Breaking Night

Chapter 10
The Wall

THE WEEK AFTER WE BURIED MA, I STOPPED SLEEPING. ANY REST that I got was interrupted by cold shivers and my heart, pounding me awake, beating on the walls of my chest frantically like the wings of a caged bird. When I did manage to sleep, guilt tormented me. I had a recurring nightmare that I turned my back on Ma when she needed me most, and because of it, she kept dying all over again—each time I went to sleep. The nightmares gave me insomnia.
New York City was hit with a record-breaking cold front. Motel management finally responded to complaints about the severe cold and turned up the heat. The air became heavy with steam. As I wrestled with sleep, tangled in the motel sheets, I was drenched in Carlos’s and my own sweat. My memory of that time is choppy: the fragrance of a dozen roses he carried to my bedside; their day-by-day, sweet-smelling rot, as Carlos’s radio fizzed and crackled; slow jams or old school rap, Slick Rick, Grand Master Flash, The Furious Five. Sam, standing in front of the mirror, smearing black makeup over her eyes, glittery gloss over her lips.
When I was awake, my state of mind was fragile. I could not handle my emotions; they just kept spilling out of me, or else I went numb and silent. By the third night, Carlos had had enough of my behavior. He taunted me with flirty cell phone calls to other girls placed right outside our window, within my view. Then he’d invite Sam for long walks alone, and return several unexplained hours later, toting leftovers from fancy restaurants with French or Italian names spelled in curvy script on grease-stained bags; all places he’d never brought me. I knew I was bad company, my sadness sucking all the air out of the room.
Our last night in the motel together was New Year’s Eve, into the infant hours of 1997. Spread out over the beds, the three of us split a bag of sunflower seeds and watched the ball drop on TV. At exactly midnight, a million shreds of multicolored paper rained on Times Square. My first one without you, Ma, I thought.
Carlos disappeared for three days. Without anything of real value left to barter, the hotel manager promised Sam and me that we would be out “on our asses” by eleven a.m. and not a minute later. We waited out the long night in silence, neither of us willing to speak what we both knew to be true: he wasn’t coming back this time. I don’t remember who started packing first, but I do know we helped each other. Sam jammed her belongings into a suitcase she’d found in the trash: comic books, jars of hair dye, her poetry, ripped-up jeans, and old-man sweaters. Everything I owned went into my backpack: my journal, my mother’s NA coin, some clothes, underwear, and the one picture of my mother I carried everywhere, the black-and-white one taken in Greenwich Village when she was homeless at seventeen years old. In defiance, we slammed our stuff into our bags, and what didn’t belong to us, we threw at the wall, or we kicked, hard, across the room.
Sam had been hiding ten dollars in case of emergency. Because the train was too far a walk and our bags were too heavy, when the sun was up, we took a cab—backpacks in our laps and one garbage bag of clothing each—to Bedford Park Boulevard. We had no idea what was next.
We hadn’t meant to split up; it just happened. Sam went to visit Oscar to store her bags. Since it was Sunday, I knew my friends would be home, so I went knocking on doors, Bobby’s, Jamie’s, Josh’s, Fief’s, anyplace I could think of knocking. Bobby let me leave my garbage bag of stuff in his closet. I showered at Jamie’s place while her mom was out. In the middle of drying my hair, Carlos knocked on Jamie’s front door. She looked back at me with her hand still on the doorknob, as though to say, “What do you want to do about him?” Carlos’s eyes were crazy, darting everywhere.
“I got us another room, Shamrock. Let’s go,” he said.
I needed a place to stay that I could be certain about. But not knowing when Jamie’s mom would be home, or if I could even stay at anyone’s place for sure, I ignored my gut and went with him. In the cab, my hair still dripping wet, I asked, “Can we stop and get Sam?”
“We’ll come back for her,” Carlos said, and I knew better than to push him. His army fatigue outfit had become tattered and was in obvious need of cleaning. He was unshaven, and his Timberland boots were mysteriously missing their laces. With one extended knuckle, he knocked on the Plexiglas cab partition. “New England Thruway, exit twelve plus one,” he said.
“What?” the driver asked.
“New England Thruway, exit TWELVE PLUS ONE!!” Carlos yelled, frantically rubbing his fingers through his hair in frustration, looking to me. “The devil’s all around me, he ain’t gonna make me speak his number. He’s screwing with me, Shamrock. I know it.” My heart jack-hammered.
“Thirteen?” I asked. “You mean Exit Thirteen?” Carlos flinched at the sound of the number and then nodded slowly, his closed fist over his mouth and his eyes winced shut.
“Yes,” he said in a way that was both flat and psychotic. Why did I get in the cab in the first place? I thought. I had no idea what Carlos was on, but I knew he was high on something.
Taking a deep breath, I told the driver, “He wants to take the New England Thruway to exit . . . Thirteen,” I said, cringing at Carlos’s outburst in Spanish. The cab accelerated.
Quietly, I reached into my bag, sifted through my clothing, and began rubbing my fingers along the rough edges of Ma’s Narcotics Anonymous coin. All these years I’d kept that coin; holding it made me feel close to her. In the cab with Carlos, I rubbed it over and over as we zigzagged through traffic.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .

Our new crash place was a side-of-the-road stop for truckers and people looking for a few hours of pleasure, called the Holiday Motel. It was not unlike the Van Cortlandt Motel, only now I had no clue where we were. I didn’t know how to get to any form of transportation that did not depend on Carlos, and I had a sinking feeling we would not be going back for Sam. At this motel there was nothing but highway, seedy-looking people, Carlos, and me.
I decided that being agreeable and quiet was my best bet. Whatever Carlos dictated I went with, even if it didn’t agree with me. I was too afraid not to, and he played my fear for everything it was worth. What unfolded was like a spiteful game of Simon Says. “Let’s go to the room,” he barked after he paid the manager. We went. He held the only room key; I waited. Standing in the cold, I watched him move ever so slowly, checking his beeper, then his phone, holding the key in his hand inches from the lock, keeping us in the icy outdoors, just because he could. Several times over the next few days, spontaneously, he called out “Time to eat!” It was—and not a moment earlier or later than he said so. I grabbed my coat and followed. When the cash register rang up, not once but twice, a total of $13.50 for our meal, he pounded the counter and walked out, abandoning our takeout food, impossibly out of reach behind the counter, leaving me hungry. And when he left the motel some evenings with no answer as to whether or not he would be back, I waited then, too.
