Breaking Night

Chapter 12
Possibility

THE TWO YEARS I SPENT AT HUMANITIES PREP UNFOLDED LIKE AN urban-academic-survival-study marathon, and it took everything I had to get through it.
I learned that there is a distinct difference between saying something and doing something, just as there is a distinct difference between setting a goal and actually living the reality of that goal. I wanted to catch up as quickly as possible, so I set a target: I would graduate with an A average, nothing less. And I would do it in two years, while homeless. This sounded like a great plan to help me get on with my life. It was very inspiring to read about in my journal, too. But then I actually had to go do it, and that was a whole different story altogether.
It started out fine, with that first hopeful week in school, when I went around gathering as many classes as possible, stacking work on top of work and responsibilities on top of more responsibilities. I didn’t exactly announce to the teachers at Prep what I was doing; it’s more that I went around on my own collecting classes à la carte, adding them onto my plate wherever I could find them. There were the standard five courses; I took those. Then there was an extra early-morning math class for those needing to catch up on their math credits, so I took that, too. Also, according to flyers tacked up in the office, nearby Washington Irving High School provided night classes twice a week. I took those. Then there was the Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side that offered a Saturday history course for another credit. I took that. I also found out that I could approach teachers individually for off-hours independent studies, which I did. I had a lot of catching up to do. So my goal at Prep became to complete one year of high school per semester, which is exactly what I set out to do, starting that September.
I was inspired by a question that kept repeating itself in my mind: Could I really change my life? I’d spent so many days, weeks, months, and years thinking about doing things with my life, and now I wanted to know, if I committed to a goal and woke up every single day working hard at it, could I change my life?
Those first few weeks it seemed especially possible, back when teachers were still lecturing on their course introductions and handing us assignments that wouldn’t be due for a while. I gleefully took notes, arrived on time, or even early, for class and I accepted my work happily, collecting assignment handouts in optimistic little piles that grew thick in my backpack. This was fine at first. But soon, deadlines were looming and reports and presentations were actually due. That was when my optimistic attitude of the first few weeks was replaced by a sense of dread and a deep feeling of uncertainty, a rubber-meets-the-road reality check of what it would take to actually figure this out. Indeed, thinking about my goal or even stating it was so much different from actually living it.
Figuring out high school while homeless meant handling details that never would have occurred to me until I was actually living in the situation. For one, who knew schoolbooks were so heavy? By itself, that’s already something. But when I carried the heavy things around while also navigating several different living situations with no predictability whatsoever of where I could stay on a given night, while also trying to follow an assignment schedule that dictated exactly which books I would need and when, I kept slipping up.
If I didn’t time things correctly, I’d end up crashing at Bobby’s or Fief’s or Jamie’s with the wrong book for a particular assignment on a given night. The consequence of a miscalculation like this could mean having the wrong material with me to study for a deadline, which could mean the difference between an A and a B or, in the case of test preparation, a grade drop even more severe than that. Between my numerous classes, numerous places to stay, and numerous assignments, there were just too many variables for me to keep track of to get it right 100 percent of the time. So to solve the problem, I began carrying almost all my books with me, along with my clothing, my journal, Ma’s NA coin and her picture, my toothbrush and toiletries; I stuffed everything all in one huge bag. But it was very heavy, and it made moving around the city difficult, with the straps pressed into my shoulders, pinching at my skin. My back hurt every single day.
Then there was the sleep factor. Sometimes my friends’ parents would let me stay over outright; sometimes not. On the occasions when I had to sneak into a friend’s place, I would need to wait until their parents went to bed, which meant doing homework or napping in the hallway until the late-night hours when the coast was clear. I’d enter their apartments ever so quietly and sleep on someone’s futon, or behind the futon on the floor hidden from sight under blankets, just in case. A couple of times I napped in a friend’s large closet. Then, in most cases I would need to be out again in the morning before their parents woke up. For this, I carried a small vibrating alarm clock in my pocket, so that I could be alerted silently when it was time to get up. When it went off, wherever I was, I quietly sat up, slipped my feet into my black boots, tiptoed over to slide my book bag—with great effort—onto my back, and I went out the door again. Sometimes I’d spend the remaining couple of hours between five and six thirty or seven a.m. in a hallway, up on the top landing of a stairwell, napping. Sometimes I’d head straight to school while the sun was just coming up and the air was still nighttime cold and the gates to stores were still lowered, not yet open for business.
Then there was actually getting my assignments done. That was a whole other thing, too. It turned out I needed a certain amount of sleep in order to be clear-minded enough to turn in a well-written paper, a paper worthy of an A. Without enough sleep, it was like trying to think straight with a fog in my brain, and that wouldn’t get me the A’s I needed. But I could not always get enough sleep when keeping the schedules of my friends. Getting the sleep I needed was sometimes easier if I simply climbed the staircase in a building and slept at the top landing, alone. At least there I had some privacy and, so long as I picked a reasonably clean and safe building, probably no one would bother me. I could work by the hallway light, sleep on the marble floor, use my sweater as a blanket and my remaining clothing as a pillow. When I really needed some rest, the hallway landings worked best.
With all of these details figured out, I could mostly manage, especially with the help of my NYPIRG savings, the hot meals and pantry packs from The Door, and especially with such a supportive group of friends. But there were other moments much more difficult to deal with, moments when I came dangerously close to saying, “Forget it.” There was one recurring situation that particularly threatened to break me.
It happened on days when my alarm clock went off at 6:20 a.m. and I’d wake up in Fief’s apartment, or some other place where parents were absent, rules were not enforced, and there was no limit to how long I could sleep. I’d wake to the sight of more than ten people sleeping on random tattered cushions and mattresses across the floor; the sun was barely up, graffiti along the apartment walls, beer bottles everywhere. Everyone had partied all night and gone to sleep not too long ago. Most nights I had done my homework in the stairwell—using my transcripts to get me focused—and separating myself to avoid the awful smell of cigarette smoke and the noisy distraction of everyone’s partying. When things died down at night, I’d slip back into my friends’ apartments and get some sleep in whatever little spot I could find. A few hours later, my little alarm clock would go off and I’d wake up and lie there, perfectly still, staring up at the ceiling. In this moment, I was so tempted to just pull the blanket over my head and go back to sleep. That temptation, in that moment, is exactly when I almost lost my resolve and gave up.
Warm blanket, or walk through the door?
These were the moments when I was most tested, when comfort was an option. Not when I was sleeping in the hallway, not when I had to exit my friends’ apartments forcibly at odd hours, and not even when I had to ride the subway all night long and sleep there. Instead, lying around in my friends’ apartments when I had the option to sleep was the most difficult of all these situations for me. This was because, without being forced outdoors, I somehow had to find a reason to choose school, a reason from inside myself.
In this way I didn’t have to choose to go to high school just once, I had to choose it over and over again, every single time I was tempted not to go. During these mornings that were full of rare and precious quiet, soft pillows and warmth, I was tempted more than any other time to just pull the blanket back over me. It took everything I had to choose to walk through the door to go to school instead. In these moments, I was my biggest obstacle. Warm blanket or walk through the door?
Making these choices, as it turned out, wasn’t about willpower. I always admired people who “willed” themselves to do something, because I have never felt I was one of them. If sheer will were enough by itself, it would have been enough a long time ago, back on University Avenue, I figured. It wasn’t, not for me anyway. Instead, I needed something to motivate me. I needed a few things that I could think about in my moments of weakness that would cause me to throw off the blanket and walk through the front door. More than will, I needed something to inspire me.
One thing that helped was a picture I kept in mind, this image that I used over and over whenever I was faced with these daily choices. I pictured a runner running on a racetrack. The image was set in the summertime and the racetrack was a reddish orange, divided in white racing stripes to flag the runners’ columns. Only, the runner in my mental image did not run alongside others; she ran solo, with no one watching her. And she did not run a free and clear track, she ran one that required her to jump numerous hurdles, which made her break into a heavy sweat under the sun. I used this image every time I thought of things that frustrated me: the heavy books, my crazy sleep schedule, the question of where I would sleep and what I would eat. To overcome these issues I pictured my runner bolting down the track, jumping hurdles toward the finish line.
Hunger, hurdle. Finding sleep, hurdle, schoolwork, hurdle. If I closed my eyes I could see the runner’s back, the movement of her sinewy muscles, glistening with sweat, bounding over the hurdles, one by one. On mornings when I did not want to get out of bed, I saw another hurdle to leap over. This way, obstacles became a natural part of the course, an indication that I was right where I needed to be, running the track, which was entirely different from letting obstacles make me believe I was off it. On a racing track, why wouldn’t there be hurdles? With this picture in mind—using the hurdles to leap forward toward my diploma—I shrugged the blanket off, went through the door, and got myself to school.
