepping around everyone sprawled out, sleeping and snoring across the floor. She had on a BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO shirt, tucked neatly into khaki pants; her hair was pulled into a tight bun. She was searching for her keys. I watched her silently for a moment, walking beside all these sleeping people, being the only productive one. In that moment, I looked up to her, for the way she just made things happen. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted her bright orange Garfield key chain, partially concealed under a magazine.
I sat up and grabbed her keys. “Hold on, Paige,” I whispered. “I’ll leave with you.”
After she nodded permission, I swiped two quarters off the fridge, pulled my jeans over a pair of Carlos’s boxers that I’d worn to sleep, and hurried to follow Paige out the door. My eyes ached in the morning sun. By then, months had passed since I left the motel, and the weather was warming up, the trees beginning to bud little green leaves, and birds were out. I threw my jacket over my shoulder. Paige wore her headphones, humming to something, and she smelled strongly of a fruity lotion when I hugged her good-bye.
We separated on her corner. Stores were just opening, workers rattling their gates open for business. An old man swept the sidewalk in front of the Chinese restaurant beneath Paige’s windows. As she faded into the distance, I to
ok out my journal and flipped it open to the page where I’d written the number. I dropped the quarters into the phone, hesitated, and hung up. Picking the receiver back up, I began dialing slowly. I started over twice more before I got all the way through, and took a deep breath.
2-1-2-5-7-0 . . .
“Hello. H-how are you? My name is Liz Murray. I’d like to make an appointment. . . . Yes, um to come in for an interview . . . for the upcoming semester.”
In the coming weeks I located, researched, and interviewed with as many alternative high schools as I could find. Something in my gut told me to focus on Manhattan, probably because Daddy always held up Manhattan as the place where people go to get things done. I liked the feel of taking the number 4 train or the D train to various stops on the east and west sides of the city; I’d wear my black jeans and black T-shirt, my book bag with all my belongings on my lap. I’d ride the train beside business types with their newspapers and appointments to travel to. My ears were pierced up and down on both sides and I wore my greasy hair waist-length, the front of which I used to cover my eyes. Reading the addresses I’d scribbled into my journal, I’d walk through side streets to huge Manhattan buildings, moving along sidewalks that were teeming with people, until I found the actual location of the schools that I’d been dialing from pay phones in the Bronx. Sometimes I’d pace outside the building for a little while, taking deep breaths, mustering the courage to enter.
It took everything I had to walk into those buildings. I did not want to enter them. For years, maybe for my whole life, it felt as though there was a brick wall down the middle of everything. Standing outside those buildings, I could almost picture it. On one side of the wall there was society, and on the other side there was me, us, the people in the place I came from. Separate. We were separate. The feeling in my heart was of the world being divided into an “us” versus “them,” and everyone on the other side of the wall felt like “those people.” The everyday working people on the train, the smart students who raised their hands in class and got everything right, the functional families, the people who went away to college—they all felt like “those people” to me. And then there were people like us: the dropouts, welfare cases, truants, and discipline problems. Different. And there were specific things that made us different.
For one thing, in my family and for the people in our neighborhood, the pace of life was frantic, determined solely by immediate needs: hunger, rent, heat, the electric bill. A standard of “for right now” was applied to every dilemma. Welfare wasn’t a solid life plan, but for right now bills were due and the check must be cashed. Ma and Daddy shouldn’t be getting high, but for right now Ma had the shakes and needed her fix. I should go to school, but for right now I had no clean clothes and I’d already fallen too far behind. Thirty-five dollars of groceries wouldn’t feed all four of us for a month, but for right now we could sure try. On our side of the wall, priority was given to whatever thing might solve the most immediate problem. This is why the lives of those on the other side of the wall held so much mystery for me.
How was it that anyone ended up possessing oddities such as a savings account, a car, or a house that they actually owned? How exactly did anyone go about getting and maintaining a job? And what was the thinking that got people to take four extra years of school after they’d already earned a high school diploma? Why would anyone go to school for four extra years? For people on our side of the wall, talking about the future always meant our near future, and our greatest concern was the immediate solution to our most urgent needs. We did not set our sights on anything as lofty as long-term planning. Sure, for us, there was always a chance that we might make a better life one day, but for right now, there were more pressing things to worry about.
Walking into those schools was like visiting the other side of the wall, and interviewing with teachers meant talking to “those people.” This entire process was my first-ever attempt at having life be about something broader than the needs right in front of me, and it felt risky and forbidden. My lack of familiarity with these massive, official-looking buildings made them feel unwelcoming, and their promise for advancement seem untouchable to me. The schools might as well have been any stockbroker building on Wall Street or a high-end jewelry store on Fifth Avenue, or even the White House; walking into those schools was as ridiculous as walking into any one of those places, because it meant walking onto “their” side. It took all the courage I had to enter those buildings, my heart pounding the whole time.