Those nights come back to me often, the nights I spent alone in the Holiday Motel on exit “12 + 1” on the New England Thruway. Those nights were my bottom.
Watching the windows for Carlos, listening to the endless prostitution through the thin wooden walls, no money to use the phone, I had no place to escape to. Daddy told me that he once spent eight weeks in solitary confinement in prison, and all he had to entertain him was a single book. He said he began hallucinating the characters of that book; they began to talk to him, becoming his only companions. I paced the small motel room at night, frantic, heartbroken about Ma, slowly unraveling.
My thoughts fixated on the people in my own life, and how they defined my options. Where would I go if I left? To Bobby’s? That wouldn’t last. To Jamie’s? Her mother was a foster care caseworker. She would be just waiting to “help” me go back into a group home, so I couldn’t stay there long. After what I’d seen at St. Anne’s—the mean girls, the indifferent staff, and the prisonlike environment—I was never going to a place like that again. Back to Brick’s apartment? Mr. Doumbia was looking for me there, so that was like choosing the group home. No way.
I was stuck. I tried to numb myself with sleep and television, but thoughts of Ma kept intruding: the damn pine box they buried her in, the coarse nails holding it together. Was she wearing her hospital gown inside the box? I told her I’d see her “later.” I’d really thought I had a later. . . . But if I had her NA coin, if Lisa and Brick still had her clothing hanging in the closet, could she really be dead? As Carlos’s insanity escalated, much like getting caught downstream in a strong current, I felt like I was going right along with him.
Over the next two weeks, whenever Carlos returned from long mysterious hours “out,” he emptied his pockets onto the motel table: his black and gold Latin King beads, tubes of antibiotic ointment for his growing number of tattoos, a handgun, Ziploc bags full of pills, block-shaped bricks of weed, and, curiously, two cans of soda. From under the blankets, I would squint in the dim hanging light as he twisted the cap off a fake Coca-Cola can and pulled out a plastic bag of white powder that was undoubtedly cocaine. Standing before a wall lined with mirrors and tacky maroon carpet wallpaper, Carlos turned to me and held the bogus can and the baggie side by side. Counting his reflections, there were three of him. He made an amused gesture with his eyebrows, finding humor in his hiding cocaine in a Coke can.
The one saving grace was that Carlos ceased trying to be physical with me; instead, coming in at dawn those cold January mornings, he kicked off his snow-covered boots and pulled a blanket over himself on the floor. This was both a relief and unnerving for me, because if we didn’t speak and we weren’t sleeping with each other, what was holding us together at all? And yet my memory stubbornly recalled intense brown eyes gazing at me affectionately and his heartbeat as I slept on his chest. Carlos had once been a source of comfort and of love. He’d cared for Ma, just the way he said he’d cared for his own dad when AIDS took hold. It was hard to be angry at him after all we’d been through, but it wasn’t hard to be afraid.
After too many awkward nights of silence and too many disappearances, I risked a couple of questions. One night I used my most timid voice to ask, gingerly, “So where are you headed? Can I come with you? . . . Can we go get Sam?”
I didn’t have Oscar’s number, and everywhere I called, none of our friends had heard from Sam. I was worried. I was also sick of eating our half-rotten leftovers and watching the window, unsure of whether he’d return. Something had to change. Carlos responded to my questions with a sneer, his jaw slack, a hateful look in his eyes. But we hadn’t eaten all day, and unless I pressed him, I might not eat for yet another. I didn’t want him to leave without me.
Very gently, I asked again, “Carlos, did you hear me? Can I come with you?” My heart pounded.
Slowly he walked toward me, then he moved very quickly, his arm cocked back. Wham! His fist came flying past my head and split the wall’s wooden paneling on impact. I screamed. He pulled back his huge fist again, as though readying to punch me in the face. I flinched and raised my arms protectively. Looking me up and down with his fist held high, he laughed. “Stupid,” he muttered before walking to the bathroom. I was shaking; I curled up against the headboard and didn’t dare say another word. Never before had he threatened violence.
But maybe that wasn’t true. Carlos had a silent way of establishing control, ensuring that you just knew not to press him. He was muttering to himself in front of the sink, slamming objects down in the bathroom. I did not dare move or speak. For what felt like forever, I watched Carlos through the mirror as he gelled his hair back, perfected his goatee with a disposable razor, put on his gold rings, and finally stuffed the gun in his belt and his drugs back into the zipper pocket of his army fatigues. He slipped out into the cold, silently.
“Cops Charge Beau in Stab,” read the January 13 headline in the New York Daily News. The write-up was more factual than sentimental. It stated plainly that the woman “had been stabbed about the body and her throat was cut; she was left to die on the motel room floor.” It was a single incident of violence against a woman, perpetrated by her boyfriend, in a city where things like this happened all the time. In fact, boyfriend-perpetrated stabbings were not even new at what the paper called this “hot-sheet” motel, at which drug dealing, police raids, and violence against women was the norm.
But I didn’t have to wait for the news report to learn about the stabbing; I had only to lift my curtain. At the time, I had been watching the news on television while Carlos was out. At first, it didn’t completely sink in: a reporter talking in front of some motel, delivering a story about the gruesome murder of a woman at a dive on the New England Thruway. The motel maid discovered the body, which at that very moment was being wheeled silently into an ambulance behind the wide-eyed reporter. It could have been an episode of Daddy’s favorite show, Law & Order. Instead, it was a real murder—right outside my window. Rosa Morilla, age thirty-nine, mother of five, had bled out on the floor of her room in the Holiday Motel, just three doors down from my room. I jumped up to look out the window, lifted the curtain, and saw the reporter. It was like having two different TV sets to watch, with two different camera angles. I looked back and forth between the television and out my window to see the same view: Ms. Morilla in a body bag, the ambulance doors slammed, the reporter’s blinding portable light shining on her overly made-up face.