That was at least half of my motivation on those tough mornings, and the other half was thinking about my teachers. In my weaker moments of blanket versus door, I knew Perry was waiting for me at school, and so were the other teachers that, much to my surprise, I came to love during my time at Prep.
Susan taught early-morning math classes. A heavyset woman who wore floral dresses and penny loafers to work every day, Susan loved literature. Sometimes we talked more about books than we did math. Susan always had a unique take on the love stories that were my favorite. She offered me insights I would have missed on my own; she always encouraged me to go deeper. Susan arrived extra early to be one of the first teachers turning on the lights, greeting our tiny seven-person class with high energy and a huge smile. “Great to see you today,” she sang every morning, and she seemed to really mean it. With Susan teaching my first class of the day, I never wanted to be late, and just thinking of her could get me going.
Then there were Caleb, Doug, and Elijah, who were all in their twenties. Each of them had recently graduated from schools like Cornell and Princeton, school names familiar to me from conversations at NYPIRG. Collectively, they were dedicated to teaching, generous with their time, lighthearted, and friendly. Elijah had a way of challenging his students not with statements, but with questions. Being around Elijah made me become much more deliberate in my choice of words, something I’d never considered much before. And like Perry, Elijah made eye contact with me, searched my face when I spoke in class—he connected. He inspired me to want to connect, too.
Doug was inclusive and humble. One day I asked a question in class, and when he fumbled in answering, he interrupted himself to say, “Liz, I don’t know, and I was trying to seem like I did. But really I don’t, sorry. If you’re interested in the answer, I can find out for you.” I was stunned. Never had teachers been so human with me. From Doug I learned the importance of authenticity.
And I had never met anyone like Caleb. Perry once joked that the teachers at Prep put in so many hours, they must have thought they were investment bankers. I think he was talking about Caleb. Prep already had a culture different from mainstream schools, in that there wasn’t a mass exodus at three p.m. when the bell rang. People actually stayed around after school, lounging in our one large public area, which was called Prep Central. Or students stayed for tutoring or extracurricular activities with the Prep staff until well into the late afternoon. The teachers did this without additional pay, and even with the extra hours they put in, Caleb stayed later. Long after school let out, and even after everyone meeting for extracurricular activities went home, you could still find Caleb by himself in one of the small, cramped staff offices, hunched over the phone, calling late and absent students, one by one.
“Hi, this is Caleb Perkins. Sorry we missed you today. Do you mind sharing why you were late or absent? Can we help you get here on time from now on?” One by one, Caleb reached out to students, asked them questions, listened carefully to their answers, and offered them help. He kept track of their promises, and he held students accountable. “Say what you mean and mean what you say” seemed to be his motto. I’d never seen anything like it. From Caleb I learned what it meant when a teacher was both compassionate and held a student to a higher standard. I also learned, from Caleb, what it meant to be committed to something and to put in hours upon hours of work to attain it.
I knew Caleb worked so hard because I often stayed late at Prep myself. In the space of a narrow corner office with high ceilings, one wall made up of painted-over cinder blocks and massive bookshelves, I hunched over a desk and taught myself how to use a computer to get my work done. These heavy square things with dim, flickering monitors and chunky keyboards were completely foreign to me. I realized that my task was twofold: I had to study while also learning how to study at the same time. It felt as if I were climbing a mountain with bricks in my pocket. I wrote an essay about The Catcher in the Rye while learning about essay writing, and while learning how to type, all at once. I did so by tapping a single button at a time, frustrating myself with countless mistakes, messing up and starting again and again and again. It was exhausting; I had never been one of those students who learned things quickly. Instead, I always had to read and reread a textbook to understand it, and it often took me two or three times as long as my classmates to complete my assignments. It got so late most evenings that Prep’s empty classrooms sat in the dark, their chairs motionless in the setting sun. The janitor would ask me to lift my feet while he mopped the tile floor around me, Caleb within earshot calling students in the next room, one by one, while I created endless pages of work, a single letter at a time.
This was the environment in which I finally came to my education, the environment in which I knew I could no longer lie in bed and give up. How could I pull the blanket back over my head when I knew my teachers were waiting for me? When they were willing to work so hard, how could I not do the same?
With the Prep staff, my negative feelings about school began to dissolve, replaced by an actual love for learning, and with it, at last, a tangible hope for my life.
My feelings about the teachers were my feelings about the school. If they were wonderful, school was wonderful. It had always been that way for me. And if the teachers believed in me, that was at least the first step in a long journey of believing in myself. This was especially true during my more vulnerable moments, back when I was labeled “truant” and “discipline problem.” I was always seeing myself through the eyes of adults, my parents, caseworkers, psychiatrists, and teachers. If I saw a failure in their eyes, then I was one. And if I saw someone capable, then I was capable. Professional adults had credibility and were my standard for deciding what was legitimate or not, including myself. Previously, when teachers like Ms. Nedgrin saw me as a victim—despite her good intentions—that’s what I believed about myself, too. Now I had teachers at Prep who held me to a higher standard, and that helped me rise to the occasion. If I kept at it, slowly, I could do this. The deeply personal relationships with my teachers in this intimate school setting made me believe it.
I learned a lot in the years I spent at Prep. I was engrossed in Shakespeare (I played Hamlet and Macbeth in school plays); I participated in student government, and traveled with student groups on buses north of the city to represent Prep in regional conferences. I began wearing colorful clothing, taking my hair out of my face and, slowly, looking people in the eyes. I learned that my voice mattered. But I think that it was the teachers themselves who were my biggest lesson at Prep. My teachers, my role models, became my compass in an otherwise dark and confusing world.
Eva and I became friends in our after-school peer education science class, which met every Monday and Wednesday. Enrolled in the class were fifteen students, fourteen girls and one boy, Jonathan, who assured us all that he was very much “one of the girls.” The class was an add-on to my already full schedule and it counted for one solid credit, one more toward the forty I needed to meet my goal of graduating in two years.
Our group sat in guidance counselor Jessie Klein’s rectangular office, some of us curling up on a futon and the rest of us on metal chairs we’d dragged in from a nearby classroom for the occasion. A woman named Kate Barnhart sat before us. She was plump with large, circular glasses and long, Halloween-wig-frizzy red hair. Her jacket was a patchwork quilt of mix-matched colors, like an old rug that someone had stitched sleeves into. She smiled often, revealing her small, perfectly white teeth; she seemed happy to see us, happy to teach us. Kate came from a program named CASES, which trained kids in the court system to be peer educators in the subject of HIV/AIDS. Jessie gave her the floor.
Kate introduced the topic by asking, “Ever had a guy try to tell you he’s too big to wear a condom?” The room erupted into nervous giggles.
Jonathan called out, “Yes!”
“Thank you, Jonathan,” Kate said, “because that’s how this is gonna work, we are gonna get real in here. Now, who else? Please raise your hand.” Several girls obliged.
“Great,” Kate said. “We’re just getting started. Now raise your hand if a guy ever caught an attitude with you about putting on a condom.”
The majority of hands went up, including my own. I had sometimes had to argue with Carlos to put one on, but I assumed it was a problem specific to him.
“Thanks, hands down ladies, and Jonathan.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, in a Southern woman’s voice, snapping his fingers. The girls laughed and someone high-fived him.
“Great. Now I want you to watch this,” Kate said. She produced a red condom from a bag, ripped it open, and began stretching it out with all the expertise of a pizza maker maneuvering warm dough. As she stretched out the latex, she spoke.
“What you’re going to do in this course is empower yourself to teach your peers all about HIV/AIDS and STD prevention.” Tug, pull, tug, stretch. “But first, you have to learn all about HIV/AIDS and STD prevention, and to do that, we are going to get a little outrageous.”
With her ten fingers protruding out in a cat’s cradle, Kate stretched the bottom of the condom to a cartoonishly broad width. To the classes’ collective shock, she began to pull it over her head, Halloween hair and all. She spared the glasses, which sat on her lap. Tugging and stretching, to the sound of our laughter, Kate pulled until the latex condom hugged her face firmly and cupped her nose. With her nostrils, she blew air into the condom. It filled like one of those clowns whose mouths you shoot water into at a street fair, until the balloon pops and you get a prize. When the thing had inflated to a reasonable size over her head, she reached up with a hairpin—like she’d done it a million times before—and pierced it with a small pop. Then she yanked the broken pieces away one by one.
It felt right to clap; we all did. “So, who’s too big for a condom?” she said defiantly, refluffing her hair and reapplying her saucer-shaped glasses. “The first step to taking control of your health is to know you are worthwhile. You are important, and you get to ask for things you need. Your rights and needs, safety and comfort, are important. And you can steer the ship with your guy. Remember, you have something he wants. You have more power than you realize.” From her desk, Jessie smiled at all of us.