The interviews were a big disappointment. There is a distinct look someone gives when they are not really listening. It’s a blank kind of a stare that involves lots of unnecessary nodding. It comes with the “toothless grin,” as Daddy often called that fake, thin smile people put on when they are placating you. I knew by the way some teachers looked at me that the answer was “no” before the interview even started. I’d get the once-over, the head-to-toe scan of someone taking me in superficially and labeling me: Goth, truant, trouble. And then came the toothless grin and the BS: “Our spots are limited, thank you for applying,” and “If something opens up, we will contact you at home.”
Well, they would contact me at Bobby’s house, whose address I’d given them. But when they did, it was only to say, “No, sorry, we are all full this semester. . . . We’d like to take you, but given your limited amount of credits, we need to say no and give someone else a chance. . . . No, sorry, we don’t think it would be a good fit.” Who wanted to take someone old enough to be graduating, with an F average and almost no credits, so I could begin my education at their school? Particularly when I did not make eye contact and looked like, well, me? Across the board, the answer was a straight “no.”
Being told “no” wasn’t so bad the first few times, but after several rejections, I could feel my resolve slipping. Exiting from yet another “no” one sunny afternoon, I stomped down a crowded city block angry, ready to drop the whole thing. It would have been easy. Danny, Fief, Bobby, or Jamie—somebody—would house me until I figured out something. And maybe I could even go back to the block and look for Carlos. I could always go back to him. I sat down to think.
The corner of Lexington and Sixty-fifth Street was bustling with people—Hunter College students, office types breaking for their power lunches, the long line at the hot dog stand. The day was unusually hot for an early May afternoon in Manhattan. I counted my options. I had enough money in my pocket to do one of two things. One, I could afford the subway fare to the next interview, someplace called Humanities Preparatory Academy. Or I could take the train back to the Bronx, about an hour’s ride, and still afford some pizza. But I could not do both. Weighing my options, I sat on the stone partition in front of the college, and I did some people-watching.
Pizza or interview?
I was so tired—tired of interviews, tired of getting rejected, tired of hearing no. And if I was going to be told no anyway, what was the point? At least if I left now, I could still afford some pizza. If I was being realistic, there was a high probability I was wasting my time.
But sitting there, I started thinking, Well, what if? Yes, it was likely that this school would be like all the others, but what if the answer just this one time wasn’t no? The thought had struck me out of nowhere, and I found it as compelling as it was simple. “What if? What if, despite all the evidence I had that said it wouldn’t work out, what if this very next time, just this once, it turned out to be the school that let me in?”
The thought made my heart swell with a rush of emotion that suddenly made me miss Ma. I became lonely on that sidewalk by myself, surrounded by all those people. My mind was racing. One minute I had a home, a family, a roof over my head, and loved ones to orient me in the world. And now I was on Sixty-fifth Street and Ma was dead, Daddy was gone, Lisa and I were separated. Everything was different.
Life has a way of doing that; one minute everything makes sense, the next, things change. People get sick. Families break apart, your frie
nds could close the door on you. The rapid changes I had experienced were hitting me hard as I sat there, and yet sadness wasn’t what came up in my gut. Out of nowhere, for whatever reason, a different feeling snuck up in its place, and hope. If life could change for the worst, I thought, then maybe life could change for the better.
It was possible that I could get into the next school, and it was even possible I could get straight A’s. Yes, based on all the things that happened before, it wasn’t necessarily realistic, but it was possible that I could change everything.
I ditched the idea of pizza and went for the interview.
In the mid-1990s, the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities was in trouble. They faced a problem of severe overcrowding, with 2,400 students enrolled in a school meant to hold no more than 1,500. In the overpacked classrooms there were lots of kids who were failing. Morale among the teaching staff was low and cynicism high. A handful of teachers who sat on a governing committee called School Based Management (SBM) within the school proposed a desperate solution: segregate the failing kids from everyone else, give them only basic classes and their teachers the benefit of fewer classes to teach, and get them out of the building by noon. Behind the scenes, a small group of teachers nicknamed the project Failure Academy.
Failure Academy would be a small thing, a separate school lodged in the back bottom corner of the building within the much larger High School for the Humanities on Eighteenth Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues in Chelsea. The plan was for it to be populated by the hundred-plus students who were screwing up their education so badly that they were seen as a detraction within the mainstream school. The thinking was, with the help of this program, the larger school could focus on educating those kids who were actually performing, while the students of Failure Academy could be segregated, parked in the annex for those from whom no one expected too much. And this is exactly what the school would have been, if not for Perry Weiner.