I shut everything off, light and TV, and crawled under the blankets. Through the dark, I listened to the police radios crackling, the dozens of footsteps crunching snow, the maids speaking frantically in Spanish. “No,” I spoke to the empty room. “Goddamnit.” Just a few hours later, you could have never guessed it happened. With the reporter long gone, the police packed up and departed, the whole motel was back to business as usual, as though Rosa Morilla never existed. As though she was not the mother of five children; as if she had not been someone’s daughter or sister; as if she didn’t even matter.
Turns out people could just vanish. I couldn’t help but sit there and think about the woman who’d been murdered a few feet from my room. How had she gotten there, in a seedy motel room with a violent man who claimed he loved her? And was I really any different?
Maybe originally I had loved Carlos, and I wanted the future he said we would have together. I’d wanted him to have his inheritance and a place of his own. I’d wanted to love him the way he’d never been loved. But that future dimmed a long time ago. And now I stayed because I was afraid of him and felt stuck without him. I thought I needed him.
I couldn’t help but wonder, What if it had been Carlos and me instead of Rosa and her boyfriend? What if it had been my name the reporter uttered? Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Murray allegedly murdered at the hands of her boyfriend, eighteen-year-old drug dealer . . . I imagined what it would do to Daddy, Lisa, Sam, and Bobby—all the people I loved—if my life ended like that.
The hotel maid took pity and gave me a couple of quarters. I used them to dial Jamie. “I need your help. Can you talk to your mom and see if I can come stay with you? I need to leave, now.”
Jamie’s apartment was one stop in a series of different friends’ homes, patches of refuge as I carved out what was next, this time alone. Jamie had a fierce argument with her mom, and I was granted one week’s stay. I’ll never forget Jamie’s kindness—how she didn’t even question me, just helped any way she could, like family. She borrowed cab money from her mom, washed my clothes while I took a steaming hot shower, made us tuna-fish sandwiches with the crusts cut off and hot bowls of chicken soup. On the futon with her at night we fell asleep side by side, clean and warm. Carlos was far away from me, and I felt safe. If it were her choice, I could have stayed longer. But none of my friends had their own places, so it was all about whose place, on which night. And it was all up in the air from here on.
I bounced around aimlessly from one home to another those first few weeks. Sam called to reach me at Bobby’s a few times, but I kept missing her. She was safe, in a group home on 241st Street. When I dialed the number she’d left, a girl named Lilah picked up and took a message.
“Naw, Sam ain’t here, she out. You wanna leave a message or sumthin’?”
“Tell her it’s Liz, and I’m at Bobby’s tonight if she wants to call me back. Sam is the Puerto Rican girl with short blue hair. Please make sure she gets the message.”
“I know who she is,” the girl blurted. “I’m her best friend!”
She hung up. Sam had moved on . . . out of nowhere, she was gone, too. It was really going to be just me for now, figuring it out.
Once, in the middle of the night, I had to leave Fief’s house when his mom and dad got into an argument. Bobby didn’t mind the late-night surprise; he actually seemed very happy to see me. When I popped in on him, he’d already dressed for bed, in shorts made from cut-up jeans and a faded T-shirt bearing the McDonald’s logo, only it read MARIJUANA instead, right beneath the golden arches. Seeing the way his warm eyes brightened the moment he opened the door, I realized only then how much I really missed him—missed Bedford Park, the group, and our hangouts. I had stopped a few people outside to ask for money and I brought Chinese food, careful not to come empty-handed.
“Pork fried rice with no vegetables and chicken with broccoli, no broccoli, just the way you like it,” I said first thing, lifting the bag up high, in the hallway.
He smiled that half smirk, pressing a finger to his lips, while he led me inside the warm, dimly lit apartment. His mother was getting her last few hours’ sleep before her early-morning shift at the hospital. The cat, a gray tiger-striped, was rummaging through the kitchen trash pail. A drawing of his little sister’s, a butterfly colored purple and yellow all jagged and outside of the lines, was magnetized to the fridge.
We unwrapped the food in front of his TV. A taped episode of wrestling had just ended. Beside the screen, a picture of Bobby and his girlfriend, Diane, passionately kissing at a wedding was framed, her shiny, black hair falling over her shoulders. Bobby’s math homework was spread out over his black futon, shapes and various angles stenciled on the white sheets, his answers penned in beside them. Being in a real home instead of wasting away with Carlos in that motel room was like rejoining the land of the living. Looking at Bobby’s papers, his healthy, handsome face, his relationship, it was obvious that the whole thing—society, reality, life—had been going on without me, while I had been spacing out in some morbid fantasyland. Next to him, I felt like a ghostly emanation from limbo.
“So, wow. How’ve you been?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I said suspiciously. Sitting there, staring at Bobby’s stable life, the question felt almost rhetorical. Didn’t I look as raggedy as I felt? My clothing was dirty, my hair was greasy and wild.
“Well, I just mean, I dunno, how are you? I know it’s been rough, with your mom and everything. And it’s been hard, too, Liz . . . not being able to get in touch with you. I wanted to be there for you about everything. So I was just wondering how you’re doing.” His hair was freshly wet from a shower, combed away from his face, and his eyes were earnest, full of concern. Coming from the motel, it was hard not to be defensive. I had to keep in mind that I wasn’t dealing with Carlos; that there were good, sane people in the world.
“Sorry . . . I’m just tired.” I kept my eyes on the ground, trying not to show my embarrassment. “A lot’s been going on. But I guess you could say that I’m all right.”
“All right? That it?” he asked, scooping a spoonful of rice into his mouth. His curiosity was sincere. Looking at him, I relaxed and reminded myself that I actually had friends who really loved me. With Bobby, I was safe.
“Yeah . . . you know right now, that is it. I’m all right.” And I was. Letting go of Carlos had freed me, jolted me out of some slumber. I felt unusually lighthearted. “Tell me how you’ve been.”