I looked at Jessie, then back at Kate, and I was flooded with a sense of pride. I loved the feel of these two grown women pulling us aside for what felt like girl talk. It made me feel special, as if they were sharing secrets.
“Your well-being has a direct relationship with your self-esteem, mentally, physically, spiritually. Your body is a temple, and you have to protect yourself from abuse and misuse of your temple. You must be your own guardian! You get to say what happens to you,” Kate said.
Her enthusiasm became my enthusiasm. I could feel a glimmer of what Kate was talking about . . . like maybe there could be something beautiful about me. I wondered why I’d let Carlos treat me the way he had; how I came so close to letting him break me. I didn’t stand up to Carlos, and it wasn’t me who got us out of the bathtub with Ron that day—it was Lisa. “You must be your own guardian. You get to say what happens to you.”
We spent the rest of the session with Kate going over a list of what she called Didjaknows, which were a series of facts introduced by the question, “Didjaknow?”
“Didjaknow Cool Whip can trigger yeast infections? And so can anything else heavy in sugar, when applied to your labia majora. Do we all know what a labia majora is?”
“It can trigger what?” asked a concerned voice across the room. The owner of the voice was a thick, pretty white girl with big green eyes wearing a sparkling stud of a nose ring and tall leather boots. Her name was Eva; I’d seen her in two of my classes. Her style was hip-hop with a club girl twist. Her pink lipstick was outlined in deep red lip liner, and her long brown hair was highlighted blond and pulled into a sleek ponytail.
“Does it always cause an infection, really?” she asked. Everyone laughed.
“Whatchoo been up to?” Jonathan quipped, laughing and taking more high fives.
Kate smiled. “Not always, dear, it’s just something to watch out for.”
“Oh,” Eva said, still showing obvious concern but slowly beginning to smile. “Well . . . I’m just asking,” she said, her hands raised in mock defense. “ ’Cause it doesn’t say all that on the label, and a girl needs to know,” and then she laughed, too; we all did.
Eva lived on Twenty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue, close to Prep. Other than a visit to one of Daddy’s friend’s apartments growing up, I’d never been inside a home in Manhattan before. I expected it to be “rich” like Daddy said, but instead Eva and her father, Yurick, a Holocaust survivor, lived in Chelsea’s version of the projects, in one of a cluster of tall redbrick buildings that primarily housed elderly and low-income families. Yurick was a painter. His mother, Eva’s grandmother, had smuggled him out of the Warsaw ghetto when he was an infant, saving his life. There were abstract paintings of the Holocaust all over the walls of their large, sun-filled, two-bedroom apartment.
“They make me feel guilty for having food,” Eva half joked, gesturing over the microwave, toward a painting of a gaunt and horrified cluster of people lost in the woods.
“You’re hilarious,” I told her as she served us a late dinner, two plates of creamy bowtie pasta with peas and carrots. Eva was always making me laugh, and she was deeply insightful, easy to talk to. The moment I met her in Jessie’s class, I decided I liked her instantly.
Eva became my first real friend at Prep. Our short talks after class had grown into lunches on the stoops of Chelsea brownstones, which grew into visits to her apartment, and eventually into sleepovers. We were quickly becoming close. I told Eva an edited version of my situation, withholding the full extent for when I felt more trusting. Without ever really stating explicitly that she wanted to help me, she did. We had dozens of sleepovers and hangouts on Twenty-eighth Street. Eva would always cook something, loan me clothing, let me take hot showers upstairs. Often, she split her extra snacks with me during lunchtime at Prep, and she never once showed a sign of being inconvenienced.
“Does your dad remember much about the war?” I asked, dressed in my pajamas in her kitchen, ready for bed. I always felt it was easier keeping the conversation about other people. And after taking “Facing History and Ourselves” with Caleb, I’d learned all about genocide and the Holocaust. It felt good to be able to engage Eva in conversation with some confidence.
“Parts. He was really little, but his dad was the head of an important Jewish organization, so mostly his memories are of after the war, when my grandfather counseled survivors in their living room. My dad overheard all of it, which had to be tough for a small kid,” she said.
Eva loved psychology, and she had a way of seeing deeply into people, always listening to someone’s sharing from the angle of discovering their motivations, struggles, and needs. “I think his paintings are cathartic for him,” she said. “After you experience trauma that deep, you need to do something to heal. Something to make meaning out of all the loss.”
I ate everything Eva gave me, and then a second plate, too.
“There’re clean sheets on the couch for you, Liz. For whenever you get tired and are ready to sleep.”
With Eva, I felt totally understood and cared for. She was safe, loving, and funny. I looked forward to seeing her every day, and I wanted her to be a part of my life always.
Sometimes, another new friend from Prep joined us at Eva’s house. His name was James, and he took history class with us. James was over six feet tall, half-black and half-white, with beautiful caramel skin, a toned, muscular build, and a very messy and very large Afro. He loved all things Japanese, and often wore T-shirts with Japanese characters across the chest, or old martial arts shirts from his kung fu class. His clothes were always disheveled, and he had an innocence about him that made me want to be his friend. We connected one day when our teacher unknowingly repeated a nervous tic throughout his lecture, saying the word mmkay dozens of times in a single class session. It was so frequent and so funny that I looked for witnesses and saw James beside me, holding back laughter. I slid him a note marked, “Matt says mmkay,” with tallies underneath, tallied to well over a hundred. He erupted into laughter in the tiny classroom and we were asked to move seats, both of us still smirking and sharing the joke silently, making eye contact from across the room. Later at lunch, I saw him eating alone, and I used a memory of Sam to summon the courage to approach him. I promptly walked over and stuck my fingers, splat, into his mashed potatoes.
“This lunch sucks,” I said. “You wanna come eat with me at the deli, my treat?”
With a disbelieving smile on his face, he looked up at me, then back down at my fingers in his food, then back up at me, and said, “Sure.”
We split a sandwich in a park off the West Side Highway, facing the crashing waves of the Hudson. I devoured a bag of chips and watched James rollerblade in lazy circles around the pier in the brisk afternoon air. We started having lunch together every day after that, and soon the three of us, Eva, James, and me, began hanging out all the time. Some nights I slept over at Eva’s, other nights I crashed at James’s. James lived with his mother in a one-bedroom in Washington Heights, uptown near the Bronx. At first I slept on the top bunk of his bunk bed. We’d sit up talking into all hours of the night, posters of Mount Fuji across the walls and a beautiful oak tree outside his window. Eventually, I started lying down next to James to talk. Some nights, we’d fall asleep telling each other stories, wrapped together like pretzels. Other times, things would go further. James was gentle and protective. Our sex was affectionate and it happened naturally, like our friendship.
I slept so well on those nights with James, knowing that I was completely safe.
I had lost my family, but I was building another one. Between Eva, Bobby, Sam, Fief, Danny, Josh, James, and Jamie, I had a collection of people in my life bound together by love. These were the people I leaned on to get through.
Not that Lisa and Daddy weren’t my family, but after Ma passed, we’d drifted from one another. Lisa stayed with Brick, and Daddy was in the shelter system. I think a lot of hurt went unspoken between us. I felt that Lisa blamed me for leaving her alone with Ma at the worst possible time. And Daddy and I hadn’t been the same since I was taken into St. Anne’s. Something essential had broken between us, and it felt as though with time, he was just getting further and further away. I felt as if I had failed him by not going to school and by getting taken into a group home. However irrational, I felt that I’d left him. And then, when he’d lost the apartment on University and hadn’t even told me, it was so painful for me because I knew it was proof that we weren’t close anymore. I wasn’t his little tomboy who played with trucks and helped him sneak past Lisa late at night. I was lost to him.
Without a shared living situation to connect us, Daddy, Lisa, and I spun out of one another’s orbits and made independent lives of our own that barely even touched. By the time I finished my first year of high school, the truth was, we barely knew one another.
Painfully, we made the most awkward attempts to be together. We sat through holidays and forced birthday celebrations at a favorite dessert place of Daddy’s in the Village. I worked at NYPIRG a second summer, and with my savings, I paid for the cake. These celebrations would always play out the same way. Daddy and I would arrive early, Lisa shortly after. Daddy and I would chitchat, but provide no real details about what was going on in our lives. When Lisa arrived, we would be seated. Being seated was the worst part because there is no such thing as a table for three. There would always be one empty seat at our table, as if to announce clearly Ma’s absence. And because it was often one of our birthdays, a waitress would carry out a cake glowing with candles and the three of us, who no longer really knew one another, would sing in celebration of each other’s lives.
