by Ron Suskind
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!!!”
It 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.
He gets a laugh out of the girl, and he turns as she passes to watch her walk away. He has at least five minutes before he needs to be in his next class—which he may or may not go to—so he scans the crowd. What next?
At the far end of the hall, he spots his favorite foil opening his locker. Cedric!
Phillip dodges through the crowd currents, shoving the radio in the pocket of his low-riding jeans, and flies by in a twirling leap, snatching a small book off the locker’s top shelf above Cedric’s head.
Cedric spins and slams the locker as Phillip slaloms around clusters of passing students. Cedric tries to follow him. At the end of the hall, Phillip stops, panting, not wanting to navigate the staircase, as Cedric, laughing a little, closes in and grabs him by the shoulder of his black T-shirt.
Leaning against the lockers, they both catch their breath, Cedric holding tight to Phillip’s shirt.
“Hey, give me the book,” Cedric says.
“Why should I?” says Phillip, putting it behind his back. “Say please—real nice.”
Cedric tries to reach around but can’t get it, and Phil grabs the front of Cedric’s shirt.
With the two of them only a few inches apart—each holding a handful of shirt—their eyes lock.
“Wouldn’t mind pounding me, would you Cedric?” Phillip says, trying to keep his rising bitterness under control.
“Just give me the book—I’m not playin’,” Cedric says, his voice flat, even, and all business.
It was just a game, thinks Phillip, who was feeling so buoyant a minute ago and doesn’t want this to end with the two of them rolling on the hard linoleum.
Why does Cedric have to make everything so hard, Phillip wonders in frustration as he lets go of Cedric’s shirt and looks down at the bony fist still stretching his T-shirt.
“Hey, chill.” Phillip spits, dropping the book on the floor from behind with one hand and punching Cedric, hard, in the chest with the other.
Cedric winces, letting go of the T-shirt, and Phillip slips away into the crowd, looking back once to see the angular boy in hush puppies quietly pick up his book from the floor.
As the day passes, Phillip’s act sags a bit. His timing is just a little off, and he blames it on his feeling bad about punching Cedric—about letting that whole thing get out of control. In his late afternoon classes he finds himself slipping into a pensiveness that, these days, makes him uncomfortable.
After school, with nowhere special to go, Phil wanders out a side door and settles on the stone steps that overlook the track, where the team is running wind sprints.
Being the class clown allows him to be in control, energized, making them all laugh, setting the tone. But some days—like today—it seems like battery acid leaks out of him, soiling his charming, hip-hop veneer. Punching Cedric like that? It has not been a good day.
Sitting there, grabbing handfuls of pebbles and powdered concrete from a crumbling corner of the steps—no audience in sight—he slips into reflection about what he calls his “double life.”
He does this every couple of weeks. It always means thinking back, if only briefly, to a time three or four years ago when there was a certain coherence to his life at home and at school, a consistency between the goals he publicly embraced and his inner desires, between the outward and the inward.
Back then, he didn’t feel like two people but one: a nerd. Phillip carefully guards his memory of that kid and his life. He wore straight-legged pants and an ironed white shirt, with a bow tie on Sundays. He was a top student who read a lot and would spend hours spinning the globe with his father, thinking about all the places he’d someday go to. Every Saturday, there’d be a morning prayer meeting at the Atkins house in the Highland Dwellings public housing project that would adjourn to the streets, and Phillip and his father would go door to door proselytizing and passing out The Watch Tower, hallmark of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Atkinses were a leading family at a local Kingdom Hall, where Phillip’s father, Israel, was a church leader.
All of that is easy to remember, because most of it remains intact. At home, at least, Phil is still like that, but everywhere else the other Phillip has emerged.
Whenever Phillip thinks about how he’s changed—a gradual process and not all for the worst—he always thinks of how it started one afternoon in the spring of eighth grade. He saw an older boy in the projects—a boy he knew and admired—gunned down right before him. He watched it all from his bedroom window. He thought the shooters saw him. He said nothing but feared retaliation. He didn’t sleep. Police came to the house and interviewed him. That made it even worse, the idea that people in the project, including the shooters, might think he’d been cooperating with the cops.
After that, something was extinguished in Phillip. He began a slow but steady shift in outlook and appearance to creating an identity that he considers a completely sane response. He is now a popular member of Ballou’s mainstream, sporting his tough guy/clown demeanor and a new nickname he recently came up with, “Blunt,” slang for a marijuana cigar. Phillip parties with his buddies on weekends, and his friends lately chide him for having red eyes in school. No matter—he’s rough, he’s fun, and he can walk among almost any group at Ballou. He’s earned himself some comfort and security.
He looks down at the track, at the select group of kids—one of the city’s top track teams—running sprints on the grassy oval. He remembers the look on Cedric’s face after he punched him. Being like Cedric is crazy at a place like Ballou, Phillip thinks. It makes you a target. The kid is asking for it. And, what’s more, Phillip mulls, Cedric is damn lucky it was just me and he just got a little punch. Imagine if he’d mixed it up with Head or one of the school’s genuinely tough kids. That’d be that.
He stands up, brushes the grit off his jeans, and looks around. Not much to do. He
was talking to a friend not too long ago, and the friend asked what Phillip was thinking about doing, in the future and all. The question kind of stumped him. Of course, there won’t be any college or anything like that. Lately he’s been wondering privately about how he might develop his creative, humorous side, on the way, someday, to trying stand-up comedy; as a fallback, though, he might end up owning a nightclub or, better yet, a comedy club. But it was hard to explain all that stuff, so Phil went for the easy line, which ended up being truer than he wanted it to be: “All I know is what I do now. I act stupid,” he said. At least he got a laugh.
An hour later, Phillip arrives home—a sparsely furnished four-bedroom ground-floor apartment in Highland Dwellings, a housing project with D.C.’s usual accompaniment of gangs and drugs. He retreats to the room he shares with his older brother, Israel Jr., a brilliant saxophone player who graduated from Ballou last year and is now a cafeteria cook.
This is the site of Phillip’s other life: going to church, passing out The Watch Tower in his white starched shirt, and living according to God’s Word. He looks around the room, takes a deep breath—relieved that another confusing day is coming to an end—and flops on the bed, his head next to the open window, feeling the breeze.
Just outside, reclining in a kitchen chair on the apartment’s concrete back patio, Israel Atkins Sr. is talking to an adult friend about the problem of shooting too high. A lyrically articulate man who conducts prayer sessions at his home on weekends, he gives this advice to his eight children: hoping for too much in this world can be dangerous.
“I see so many kids around here who are told they can be anything, who then run into almost inevitable disappointment, and all that hope turns into anger,” he says, catching a few last minutes of sunshine before he goes off to work the night shift cleaning Budget rental cars in downtown D.C. “Next thing, they’re saying, ‘See, I got it anyway—got it my way, by hustling—the fancy car, the cash.’ And then they’re lost.”