We ate while Bobby played back his old wrestling VHS tape, pausing every so often so he could teach me all the correct names to the moves; Razor’s Edge, the Tombstone, Elbow Drop. But my eyes kept going back to his math homework spread out on the futon. His penmanship, racy and dark-pressed, seemed confident.
“. . . These are the main guys,” he said, moving his hands around for emphasis. “But ECW—that’s Extreme Championship Wrestling—now they’re for real. When it comes to actual violence—”
“Bobby,” I interrupted. “What’s high school like?”
After that night, I finished the rest of the week around the corner, at Fief’s. The week after, I jumped from place to place. It was hard to get a full night’s rest because I often had to sneak in after parents had gone to bed and be out again before they woke up, but I did manage about four hours a night. At Myers’s place, there was this sleeping bag he’d taken camping only once. When he rolled it out for me between his computer table and bed, I took up the only free space in his small, rectangular room.
Jamie’s mom made rice and beans, and Jamie split her portions in half with me while we played Nine Inch Nails tapes and gossiped about guys or talked about old movies in her kitchen at night. At Bobby’s apartment, I could get the best showers. I savored the fresh smell of his Pantene shampoo, his blue, perfumed bars of Coast soap, and the use of his mom’s tampons and deodorant.
My friends fed me, or sometimes I panhandled just enough money to get a plate of fries drenched in mozzarella cheese and gravy at Tony’s diner. Tony would let me sit there to eat it, keeping warm for hours. But when there was no one to reach out to, I’d shoplift at C-Town, stealing whatever I could get my hands on. I was bold, fearless, shoving bread, cheese squeeze, and seedless green grapes into my backpack or into the pouch of my hooded sweatshirt. Anything, as long as I could eat enough to make the pains in my stomach go away. This wasn’t the hard part. If I needed something, I could figure out how to get it, the same way I had figured out my needs my whole life. No food at home? Go pack bags at the supermarket, go pump gas. Ma and Daddy too chaotic? Leave. School sucks? Don’t go. Simple. I had always been able to meet my needs. No, the hard part about being on my own turned out to be something else altogether.
With Sam and Carlos by my side, knocking on doors and living off the help of my friends had been manageable. If I ever felt self-conscious asking for help, I could always tell myself that we were all just being “social,” the three of us were coming over to “visit.” But being homeless alone turned everything upside down. It revealed just how needy I was, and I hated that.
Yes, sometimes I could stay over, but not without a cost. It was the little things that got to me. The way I’d hear the smallest whispers over the stove around dinnertime at Bobby’s place; Bobby and his mom, in hushed voices, would debate if there was enough food that particular night to split with me. Or how from the hallway of Jamie’s building, I could hear her arguments with her mom, the knock-down, drag-out battles to get me to stay one more night. Even Fief’s apartment could get tricky, when he disappeared to Yonkers for weeks to see his cousins, and his dad answered the door to tell me he didn’t know when Fief was coming back. They were my friends, but I was something else . . . I was “Need a place to stay, can you spare a plate of food? Do you have another blanket? Mind if I use the shower? Do you have any extra . . . ?” That’s what I was, and I couldn’t stand being that.
Not only was this not who I wanted to be, but it was also terrifying, because as much as my friends, my new family, were helping me, I had to wonder: When would they stop? At what point would I become too much? When would they start saying no? This couldn’t go on forever. And just the thought of being in dire need and having to, one day, hear my friends flat-out say no to my hunger and my need for shelter—and to turn away from my desperation—well, the thought of that rejection was just too much to deal with. I dreaded that moment of “no” that I sensed was coming. What does it feel like, the moment someone you love turns you down? I didn’t want to find out. So I decided it was better to stop needing so much. It wouldn’t be instant, and it would take some time, but I resolved to never be so needy again.
And then, this back-against-the-wall situation gave me another piece of clarity: Friends don’t pay your rent. It was a simple and powerful thought. It hit me as I was trying to sleep on Bobby’s futon one night. But as simple as that thought was, it caused a huge shift in my thinking. Friends are great. They are loving, they are supportive, they are fun—but friends don’t pay your rent. I never really had to worry about rent before, but now that I absolutely had to worry, I was trying to grasp the concept of actually getting an apartment and gathering the money for rent when it hit me: everything I had been obsessing about (Carlos, friends, hanging out, thinking about my past)—none of it paid my rent. Paying rent would require something new to focus on.
After a few weeks of being so dependent on people, I began sleeping a few nights a week on the subway, alone. Into the far corner of the subway car, I appeared just like any other traveler taking public transportation, rocked to sleep by the train’s rhythm, well on my way home. No one had to know. But this wasn’t safe. Sometimes thugs boarded the train, teenage guys in hoods, their pants sagging, barking loud words to one another, dominating the subway car. I’d awoken a few times to their stares, but never anything more. It was luck. So I chose hallways as my main refuge; they were a better bet.
The top landing of any Bedford Park building’s stairwell felt so much safer. Lying there, flat on a bed of marble, using my backpack for a pillow, whole lives played out beneath me: the smell of food cooking; lovers’ arguments; dishes clanking; TVs blasting at top volume; my old shows, The Simpsons and Jeopardy!; rap music—all carrying me back to University Avenue. Mostly, though, I heard families: children calling out for mothers, husbands speaking their wives’ names, sending me reminders of the way love stretched between a handful of people fills a space, transforms it into a home. I wondered how Lisa was doing at Brick’s. How was she dealing with school when we had just lost Ma? I didn’t have the strength to call her; I knew I just couldn’t handle the questions I was sure she’d ask: “What are you doing out there, Liz? What are you going to do with your life? Are you going back to school?” It was too much to deal with, so I stayed away.
Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is.
Sometimes, waking up, I didn’t initially recognize where I was. For those first few seconds, it could be University Avenue, the footsteps nearby, Ma and Daddy getting ready to binge for the night. Or Brick’s place, Sam somewhere right within my reach. But when my eyes adjusted, it was always someone else’s personal touches, their family’s noises surrounding me, and their scents in the air. I was at Bobby’s, Fief’s, or one of a few other random places I’d sometimes go, the apartments of friends’ friends.
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 took 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 friends 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.