Lisa’s birthdays were the hardest, for the way I could see Daddy’s nervousness peak then. He was always so anxious with her, even more so than he was with me. The only other time I could recall seeing him that anxious was in my faded memories of our brief encounters with our older sister Meredith. He seemed fraught with guilt and eager for escape. I couldn’t take my eyes off Daddy then, clasping and unclasping his hands, fidgeting through birthday songs with his forced smile, and the absurdity of his reluctant singing. It knotted my stomach to watch. I hoped Lisa didn’t see it. And I was grateful she didn’t know that I had to call Daddy to orchestrate the whole event to begin with. How he would send me to the drugstore to pick out a card for Lisa, from him. “I’m bad at that stuff, Lizzy, and kinda low on cash right now. Pick out something nice, okay,” he’d ask. “Thanks, Lizzy, you’re the best.”
But it was no easy task to pick out a birthday card from Daddy to Lisa. What could I possibly pick? They were all designed for men who had lived up to their responsibilities as father, cards decorated with shimmering monikers of Dad, Daddy, sayings like, “This card is from your loving Father.” “Through all the years watching you grow, it’s been my joy to raise you.” But he hadn’t, not really. “To my Daughter on her birthday, the light of my life.” I didn’t want to insult Lisa, or to embarrass him. So I came up with my own solution. Neither of them knew it, but more than once I found the perfect card from Daddy to Lisa in the sympathy section of the card store: “Been Thinking About You,” or “On This Day and Always, I Remain by Your Side,” cards that expressed love but left room for the implication of tragedy and distance. These were the only greeting cards that captured Daddy’s role as a father. My role, as Daddy engaged me and as I accepted, was to minimize the awkwardness of these moments, to facilitate the experience of a holiday gone smoothly for all of us.
For the same reason, when Lisa would look away or go to the bathroom, I always slipped Daddy the money to pay for our “celebrations.” The waitress would come with the check and Daddy would reach up to grab the black leather fold, inserting cash. “I got it,” he’d say. “Happy birthday, Lisa.”
It’s not that we didn’t love one another—we did. I just think we didn’t know how to be with one another anymore. No one had prepared us for this, for what to do when tragedy breaks up your family. We had no idea what to do when disease took hold, mental illness struck, when Ma died. And we weren’t prepared for what happens when proximity no longer brings you together, and instead connecting became a matter of making an effort toward one another. We were doing the best we could with what we had.
A few days after my eighteenth birthday, we met up at our regular place to celebrate. I arrived on East Eleventh Street first and Daddy showed up a few minutes later. Together, we waited for Lisa.
“How’s school?” he asked, picking our safest topic.
It was going well. He knew it was going well. That was probably about the only thing Daddy knew about my life. He fumbled for more small talk, and surprisingly came up with something he’d read in the paper: “You know, Lizzy, they are doing remarkable research on AIDS and AIDS medication these days. They think they’re close to finding a cure.”
Normally we avoided any topic that could lead to one of us mentioning Ma. The confusion must have read on my face, because when I looked at Daddy again, he turned his head away, pretending to look for Lisa. But he did not change the subject. “With the medication they have now, the quality of life for someone who’s got it. . . . It’s so much better than it used to be. You really can live for a long time.”
I was trying to figure out how to respectfully tell him to talk about something else when he let it out. “I’ve got it, sweetheart. I’m HIV positive. I was diagnosed in April.”
April? It was almost October. All that time, and he hadn’t told me? Even with the distance between us, how could he keep this to himself? It felt like someone had punched me in the chest—my heart started pounding and my face grew flush. I looked up at him, my only living parent, and was struck by the idea of losing him, too; the idea of even more loss. Standing on the sidewalk beside him, my world drained of color.
Out of the throng of people making their way up the sidewalk, Lisa emerged. Before she came close, Daddy leaned over and quickly whispered, “Please, Lizzy, do me a favor. Don’t tell Lisa.”
We sat down to cake on Eleventh Street and I listened to Daddy and Lisa strain through conversation. My head was spinning. I tried to look normal. Get Lisa’s birthday cards, make reservations, call and remind him of the holidays, “I’m HIV positive, Lizzy, don’t tell Lisa.” That night, he joked and laughed harder than I had seen in a while, harder than he really meant it, I suspect. When the cake arrived, glowing with eighteen candles, they both sang me happy birthday and Daddy gently squeezed my hand below the tabletop—one awkward touch with his own shaky hand. The physical contact was out of place coming from him, and I know it took a lot for Daddy. In his gesture, I could feel him reaching out to me across our distance, assuring me silently, “I know, Lizzy, and I’m with you.” I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was captured by this image: my father clapping his hands before the smoke of my extinguished birthday candles, so vulnerable and still full of life right in front of me, for now. I wanted to grab on to him, to protect him from AIDS. I wanted to make this stop happening to our family, to keep him safe and to make him healthy again.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference . . .
I did not make a wish over my candles. Instead, I chose to forgive my father, and made a quiet promise to work on healing our relationship. I wouldn’t make the same mistake that I’d made with Ma, I would be there for him through this. We would be in each other’s lives again. No, he hadn’t been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he’d disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.
The irony is, despite all the years I spent avoiding it, school became my refuge. For my remaining two semesters at Prep, I squeezed into my schedule as many classes as I could possibly take, and I fell in love with the process of using my education to rebuild my life. I began to relish the sense of achievement I took from completing long hours of course readings, and I savored the creative process of ever so carefully constructing essays on authors like Shakespeare and Salinger. Deciding exactly how to fit which words into which sentences felt like a puzzle to solve, a challenge made compelling by Perry’s enthusiastic class discussions on character motivation, syntax, and even his bold assertion one afternoon that “grammar saves lives!” “Punctuation changes everything,” he proclaimed in white chalk across our blackboard. “Let’s eat, Grandpa!—versus—Let’s eat Grandpa! To Grandpa, these are very different sentences,” he teased, making the class erupt into chuckles and groans. I smiled widely at Perry then, filled with joy by his exuberance.
But I know I didn’t love school for school’s sake. I had never really been what people call an “academic” person, nor did I see myself becoming one. Instead, I took pleasure in the fact that my work existed in a social setting, one that was based on the promise of a brighter future. I knew that what I adored about school was that each of my assignments—readings, essays, or in-class presentations—was inseparable from my relationships, both with my teachers and with my new friends at Prep. If I loved school at all, I loved it for what it provided me access to: bonds with people I grew to cherish. And nothing was better than working toward my dreams alongside people I loved who were doing the same.
Like those study nights at Eva’s place, when she, James, and I would work sprawled out across her living room, our books and papers littering the tabletops, couches, and floor. We’d study side by side, passing the hours together. I’d curl up on the couch, my head resting on James’s lap while he ran his fingers through my hair. Sometimes we’d make faces at each other, or laugh at one another’s stupid jokes while I read for class, and James flipped through his book on Japanese Kanji. Diligently, he’d practice writing neat rows of characters on dozens of fresh notebook pages. Eva cooked for us, typically making pasta with chicken, peas, and carrots in creamy sauce. And on days when we could afford it, she’d cook with extras like portabella mushrooms or scoops of avocado on the side. For my part, I always liked to show up at Eva’s apartment bringing food to share, making sure that I had something to contribute. Despite my full schedule, it wasn’t difficult to make time to stop and get a few things; the grocery store was close enough—on Twenty-sixth Street, just off of Eighth Avenue, two blocks from Eva’s place.
On one particular evening after night school, when I was on my way to Eva’s place from Union Square, I devised a small plan. As I had on many other occasions, I would stop in the supermarket, slip groceries into my book bag to steal them, and then exit discreetly through the sliding doors. This way, Eva, James, and I could pig out while we watched a movie on Eva’s couch later that night. The three of us would be well fed and cozy in our pajamas, and it would be perfect. Eva had already gone shopping and because I had no intention of showing up empty-handed, from a pay phone on Fourteenth Street I’d promised Eva a pack of chicken cutlets and a jar of Parmesan cheese (both items I knew I could slip into my bag in mere seconds). It’s not that I didn’t have money to purchase the food. In fact, I carried with me everywhere I went my savings from my second summer working at NYPIRG. But money equaled survival, and I did everything I could to conserve it. So that night, just as I had done many nights, I entered the supermarket with absolutely no intention of paying.
At first, the plan was going smoothly. I had both items in hand and was searching for a place to hide them in my bag when, to my surprise, I stopped myself. It was the sight of the manager that triggered me. He was a short, thick, Latin guy wearing a tie, with a pen tucked behind his ear. I saw him reading papers off a clipboard in the distance, checking a shipment, managing several employees. He was sweating. I looked over at the cashiers ringing up groceries, and then over at an older woman filling her cart with bags to bring home. I stood and watched each of them and realized, I didn’t want to take anything from this store; something about it felt wrong. Here was this manager working hard to make this business work, and for the first time, I could actually see that. Standing there, I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen it before. Holding that jar of powdered cheese and those chicken cutlets in my hand, ready to steal, I suddenly felt off, creepy.
Earlier into my current semester at Prep, there had been an incident of someone taking a student’s wallet. A town meeting was called, and Perry led the discussion. “It’s not the wallet that is our biggest loss,” Perry said. “A trust has been broken in our community. This creates a question of whether or not we are safe with one another. It’s going to take a while before we can build back that trust. It’s a hurt to our community.”
The cause and effect of one person’s actions onto a larger group of people, at that moment in Prep, was clear. But as far as out in the world was concerned, the idea had remained abstract to me. Until, that is, I found myself standing in that supermarket, considering yet another theft in a long line of thefts, and my eyes found that store manager. Before Prep, I had never been a part of what everyone kept calling a “community,” and the idea that what I did impacted anyone other than myself, than my small circle, had not been real to me. I felt like an island.
But standing in that supermarket, recalling our Town Hall meeting, I was beginning to identify more clearly the connection between my own cause and effect. At best, the impact of people stealing from this store would cause prices to go up. Families would have to pay more for their groceries to compensate, if they could afford to pay more. At worst, the store could go out of business and the cashiers and this manager would lose their jobs. People’s trust in people would be tarnished, I imagined. I looked at the manager again and thought of Perry’s words. Then I approached the register with the chicken cutlets and the jar of cheese.
It was not that I never stole again, because truthfully, I did. But that day was the beginning of my never stealing again, and it was the start of a long process of me understanding that I was not, in fact, an island unto myself.
I walked over to the register with my groceries and dug out some loose bills from the bottom of my book bag. The cashier smiled and gave me some change. I stopped to watch the man at the end of the counter pack my bag, filling it in two quick swipes. It felt like ages ago that I was packing bags in the supermarket myself. On my way out, I gave the guy my change. “Gracias,” he said, and I went on my way.
The poster boards were bloody with red ink, wet with blues and yellows that lit up the white page, bringing the biology lesson to life: “The B-cells tell the T-cells to fight illness and disease.”
As part of a student team of three, Eva and I selected an original design for our presentation depicting the roles of cells at work in the immune system’s fight against HIV/AIDS. Together, we stood back to take in the image our team had chosen: boxers in a boxing ring, red gloves raised chin-high. On the outskirts of the ring a coach with a towel wrapped around his neck, water bottle in hand, was the B-cell, the communicator. The smaller boxer represented the T-cell, the hopeful fighter. The largest contender represented HIV itself, and it stood tall and menacing in opposition.
Crouched down low, lifting her long hair over her ears, hoop earrings dangling, Eva puffed out her cheeks and blew on the ink. Sam, now in her second semester at Prep, passed her a Sharpie to deepen the bold headline: “Empower Yourself, Fight the Spread of HIV.”
“Shoulda made ’em the Crips and the Bloods fighting. Like, ‘I’ll cut choo! Ya feel me?’ ” Sam said, motioning a knife-swing through the air. All three of us laughed. Living in the group home, Sam was full of gang and prison references, and her slang now had a deeper street twist to it. Having her at Prep was like having a piece of my family back together again. Sam didn’t come to school every day, but she came in often enough to enjoy the experience of our little community; she made friends and was well loved by our teachers. I was so happy to have her there. That afternoon was a big day for us, and Sam had dressed for the occasion: her long skirt was tattered, and she wore a man’s blue button-down shirt with a pinstriped tie and combat boots.
“The boxer thing is cool, though,” Sam conceded, shrugging her shoulders and snapping her gum. She leaned down and spontaneously penciled a black eye onto HIV’s face. “Forget this guy,” she said, etching it in deeper. “He should get knocked out.”
“Word,” I said to Sam, smirking. “Good idea.” Suddenly, I was on my knees, too, pencil in hand, giving HIV a busted lip. “Let’s ugly him up,” I told her. Side by side, we vigorously scratched our pencils to the page.
We had a presentation to make; a small crowd of students waited for us in Prep Central. Our job was to use these characters to engage our classmates in HIV/AIDS awareness, to have the cellular struggle between HIV/AIDS and the immune system jump out from the page to create prevention in the lives of others. Bobby, Josh, and Fief were also in the waiting crowd, sitting among the other Prep students. It was their second semester at Prep, too. It had taken me only a few weeks at Prep to understand how welcoming the environment was, for me to feel and trust the safety that these teachers were. But as soon as I knew what Prep could be like, what high school could be like, I went back to my friends and encouraged them to interview. They got in, and now several of us were enrolled. Sam, Bobby, and I even had a few of the same classes together.
At times, having my friends at Prep could be rocky. More than once, a couple of them wanted to skip class and they urged me to come with them. It was so tempting, seeing them huddled by the exit door, slipping out into the bustling streets of Manhattan. I wanted to hang out, like the old days. And it could feel so stale in the classroom compared to the fun I knew they would have walking all around Greenwich Village and Chelsea, sneaking into a movie or sitting in the park. Plus, I didn’t want to be the uptight one in our group, serious and obedient of school regulations. There were moments when it was hard not to cut class too. But I kept thinking about my transcripts, the neat little columns of A’s that I’d written in blue pen sitting in the stairwell that night, and that woman running track, jumping hurdles, checking off one A at a time. They were adding up, and I was writing my ticket; no one could get me into college, but me.
Still, my group at Prep was my family, and meant everything to me; it made the school feel like a kind of home. It reminded me of those late-night episodes of the TV show Cheers that Daddy and I used to watch sitting on the couch together, how whenever the character Norm walked in, everyone would call out his name in unison. As a child I didn’t understand the show much, but I understood the sense of belonging shared by the characters, and I longed to have it for myself, a place where I could belong. Before Prep, and especially before my friends came to Prep, I’d never had a place where everyone knew everyone’s name, a place where everyone was welcome and working on their goals together. And now here we were working to make our lives better, side by side. It meant everything to me.
“Let’s go, guys, I think they’re ready for us,” Eva said, lifting a poster board up high. The characters she’d drawn were a worried couple seated bedside, troubled because neither could remember whether or not they had used a condom during a night of drinking and irresponsible sex. Eva had given the girl bee-stung lips, a nose ring, and eyebrows arched in concern. Their thought bubbles were decorated in glitter, highlighting words like trust, choice, and consequences. Armed with our materials, the three of us, Eva, Sam, and I, stepped through the doors of the meeting room.
“No one ever expects to contract HIV,” I said, opening our discussion to the room of students. I wore a green sweater and blue jeans for the occasion, one of many articles of colorful clothing that I’d begun to trade in place of my standard black uniform.
“But it happens anyway, and it breaks up families and it takes lives. We’re here today to keep it from happening to you. That’s what this is about.”
For a half hour, Sam, Eva, and I used our posters and the information we learned with CASES for our presentation. When it came to the part about exactly how HIV spreads through the human body, I saw Ma. But not the sick version of Ma in the hospital—instead I saw a smiling one, full of life and love. I saw her laughing with me, clasping my hand on Mosholu Parkway, blowing dandelion fluff into the sky and making wishes, the HIV virus already multiplying in her body. Her wish for me to stay in school, her wish for me to build a life of options, her wish for me to be okay.
The Xerox machine spit out ten clean copies of my transcripts. Sitting in Jessie’s empty guidance counselor office, I ran my fingertip down the columns of grades: 92, 94, 100, 100, 100, 98—more than ten classes per semester in total, many of which were high A’s. As I’d planned, I was moving at a pace of one full school year per semester. That morning, the rest of the school was in an assembly in Prep Central, just on the other side of the wall from Jessie’s office. My task that Friday, I decided, was to finally deal with scholarship applications. I wouldn’t fill out college apps until later in the year, but my plan was to have the funds gathered ahead of time.
Jessie Klein, my guidance counselor, helped me decide this. Throughout the last few months, we’d sat in her small office during lunch or after school and talked about college.
“With your grades, Liz, you have so many schools to pick from. You’re in great shape,” she’d said. “But you want to think about how you plan to pay your tuition, and sooner rather than later.”
On one of those afternoons, Jessie had handed me a manila envelope packed with scholarship applications that she had personally taken the time to select as well suited for me. State schools, Jessie explained, would probably give someone with my grades full funding, no problem. I just had to fill out something called a FASFA form, Free Application for Federal Student Aid. But, Jessie explained, tuition for other types of schools could be much more expensive, so the best thing to do would be to fill out lots of scholarship applications so that I could secure all the funding possible and keep my options open, which sounded great to me.