The chairman of the board of SBM and a passionate English teacher for many years, Perry was absolutely indignant about the idea of segregation, and he challenged the committee to instead start a real alternative high school that met the needs of these struggling students. Several people supported Perry, including the chairman of the teachers’ union, Vincent Brevetti, another man who dedicated his life to empowering young people through the betterment of education. Together, Perry and Vince spent months meeting to design a school that would serve, rather than “park,” this at-risk population of kids who had failed within the structure of mainstream education. The two men became a team.
Every morning at seven a.m., Perry and Vince would arrive at school for an hour or more of planning. The school they were building would be so much more than a dropout prevention program. Rather than base the model of their alternative school on what was not working with the troubled students, they decided to seek out an educational model that did work, one that had already proven to be highly successful. They visited and observed other high schools, ones that catered to more elite and privileged populations of kids. What they found in the design of those schools deeply inspired them, and they returned to Chelsea determined.
The students of so-called Failure Academy would instead become the students of Humanities Preparatory Academy. “Prep,” as Perry and Vince began calling it, would become a mini-school that provided at-risk students the opportunities and privileges of a personalized education traditionally reserved only for those who could afford elite private schooling. The design of Prep would be radically different from typical mainstream education.
Prep would cap the number of students at 180, so that pupils could benefit from one-on-one attention from teachers. High-stakes tests would not be the measure of a student’s success at Prep, for the feeling was that it narrowed the curriculum and the students’ ability to demonstrate their real knowledge. Instead, something called Performance-Based Assessment Tasks took their place. PBATs were a rigorous and personalized means of testing students by allowing them to respond to test questions in depth, as opposed to the traditional fill-in-the-blank style of high-stakes New York State Regents exams, which in so many cases were the catalyst for students failing. Instead, PBATs would require students to produce thorough, in-depth work that demonstrated real world knowledge and application of their semester-long classes. This could be done a number of ways, via portfolios, extended writing projects, or even through classroom presentations wherein a student was given the opportunity to teach the class the lessons they learned throughout a semester. In doing this, PBATs would open the space for an alternative curriculum, and with it, a way for teachers to teach students differently.
So courses at Prep expanded beyond standard names and themes such as Global 1,2,3, and Literature 2, trading them in for dynamic classes like Facing History & Ourselves, in which students studied the implications of genocide, and Themes in Humanity, in which these formerly failing students would read Dante’s Inferno or Kafka. English 1 would become Shakespeare on Stage, and students would comprehend and perform Hamlet to earn their English credit.
Far more than mere name changes, the courses themselves were meant to cultivate an environment of authenticity and encourage depth of thought. To do this, classrooms were capped at around fifteen students per class. This way, student and teacher alike sat in a circle of chairs, looking one another in the eyes for an active, heavily participatory discussion-based lesson. There would be no place for a student to hide out at Prep, no place for them to get lost, and no place where they might be forgotten.
For Perry, Prep was a labor of love; he was dedicated to seeing his second-chance students win. His belief was that if the mainstream school system had failed, then it would require something different for these students to succeed. Prep would be that difference. In this way, the students were not looked at as dysfunctional; the system was dysfunctional. The concept of “failure” incorporated within the system’s very design was not in any stage of the planning of Humanities Prep. By design, Prep was made to facilitate for its students what was possible.
I flew through the double doors fifteen minutes late, my forehead broken into beads of sweat, the bun I’d attempted curling with flyaways. Humanities Preparatory Academy. I read and reread my journal page to ensure that I was in the right building. The place looked so small, like the back office of an actual school.
The main office, Prep’s only office, contained a set of four sectioned-off cubicles with walls that didn’t quite touch the ceiling. Filing cabinets had been rolled into the short partitions that made up each room; one had a shipment sticker still stuck to the side of it, with the school’s address penned onto the boxes from their delivery. A fan whirred from on top of a bookcase that was filled with random, secondhand books. Above it, a faded poster read, LIFE REWARDS ACTION, in bold, purple script. The secretary, April, an African American woman with pretty eyes, instructed me to have a seat in the waiting area, which was a row of classroom chairs strung along the wall across from her desk.
“You’re late. They started without you,” she said, tilting her head, gold jewelry dangling from her neck, wrists, and ears. “Don’t worry, Perry will be out real soon and you can talk to him.”
Looking down at the last cubicle, to the far left, through a thin glass window in a door, I saw a chalkboard with a sentence written and underlined on top:
Pick one of the following topics and write an essay on its meaning.
Diversity
Community
Leadership
A middle-aged white man with a goatee and glasses led a discussion that was mostly muted behind the partition. He was dressed in dark corduroys and a maroon tie. The first thing I noticed about him was that he seemed to laugh and smile easily. He looked friendly. Five or so young people sat in a semicircle around him, listening and answering questions at length. I pulled out my pen and got to work on the essay. I didn’t know what I could write about community or leadership, so I chose diversity because my mind went to the discrimination I faced in my old schools.
For three pages, I detailed the way people assumed things about me based on appearance, my race, or my being unkempt. They’d called me blanquita, little white girl, for so many years on University Avenue. “You must be rich, white girl, snotty, too,” they’d hiss as I went through the halls of Junior High School 141. I also went on about the way I was often stared at for my Goth clothing in my previous high school interviews. In detail I described the anger I felt when I knew a teacher had rejected me before really listening. Written with sloppy blue penmanship, my paragraphs were fat and long. Reading them over, I felt they made a coherent point about diversity and discrimination. It was the first writing assignment I’d completed in years. I chewed on my pen. The meeting I should have been in suddenly let out.
I had to stop the teacher. He was on his way out, dashing past me.
“S-sir,” I said. “Sir.” He turned and smiled warmly.
“Hello,” he said, his open hand extended. “Perry.” He finished his sentence laughing, looking directly into my eyes. I looked away. He was one of “those people” on the other side of the wall. The intensity of his eye contact caught me off guard and made my heart pound; I flinched when he put out his hand, stared at it too long, and grabbed hold to shake it only at the last possible moment.
“Hi, I had an appointment to be in there, too.”
“Elizabeth—” he held up a notepad—“. . . Murray. What happened?” he asked, raising his eyes from reading, looking at me through his glasses. His totally focused attention made me uneasy, but it also made him interesting. He seemed different. If there were a photograph of the day I met Perry, it would be a perfect study in opposites: Goth mess meets jovial man who, based on his glasses and desk of Shakespeare books, appeared to live in the library.
“Well, Liz, actually. Call me Liz. Please, I just need a chance to sit and talk to you. I’m really sorry about being late.”
I was so nervous my palms were sweating. I was not good at this sort of thing; I’d never felt the permission to just talk to authority figures, ever. The other teachers interviewing me must have noticed it. I worried what this guy would do when he noticed it. I mean, what must I look like to him? A ratty street person. Lice girl, dirty, truant, thief, late, irresponsible.
“Look, Liz,” he said, without taking his eyes off me, “I would love to take you inside to talk, but I’ve got a class in ten and there’s an essay component to the interview. It’s going to take too long. I’m afraid you’ll have to reschedule.”
I held up my completed essay for Perry to see. “Done,” I told him. “I did it already.” He looked surprised, squinting at the papers, taking them from my hand to skim over, quickly. “Now can I have those ten minutes?” I pushed.
He laughed that lighthearted laugh again, took a few steps back into the office, and swung open his door. They’re just people, I reminded myself as I took a seat.
“Look,” I started, “my record is bad, I know that . . .”
I wanted to control that conversation, direct it, defend myself before he could judge me. Only, as I spoke, I quickly saw by his facial expressions—empathetic and interested—that he didn’t seem to judge me at all. Perry just listened. He watched me and took in everything I said. He was genuinely connected; I could see it on his face. A feeling of trust opened in me as we spoke, and spontaneously, because of it, I told him everything. Everything except that I was homeless. I did not want to go back into the system, and I knew it would be Perry’s job to report me if he knew I had nowhere to live. So I withheld that one detail, and shared with him everything else.
“And I have this friend Sam who I cut school with a lot, so I could, I don’t know, cut loose. Well, I always meant to graduate. I really did. But then years passed and it got out of hand.”
It was all flooding out of me, and I became more emotional in front of him than any of the teachers who had interviewed and rejected me in the last few weeks, more emotional than I wanted to be. I couldn’t help it. It was just an alien feeling, having a teacher really connect the way he did, and not at all with pity. Instead he listened actively, asking clarifying questions, offering insight, even relating to me, sighing audibly at the details of my mother’s funeral, but never once indicating pity, only understanding and interest. But listening to the sound of my own voice as I opened up to him, I began to judge myself. When I heard myself explaining my life to someone else, particularly to a professional type like him, I sounded so dysfunctional—and he looked so normal. My eyes traveled around the room, from the computer in back to Perry’s clean brown leather shoes, then to my own rotten, ten-dollar boots.
“Liz,” he stepped in, a grim expression on his face. He was suddenly very serious. “That’s . . . horrendous. It sounds like you’ve been through a lot, and I do want to help. But I also want to make sure I’m helping in the right way, do you understand?” I don’t know why I thought he meant calling social services. My eyes found the quickest exits. I could outrun this guy; the train back to Bedford was just five blocks away. “What I mean, Liz, is that I see from your appointment slip that you’ll soon be seventeen, with no high school history whatsoever. Is that right?”
“I have one credit,” I said. Coming out of his mouth, seventeen sounded so old. Of all the kids who interviewed before me, none of them could have been older than fifteen.
“Well, I admire your effort to come here today. I just want to say, if this is the right place for you, then that’s one thing. But that depends on what you’re looking for. Four years of high school might be a lot for a seventeen-year-old. I would be remiss if I did not inform you that there is an excellent, six-month GED program offered at night on the other side of this building. . . . Before we talk more, I just want to make you aware of your options.”
Options. He’d struck a nerve. All those times I’d watched Ma humble herself to Brick, accepting his demands, his rough shoves, his shouting, opening her legs to him out of need—all because she lacked options. Daddy with his sharp mind and his rich life experiences, his education, living in a shelter, without options.
“I’m an ex-con, who would hire me?” he often said. “My options are limited.” Being in the motels, eating from the trash Carlos left behind, no options. I’d heard GEDs turned out great for many people. But after all that Ma and Daddy had gone through, something in my gut told me graduating high school meant I’d have more options.
“I see where you’re coming from, Perry, and I really appreciate your help . . . but I want to graduate high school. It’s just something I have to do.”
Hearing myself say it out loud made it real. Speaking what I wanted was totally different from just thinking it. Speaking it made me connect; I could feel it. I was shaking. Perry’s eyes were still on me. I tried to guess what he was thinking about what I said, what he thought of me: Failure. Dirty. Train wreck. Or he was trying to decide how to tell me no in the most polite way possible. With that tie and those glasses, those shiny shoes, he looked like the polite type. He probably grew up in Westchester, I thought. He probably told people like me “no” all the time, just like the rest of them did.
Perry leaned back heavily in his chair and let out a small sigh. But he didn’t look stressed; he looked emotional. I waited.
“Liz,” he started, sitting up again, sending my heart racing. Here it comes, I thought. His voice was much lower, his face completely serious. “Can you get here on time?”
A smile pushed itself across my face and my eyes welled up. “Absolutely,” I answered. “Yes.”
The only catch was that I had to bring in a guardian to officially register me in school, as soon as possible.
Daddy and I met on Nineteenth Street and Seventh Avenue later that week. By then, I’d started to sketch out a plan. I would register for school, spend the summer working, save money, and attend Prep while living off my savings. It seemed solid. But the whole thing hinged on Daddy’s help—I needed him to get me past these registration papers. From there, everything else I could handle on my own.