“Um . . . so if tuition at top colleges is really high,” I said, taking the envelope in my hand, and opening it to thumb through the stack, “like more than thirty thousand a year . . . are these scholarships about that much? Enough to cover tuition?” I asked Jessie.
Her look told me I had no idea what I was in for.
Weeks later, as I set out to spend the afternoon by myself working on my scholarship application process, I quickly found out why Jessie had given me that look. In her empty office, I flipped the fluorescent light off and worked only by sunlight, which shone in through the crisscross window guards. For nearly an hour, I sorted through leaflets and brochures decorated with glossy photos of students from racially diverse backgrounds, all smiling, giving their thumbs-up endorsement of company-sponsored loans, scholarships, and grants. Every other moment or so, on the other side of the wall that separated us, the whole student body broke into applause, cheering on a series of teacher’s announcements that I couldn’t quite hear. I’d decided to skip the gathering because I knew deadlines were approaching, fast, and I had to get this taken care of. With so much information to sort through on the application forms, I began flipping past everything in search of only the most pertinent info, the amount of funding they were offering.
These people had to be kidding! What a disappointment! The applications requested far too much time-consuming work for far too little money. And the whole thing was confusing. A financial products company offered $500 to the winner of an essay contest about “free trade in the free market.” Another round of applause sounded next door. Someone whistled loudly. I set that application aside for later; it would require time at the library. Another company gave $250 to the student with the best politically based short story about any prominent politician who had held office in the last one hundred years. Another scholarship was for $400, and another for $1,000. These scholarships would barely cover food at top colleges, I thought. I began to wonder how it was that poor people managed to get a great education without thirty scholarships per year. Finally, I turned a page and found the one I’d been hoping for, one that Jessie had flagged with a Post-it marked “PERFECT FOR YOU,” in deep blue pen strokes. This application was issued from The New York Times College Scholarship Program, and it offered “$12,000, per year, every year of college.” Clearly, they had some idea of how much top colleges cost. On the form, apart from questions of GPA and after-school activities, it simply asked for an essay in which I was to describe any obstacles that I may have had to overcome in my life in order to thrive academically.
My eyes widened. Seriously? I mean, really? It was so ridiculously perfect that I laughed. With a sweep of my arm, I pushed everything to one side of the table and set down a blank sheet of notebook paper to begin outlining my essay. My hand raced across the page, making bullet points to work from. I laid down a paragraph in only a few short minutes. This was it, I thought. I decided to take a break and step out of the office for some water. Just as I did, the meeting broke; students were swarming out of the large room, talking to one another. Bessim, one of the seniors, came up to me and patted me on the shoulder. “Good job,” he said. Holding my cup I looked at him, totally baffled.
“Mm, okay,” I said, confused.
“Congratulations,” he told me.
I continued to stare blankly at his face, until I finally asked, “For what?”
“For all the awards,” he said. “They called your name for everything. So, congratulations.”
I walked away in a daze. I hadn’t even realized that it was an awards ceremony.
I ran to see Perry in his office. He was on the phone, but paused and said, “We missed you in there,” before handing me a folder with my name on it.
Back in Jessie’s office, I opened the front of the folder and lifted my awards out. They were made of decorative white paper framed in an intricate blue design with “Liz Murray” spelled out in calligraphy. There were almost a dozen awards inside, including ones for best onstage performance for my role as Hamlet in the school talent show, commitment to community service for the HIV/AIDS peer education program, and outstanding achievement in various academic areas.
I immediately picked up the Times scholarship application again. Outside the first-floor window, I saw students mingling, smoking cigarettes, snapping bubble gum, and talking. Class had let out for the day.
I held my pen to the paper, trembling. I worked in some kind of trance, pouring everything I had onto that page. My frustrations, my sadness, all of my grief, they pushed the pen across that page; they wrote the essay, or the essay wrote itself. Whatever it was, it wasn’t me writing because I wasn’t there. I was floating above looking down on myself, watching my hand move feverishly across the page, watching everything in my life that had ever held me back, breaking.
When my typed essay emerged from the office printer that evening, I stapled it to my transcripts. All I had to do now was apply to college.
It was only supposed to be a group picture for our yearbook, that’s all. I had no idea I’d apply to Harvard because of it. It happened when the top ten students in a school-wide course called Urban Explorations were chosen for a field trip to Boston. Perry wanted to reward us for all the hard work. Along with another teacher, Christina, he packed the group of us onto Amtrak for the weekend trip. Our “hotel” would be dorm rooms at Boston College. Eva and I both qualified for the trip, and we sat next to each other on the huge commuter train, talking nonstop for the whole four-hour ride. I kept interrupting, pointing at things out the window, yelling, “Look!” to Eva at the scenery whipping past us, streaks of houses, sparkling bodies of water, open sky. She’d been to Paris with her dad and grandmother before, so Amtrak was nothing big. But she indulged me anyway, turning every time and searching for the source of my delight in everyday things.
First-time travel on this regional train felt like an adventure. The thrill made me giddy, talkative. We’d moved to the food car for privacy, and I interrupted Eva again, this time in the middle of a story about her boyfriend, Adrian. Abruptly, I got up from the seat across from Eva and slid in right beside her. “I have nowhere to live,” I confessed, very much out of nowhere. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” We had been sharing pretzels in the food car, talking about James and Adrian. I worried that my sudden announcement was too heavy for the conversation.
“I won’t,” she said, and in no way did she look surprised. With all my nights at her apartment, it probably wasn’t news. “Promise,” she added, smiling at me. She extended the open bag of pretzels. For the rest of the train ride, we were each other’s diaries. We talked about our boyfriends, about music, and about our dreams.
Eva wanted to go to college, too, “someplace I can just go and shut the door to my room, lock it, and read all day. Someplace with a really good education. Oh! And someplace in nature, out of the city. Someplace beautiful, with trees,” she said. “And I want Adrian to come with me, too.” She asked about my plans.
“I don’t know where I want to go . . . maybe Brown? I heard Brown is good. Maybe someplace in California,” I said. “Sam and I used to say we were going to live there together. . . . I want to go someplace beautiful, too.”
The dorms of Boston College were a world unto themselves. Eva and I shared a room. I tossed my things onto my single bed and joined my classmates in a game of tag. I was enlivened in the halls of this strange and exciting place. We ran after one another, sliding up and down the halls in our socks, shrieking with laughter as we flew past the soda machine, triangle sports flags, and pegboard flyers tacked up high on the hallway walls. Monique, a tall girl with yellow hair and hoop earrings, chased after Eva and me, and we all ended up crashing onto the floor, holding our sides with laughter. Out the window was a massive track field and in the distance, the busy city of Boston. This is what Ken and the others had been so excited about when they mentioned “dorms,” a wide-open space to just be. Before heading out to explore, I hung my T-shirts in the closet, folded my spare jeans in one of the drawers, touched the picture of Ma with my fingertips, and put her coin in my front jeans pocket to take with me for the day. It was the first space in years over which I could claim some ownership, even if it was only for two nights. It gave me a small sense of pride to know that I’d earned it. I could live someplace like this, I thought.
Boston was beautiful. Perry led us down tree-lined streets with town houses and brownstones through an area called Beacon Hill. You could see right into the windows on the ground floor of the old houses, and you’d get a perfect view of their living rooms: crystal chandeliers and old bookcases built into the wooden walls, antique furniture, rooms warmed by the glow of fireplaces. I could not get enough of looking into these windows. They made me feel hopeful. There was just something enchanting about the buildings with their gray shuttered windows set against the lush green trees sprinkled with white flowers, their petals drizzled along the cobblestone streets. The neighborhood was otherworldly, magical even.
Perry indulged my every question. “How much do these houses cost? What do these people do for a living? . . . What’s college like?”
We built up a hunger walking all afternoon. Lunch was scheduled at a Chinese restaurant named Yenching, in Harvard Square. But first, Perry said, we needed just one group picture—in front of the John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard. I’d heard of Harvard on TV, but I’d never seen Harvard before, not even a picture of it, and I was curious.
I don’t know that I can ever really put into words the experience of walking through that yard on that afternoon, at a time when everything I owned fit into my book bag and I was dressed in ratty clothing, still buzzing from the novelty of an Amtrak train ride, which at that point was the highlight of my worldly experience.
As I said earlier, 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 come from. Separate.
Standing in Harvard Yard was like touching the wall, running my hands along its rough edges, questioning its authority.