When I showed up for our meeting that muggy Thursday morning, I found Daddy leaning on a lamppost, engrossed in a book. I paced myself as I approached him, taking time to ready myself and take deep, relaxing breaths. The last thing I wanted was for Daddy to see me emotional; I don’t think either of us knew how to deal with each other’s emotions. That’s probably why we had a silent agreement to pretend we didn’t have any. But seeing him there, I was emotional. For months, I’d grown so accustomed to seeing strange faces and moving endlessly to new locations that the familiarity of Daddy’s face, standing out from a sea of faces, hit me hard. No matter how much time or hurt had passed between us, I simply missed my father. Now here he was again, resurfaced, a thinner, unshaved version of himself, tattered-looking, made offbeat by the busy Manhattan life that surrounded him. He looked as fragile as Ma had that day on Mosholu Parkway when we blew our wishes into the sky on dandelion puffs. Rarely had I experienced my parents outside of our home, or away from University Avenue, but every time I did, the world around us kept reminding me of their limitations, how society made them look vagrant.
The night before, I’d called his shelter and was patched through to him by a woman who called out his name sharply, which made me feel sorry for him, protective. The way he’d spoken, so faintly into the phone, I might have woken him from a nap, I thought.
“Daddy. I’m going back to school. I need you to register me. Uh, I was hoping you could register me.” I got right to the point because time on the shelter phone is limited. He’d asked twice for clarification. “No, not a program, Daddy, a real high school, yes. I kind of need you there.” Everything in my body resisted using the word need with him. “Do you think you can make it?” If his answer had been “no” for any reason, I’m not sure what I would have done. But it wasn’t. He agreed to meet me, without the hesitation I’d expected. Though I hadn’t explained to him about the lying part. That I would save for later.
For the school’s administration, I designed an airtight story that in no way indicated I was homeless. I would use a friend’s address and a fake phone number as my cover. Because I knew the school would never be able to reach Daddy, I’d tell them he was a long-haul truck driver who was on the road for weeks at a time. I decided the story was believable enough to work, so long as I could get Daddy to go along with it.
He smiled as I walked up to greet him, a huge smile at me from under his newsboy cap. I smiled back, and my hesitation gave way to the simple joy I felt from seeing him again. We hugged, and after he rubbed a single page from his thick book carefully between his fingers, and took a moment to dog-ear it, tucking it into his shoulder bag, we began walking. I was nervous about talking to him about anything too serious—our current lives, Lisa, Ma—so I got right into the details about Prep, as though we saw each other every day and could afford to be casual. I coached him on all the little, important parts.
“Two hundred sixty-four East 202nd Street.” I recited a phone number. “Zip code 10458. Can you remember all that, Daddy?”
His face was all twisted up, and I could tell he was wondering what he’d gotten himself into. “You want me to say what?” he yelled. “Lizzy, they think I’m a truck driver?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not going to quiz you about the industry, ya know?” He seemed more panicked than he was angry; I noticed his hands shaking a little.
Maybe my own uneasiness about entering meetings like these was inherited.
“And I live where?” he asked.
Vince, the co-director of Prep, Perry’s partner in running the school, met us. Also a middle-aged man with glasses, Vince seemed a little more serious than Perry, with a harder edge to him. Still, he smiled just as much and he turned out to be equally as warm and kind. When we walked into his office, he presented Daddy with a set of papers, spreading them out on the table between the two of them. The parts where Daddy needed to sign were already X’d.
“Good to meet you, Mr. Murray,” he said, shaking Daddy’s hand. Daddy smiled a complacent smile, obviously uncomfortable.
“Finnerty, actually,” Daddy corrected. “Liz’s mother and I were never married. It was the seventies, you know. She was spirited and all—actually she was completely crazy.” He laughed. I cringed. Vince didn’t bat an eye; he only smiled at Daddy. “Call me Peter,” Daddy said.
He was so nervous, it was making me nervous. What would I do if we couldn’t pull this off? Where would I go if we blew my one chance? I stared at Vince in search of any sign of suspicion. “Okay,” I intervened, clapping my hands together. “Let’s get this moving, then. I don’t mean to rush, it’s just that I don’t want to hold up my dad or anything. You know, with work and all.”
Even though his hands were trembling, Daddy managed to sign the same neat, jagged signature I’d seen him apply to absent notes and welfare documents my whole life. He muttered to himself and kept pushing his tongue around in his cheek.
“Hmmm, okay. Good, great. Perfect,” he kept saying. “Good, got it.”
My eyes were fixed on Vince, my heart pounding. I tried to look calm and cheerful. “Address?” Vince asked, with his fingertips perched onto a computer keyboard.
I looked over at Daddy. His eyes were trained on the ceiling and he was rubbing his hand on his forehead to jog his memory. “Nine thirty three—” he began, butchering Bobby’s address.
“Two six four! Two six four, Daddy!” I quickly interrupted. “See what happens when you don’t get enough sleep!” I patted Daddy’s hand, my smile nervous. “He works too much,” I said to Vince, shaking my head to fake lighthearted disapproval. “Two hundred sixty-four East 202nd Street,” I finished for him. I gave Vince the phone number, too. Now I was shaking. We almost blew it. But I finally relaxed as I saw the meeting come to an end when Vince stood and reached out for Daddy to shake his hand again. Daddy gave Vince a smile familiar to me from our meetings with social workers.
“Well, okay then. Welcome to Prep, Liz,” Vince said, suddenly turning to me. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, hoping Daddy wouldn’t say another word. “Next thing you should do is see April for another appointment to come back and get your schedule drawn up for the fall.”
I smiled and thanked Vince. The moment he retreated into his office, I ushered Daddy toward the door. On our way out of Prep I had to talk Daddy out of stealing a copy of Time magazine from the office.
Back on Nineteenth Street, I walked Daddy to the train. We’d visited for less than forty-five minutes. Standing in front of the station entrance, I watched Daddy fidget, strapping and unstrapping a Velcro flap that tightened his closed umbrella. He didn’t make eye contact with me, but kept looking past me, from the umbrella and then into the train station.
“Well, I hope that did it, Liz. Sorry if I messed up in there. I think it worked out anyway. . . . Do you think you’ll actually go to school this time?” His question stabbed doubt at me, mocked my assurance.
“Yes. I know I will,” I said, with more certainty than I expected from myself. I’d borrowed some of Bobby’s clothing for the day, baggy, but still clean. I had designed a cover story about my life for Daddy, too. On our few recent phone calls, I’d told him I lived at Bobby’s house permanently now, and that I was fine. He didn’t ask questions, and I hoped it would stay that way. What I was avoiding, in every way possible, was for him to know what I was really going through. Because if he found out, I knew it would hurt him. Then he’d be living in a shelter and worrying about me, too. Then I’d worry about him worrying about me, and what good would that do either of us? Better to have him believe I was okay.
“Well, that’s good you’re really going this time,” he said. “Good to know. I think you might actually do that then. That’s good. . . . Yeah, Lizzy, maybe you’ll go all the way now.” Coming from Daddy, it was a real compliment.
“That’s the idea,” I said, smiling at him.
He took out a napkin to blow his nose and I saw by its insignia that he’d taken it from McDonald’s. Daddy had been doing that since I was a kid, dipping into fast food places, raiding their supplies.
“So things, are they all right at the shelter, going good and all?” I asked, leading him in my question. Maybe I didn’t want all the information about his life either; maybe I was protecting myself from worrying about him, too.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I, uh, get my three squares there. It’s air-conditioned. They treat me well. Can’t complain. Hey, Lizzy, do you have any money? Maybe for tokens or lunch?” I’d borrowed ten dollars from Bobby that morning. I had eight left. I removed what I needed to take the subway back to the Bronx and gave the rest to him.
“Hey thanks,” Daddy said. It felt good to be helpful to him again.
“No problem. I have some money saved, it’s no big deal,” I lied.
I walked him downstairs into the train station and we hugged good-bye, exchanging promises to talk and meet up more often. He didn’t stay at the turnstiles and wait for the train with me. Instead, he said good-bye and walked away far down the platform to wait. When he passed a pay phone, he stuck his fingers inside to search for loose change.
I was scheduled to begin high school in September; it was May now. I would use the months ahead to prepare; I had four years to make up. The next thing I had to do, in order to complete my registration in Prep, was return to JFK, my old high school, and get my official transcript.
Having seen Prep, JFK looked absolutely massive in comparison. I passed through metal detectors to enter the building. No one looked at me. Students were everywhere, thousands of them. It felt like a bus station. Taking the number 1 train back to Prep later that day, I sat down and ripped open the manila envelope. Columns of failing grades—45, 60, 50—were everywhere. It was unnerving, reading row after row of flunking marks. I felt like a mess, a big walking train wreck. The experience of talking about my grades (having been lectured by adults so many times) versus actually seeing my transcripts was night and day. Transcripts were a real thing, a tangible expression of what I had and had not done with my life, and a road map of what still had to be done. Looking at my academic disaster, I could see that I had a mountain ahead of me to climb.
Then, very suddenly, sitting on the train gazing at the JFK stationery, it dawned on me—my Prep transcripts were still completely blank. I literally had nothing, no grades, zip on my Prep transcripts yet. I could start fresh.
The thought of a clean slate was thrilling, especially after looking at the mess I had created. With all the things that had been difficult, it was one blessing to count on, the knowledge that what I did from this moment on didn’t have to depend on what I had done before. Back on Nineteenth Street, I asked April to give me a copy of my blank Prep transcripts, which was a simple printout of my name on Prep stationery and rows of blank columns waiting to be filled by my future grades. The JFK ones I handed in to April and never looked at again. The blank ones I kept with me at all times. They were a reminder that I was, day by day, writing my future. Sleeping in a hallway around Bedford Park later that week, I took out my blank transcripts and filled in the grades I wanted, making neat little columns of A’s. If I could picture it—if I could take out these transcripts and look at them—then it was almost as if the A’s had already happened. Day by day, I was just catching up with what was already real. My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them.
A memory of Ma helped me decide this. The only papers I’d ever seen that were as “official” looking as transcripts were Ma’s short stack of documents to verify qualification for welfare. Ma’s caseworkers were always so difficult, so technical with us. And the walls of those depressing welfare offices, for some reason, were always painted puke green, a color made uglier by the harsh fluorescent lights and the iron bars on the large windows. There were so many people waiting in those offices—dozens, hundreds. When the hard little seats filled up, people sat on windowsills or on the floor; they stood or they paced.
Ma, Lisa, and I would wait for hours, too, one of dozens of other families all nervously checking and rechecking their own short stack of vital documents. When it was finally our turn, what I can remember most about being hoisted onto Ma’s lap is the bizarre interaction between Ma and her caseworker. It did not matter what Ma was saying. All that the caseworker focused on were Ma’s documents. Birth certificates, notarized letters, doctors’ notes to verify mental illness, our lease. Ma’s actual words, and particularly Ma herself, were invisible to this woman, a woman who had the power to give or take away our food, rent, and safety. All that it boiled down to was this: either we had the exact documents required for approval, or we did not. There was no in between. And even if we were missing only something small, like a second set of copies or one of Ma’s doctors’ notes, a single error could make all of our effort—the document gathering, the travel, and the hours of waiting—irrelevant. One missing or invalid document and our file was shut, tossed. They called “next,” and we had to come back another day to start from scratch. All because the documents were either correct or they weren’t, period.
How was this different from my high school transcripts? It wasn’t. I thought, if one day, maybe just maybe I wanted to go to college, some person in a suit in a very different kind of office would open my file, read my documents, and either I would have the qualifications, or I wouldn’t. Yes or no, and nothing in between. And if I didn’t, my file would be shut and they would call “next.” I would be out of luck. Some things in life, I’d learned, were nonnegotiable. Documents as official as these transcripts were big, they were my yes or no, they were my options. They were my ticket. Now I was going to think of everything I did at Prep inside the framework of my transcripts—and that turned out to mean everything.
Later, there would be times when I did not want to go to school. I wanted to sleep on Fief’s floor and not get up. Bobby and Jamie were hanging out, walking around the Village. People were cutting school, and I was missing all the fun. There would be times I did not want to sit in a chair all day long while the fresh air was outside and I was missing out. But all I had to do was think of my transcripts, and I would go to school, on time, every day, for the first time in my life. Either I would have the qualifications or I wouldn’t—and besides, my friends weren’t going to pay my rent.