Students walked alongside the rich green grass, carrying books or pushing bikes, wearing crimson sweaters with HARVARD across them. The statue was crowded by a group of Japanese tourists posing for pictures. Our class lined up behind them to take our picture next. Harvard students laid out across the open lawn on sheets, reading. The redbrick buildings looked like they were made by the same architects who made Beacon Hill, old and important-looking structures, as ancient as they were inaccessible. But also beautiful—and the sight of the buildings filled me with a deep longing for something I could not explain. The feeling must have shown on my face because, right then and there without a word between us, Perry leaned over and said to me, “Hey Liz, it would be a reach, but it’s not impossible . . . Ever think about applying to Harvard?”
I stopped everything to absorb Perry’s words. No, I most certainly had not ever thought of applying to Harvard before. But standing there, touching the wall, I considered that while I most likely would not get in, it was, at the very least, possible that I could.
On a rainy February afternoon, I shut my umbrella and walked through the rotating doors of The New York Times building on Forty-third Street, right off Times Square, for my scholarship interview. Sam and I had gone thrift store shopping on Fordham Road to locate the pair of khaki pants I was wearing, the button-down shirt that almost fit me, and the used pair of black boots that sort of looked like dress shoes when my pants covered them. Lisa loaned me her peacoat, with one button missing, but the coat still looked professional, I thought. Three thousand high school students had applied for the six scholarships, and twenty-one finalists had been picked. I was chosen as one of them and on that brutally cold afternoon, the day of my interview, I was ready. Also, I was tired; I’d already had a long day.
It had begun with a trip that Lisa and I took to welfare. The reason we were in welfare was because we were fighting to get rent. We needed rent because we’d gotten an apartment.
With money I’d saved from my second summer working at NYPIRG, Lisa and I made a deal. Soon after I turned eighteen and was old enough to legally sign a lease and old enough to no longer worry about being taken to a group home, I would spend my entire savings, every dollar of it, to get us into a one-bedroom on Bedford Park. Between real estate fees, first month’s rent, and a security deposit, a mattress, several pots and pans, and a kitchen table with two chairs, I was flat broke when we were done. And I was busy around the clock with eleven classes and college applications, too busy to get a job. In return for my contribution, Lisa, who was employed at the Gap, would pay all of our bills while I finished my classes, until I could work again. This would also leave her flat broke. On this tight budget, we could keep the lights on, buy some food sometimes, have very basic telephone service, and just barely pay the rent. A reliable source of food would come from local soup kitchens and especially from the pantry packs they gave me at The Door, which were a life-saver. As part of the deal, Sam could share my room with me; she moved in the same day that Lisa and I did.
On a Saturday in December, on a day of heavy snowfall, Lisa, Fief, Sam, Eva, Bobby, James, and I helped carry Lisa’s belongings from Brick’s apartment to our new place, which was a short distance. We carried lamps and bags. We slipped, running and sliding through the slush at two a.m., watching the chunky white snowflakes shine by the light of street lamps; we were laughing hysterically. James pulled me into a snowbank, collapsing us into a clumsy pile; he kissed me and hit me in the face with a heaping fistful of cold snow and I screamed, chasing him. Brick was out of town for the upcoming holiday, so Sam and I had the opportunity to find old bags of stuff we didn’t even know we had left behind there so long ago. Toward the end of the night, Fief and Bobby carried Lisa’s bed into Fief’s dad’s work van, wearing their big bubble North Face coats, slipping on the wet metal of the vehicle in their thick mountain boots.
From that day on, Lisa, Sam, and I were supposed to be okay. But two days after we moved in, Lisa lost her job. We hadn’t even paid a single bill yet. We were depending on Lisa’s paycheck for everything. When her last check came, it ended up going to food and we really didn’t have anything left.
That last semester, I had a full year of high school to complete and college interviews. I couldn’t work. For weeks I’d been spending an average of ten hours a day at school, coming home at night to work on college applications, which I fanned out on the kitchen table, and I rationed food with Lisa and Sam from the pantry packs we got from The Door. It was terrifying to have spent my NYPIRG money while having no time to work, while being committed to so many classes and college applications all at once. It was every bit a gamble, and it seemed it was the wrong one. At least on my own, I could be cautious and spend as little money as possible, using my savings to survive. That savings was my security blanket. But having invested it all in an apartment, I was as broke as the day I left the Holiday Motel. Every day I’d exit the house to go to school and Lisa would be poring over the classifieds, with no luck. Then the cut-off notices started arriving in the mail, bills in white envelopes with thick red lines down the middle, stamped with end-of-service dates for us to count down to. And the pressure was mounting.
Welfare seemed like the reasonable solution. They had to help us. Public assistance was nothing new to Lisa and me. We had gone with Ma to many of her appointments, so I knew what to expect. Still, nothing prepared me for the way the surly, rude woman in charge of our case treated us. We had been sent away time after time for supposedly not having one document or another, no proof that Ma had passed away, or that Daddy wasn’t taking care of us. How do you prove something that isn’t happening? And what if we couldn’t find a copy of Ma’s death certificate? But then, on the day of my scholarship interview, I was certain we had done everything right and that I was only going to the office that morning to finalize our case, get approved, have our rent paid, and get some food stamps.
“You are not eligible for public assistance,” the caseworker said matter-of-factly, closing the file in her hand and tossing it on her desk.
“What do you mean?” I asked when it was obvious she wasn’t going to elaborate.
There was a sharp intake of breath, a sucking noise through her teeth, and then she rolled her eyes. “I mean exactly what I said, Princess. You are not eligible.”
Princess? Her name-calling took me back to the group home, and back to motels with Carlos. Life was holding up a truth for me: There were just as many people deciding my life for me as there was neediness in my life, and never more than that. The more needy I kept myself, the more it would always be up to other people what happened to me. I decided I would make my life so full of things that empowered me, people like this woman would shrink away, until they disappeared from my sight.
“I understand what you said, ma’am. I am just asking you why I am not eligible.” She came back with a lot of words, more eye-rolling, but no real answer. Like many of the other people I saw being “helped” that morning, I found myself yelling at an indifferent caseworker, another brick in that wall that stood between me and things I wanted and needed.
I could feel my anger growing. She became, for that moment, all the people who ever told me no, all the caseworkers who ever frustrated me, and the teachers at those first high schools who turned me down. I became livid. Finally, I raised my hand in a “stop” motion, closer to her face than I knew was okay. I said, “You know what? I am going to be late for my interview for Harvard if I keep wasting time with you.” My intention was to lash out at her, to let her know that even though she had power over me in this moment, I was going somewhere bigger than the welfare office, bigger than her.
She laughed in my face. “Yeah? Well, I got Ms. Yale coming in here next. So why don’t you get on to your meetin’ with Haaar-vud!”
Blood rushed to my cheeks, and I stormed out. That’s okay, I thought, pushing open the double doors and exiting that miserable office. That’s okay, because despite my caseworker’s disbelief, I did have an interview with a Harvard alumnus that afternoon. In fact, my schedule that day was packed; I had what I thought would have been a routine appointment to have my welfare approved, a college interview in midtown Manhattan, and then my New York Times interview. Because I was trying to minimize any absences from school, I packed all of these appointments into the same long day, which I hoped would go smoothly—a one-two-three day: welfare, Harvard, New York Times. Welfare, as it turned out, would be the only thing that did not go well that day.
I met the alumnus in his office at a law firm in the East Fifties. Even now, the interview is a blur of politeness and standard questions about school, what I wanted to do with my life, and my education and career goals. I just remember riding down the elevator after the interview believing that it had gone well, opening my journal, and double-checking my next stop, 229 West Forty-third Street.
After coming in out of the freezing rain, I made my way through security, found the elevators, and was directed to a tiny room where the scholarship finalists were gathered. I found a seat and immediately took in my surroundings. Two very nervous-looking high school students sat with their parents on the couch in the airless room. Someone paced; a mother kept rubbing her daughter’s shoulders. Copies of The New York Times were stacked on a small table.
I understood the importance of winning a scholarship, but not the importance of winning this scholarship, not really. I knew that without, at least, a partial scholarship, I would not be able to go to a top college. Top colleges provided the most options, which is what I was seeking. Harvard tuition was incredible and I could not afford a turkey sandwich at the moment, so I understood that I needed college funding. But what I did not get was the significance that came with being awarded a scholarship from the Times. Never, not once, had I seen anyone I knew personally reading The New York Times. I simply had no frame of reference for how influential a newspaper it was. In my neighborhood, if people read the paper at all, they read the New York Post or the New York Daily News. The only people I’d ever seen read the thicker, larger New York Times were professional people, people who looked highly functional, usually on the train. Certainly I had never read it before. So the pacing, obvious anxiety, and near hyperventilating one guy was doing was all lost on me. My ignorance left me blessedly unaware of just how important this was. And by now, with my experience at Prep and with how it was becoming easier to talk to people, I wasn’t too nervous. In fact, after the long day it felt good to be somewhere warm, and I even relaxed into my chair.
Sitting in this small, windowless waiting area, for what I thought of as my third meeting of the day, my eyes landed on a table of refreshments. Bottles of water were lined up in factorylike perfect rows, alongside a tray of croissants, bagels, and muffins. A cheerful woman with a pretty smile and thin dreadlocks named Sheila was our host, checking in finalists to get us ready for the big interview. She encouraged me to help myself. “Please, sweetie, no one’s touched a thing, we’ll end up throwing them out. Please, the whole tray is up for grabs.”
That was all I needed to hear. When they called my name and she turned around to walk out ahead of me, I quickly stuffed doughnuts and muffins into my bag. She said I could help myself; besides, they were throwing them out anyway.
I walked into a conference room with a long oak table in the center, around which sat twelve or so women and men dressed in business attire. There was an empty seat at the end of the table clearly meant for me. I approached it.
My hands still had sugar on them from the doughnuts. “Sorry, give me one second,” I said as I took a tissue from a box that was sitting on the table. I sat as I wiped my hands. Twelve sets of eyes stared at me, taking me in.
I knew the interview would be about my essay. They’d asked: Describe an obstacle you have overcome. Since I was eighteen by then and couldn’t be forced into the custody of Child Welfare, I had written my New York Times essay about being homeless. I held nothing back.
In the interview, I shared even more than what I’d written. I told them—these writers, editors, people in business suits, with expensive-looking bracelets and bow ties—about Ma and Daddy; about University Avenue; Ma selling the Thanksgiving turkey. I told them about surviving on the generosity of friends and sleeping in stairwells. I told them about not eating every day and getting meals at places like The Door. The room fell quiet. One man with a red tie and glasses leaned forward on the large conference room table and broke the silence.
“Liz . . . is there anything else you’d like to tell us?” he asked.
I was stumped. Obviously I was supposed to say something impressive, a thoughtful something that would have them believe I deserved this.
“Well, I need the scholarship” was the first thing that came to mind. “I just really need it.” Everyone laughed. Had I thought of something more complex and impressive sounding, I would have said that instead, but it was the one simple truth that came to mind.
Someone said it was nice to meet me. Several people shook my hand.
A reporter named Randy took me upstairs to a cafeteria where Times employees ate their lunch every day. Everyone was walking around in business clothing, ID cards dangling from their waists or key chains. He sat across from me, a white man in his thirties, in a blue button-down shirt and a tie. He was friendly enough, and he bought me lunch.
“Sorry, I wasn’t in the official interview, Liz,” he said, clicking his pen. “Can you tell me how you became homeless? And why your parents couldn’t take care of you?”
Sitting there with him, I jammed warm macaroni and cheese and chicken into my mouth and gulped down delicious sweet apple juice. My head was buzzing with excitement at the warm meal and the attention of this reporter. I was thrilled to be inside a real office building full of professional people, like the ones I’d seen on TV. After everything I’d been through in the last few years and everything I’d been through on that day alone, it was surprisingly easy to talk to this guy. I told him everything, too. I told him about growing up watching my parents get high, about losing Ma, about the motels, and even about my morning in the welfare office.
Years later, I’ve often reflected on how blessed I was to have no real understanding of how difficult that day was supposed to be. Had I known how difficult it was supposed to be to interview with Harvard or The New York Times; had anyone told me that those were hard, nearly impossible, things to do, then I may have never done them. But I didn’t know enough about the world to analyze the likelihood of my success; I had only the commitment to actually show up and do it. In the years ahead of me, I learned that the world is actually filled with people ready to tell you how likely something is, and what it means to be realistic. But what I have also learned is that no one, no one truly knows what is possible until they go and do it.
When we were done talking, for the second time that day, I got into an elevator feeling that I had taken a step forward. I saw my track runner bounding top speed, one more hurdle behind her.
The following Friday, the phone in our apartment rang. I was actually startled to hear it, because I expected it to be cut off by then. For weeks we’d been getting these disconnection notices for the phone and the lights. In fact, I was certain we had only a couple more weeks left before we would lose everything, including the apartment. I had already planned out the bag I would pack.
“May I speak to Elizabeth Murray, please?” a very professional-sounding voice said when I picked up.
“This is Liz.”
“I am Roger Lehecka from the New York Times Scholarship Program. . . . I am just calling to tell you that you are one of the six students chosen to be awarded the New York Times Scholarship!”
Whirlwind. That’s the word that comes to mind when I think of how to describe my life after winning the scholarship. A floodgate had opened, and I had no way of knowing that my life would simply never be the same. If I had no real understanding of it before, I very quickly learned about the influence of The New York Times.
The six scholarship winners were called back to the Times to be photographed the week after we had been notified. Lisa came along with me. We were seated with the other winners and their parents back in that tiny airless room. Lisa was adorable, with the way she kept looking at everything around the office, holding in laughter.
“Where are we?” she said, giggling. “This is so funny.”
“I know,” I said, giggling too. We both played it cool and sat there quietly amazed.
I was photographed once with the group, and then once alone. For that second picture, I was taken up the elevator to a high floor in The New York Times building, to one of the libraries. Being among those stacks of books reminded me of all the times Daddy had taken me to the library when we lived on University Avenue. The photographer had me sit on a large windowsill, the sun illuminating the room from behind me. As his camera clicked away, I wondered what Daddy would say when he saw it. I wondered if somehow Ma could see me, too.
It really did not dawn on me until the day that the article hit newsstands, featuring the six winners on the cover of the Metro Section (next to an article about Bill and Hillary Clinton), that the entire world would see it. Everyone, including my teachers at Prep, was going to know my whole situation. Part of me was worried that they would think differently about me. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite. Perry was proud, all my teachers were. But everyone expressed concern over how I was going to pay my rent and remain stable. And my teachers weren’t the only ones.
I’d mentioned my high school in the Times interview. That created something I never anticipated, what I eventually came to call the Angel Brigade. People I did not know began showing up at Prep to meet me, to hug me, to give me encouraging words, clothing, food, and care packages. They came to help me, and they asked for nothing in return.
Mail came flooding in. People sent cards with smiling pictures of their families, invitations to visit them in their homes across America. They sent books. One man, learning about my situation, got his friends together and reached out to several people in our community, and they paid what Lisa, Sam, and I owed in back rent. People we did not know paid our back rent, they kept on our lights, and they filled up our fridge.
I never slept another night on the streets, ever again.
What was most moving about all of this unexpected generosity was the spirit in which people helped. It was something in their moods and in their general being when they showed up at my school, how they were smiling, looking me right in the eyes, asking in every way what I needed. One lady in her late forties, wearing a yellow dress, showed up in front of my school around the time we finished. April got me from the back office and when I came out front, this woman looked nervous, clutching her necklace and fidgeting; she stepped forward to introduce herself.
“I’m Teressa. Terry . . . First of all, I want to apologize to you,” she said, standing on the sidewalk on Nineteenth Street. I was confused; I had never laid eyes on her before. She continued, “I’ve had the article about you on my fridge for weeks. Since I didn’t have any money to help you out, I thought I couldn’t do anything for you at all. And then last night, I was doing my daughter’s laundry, and I thought, how silly of me, maybe you had laundry I could do for you. I mean, your parents, someone, should be helping you with these things while you’re busy with school.” I stared at her in disbelief. She asked again, “Well, do you? Do you have some laundry?”
Once a week, every week, she stopped by the school in her silver minivan and picked up and dropped off my clean, folded clothing, true to her word. She even added a bag of cookies most weeks. “I can’t do much, Liz, but I know I can do that,” she said. So while I was studying for my eleven classes, Teressa—Terry—did my laundry.
There are countless ways in which people appeared out of nowhere and supported me. When it first started happening, I didn’t trust it. I didn’t believe that anyone who wasn’t my family or my close tribe of friends would be willing to help just because they’d read about me in the paper. I most certainly did not think that “those people,” the people I had judged as “separate” from myself, would want to help someone like me. But they did. They just gave and asked for nothing back. And in doing this, they knocked every brick out of my wall. For the first time I could really see there was no difference between myself and others; we were all just people. Just as there was no real difference between people who accomplished their goals and me, as long as I was willing to do the work and able to have some help along the way.
My favorite thing that I received was a hand-stitched quilt from a lady named Debbie Fike. Attached to the beautiful quilt was a small note that read, “It gets cold in those dorms. May you warm yourself knowing that people care about you.”
I wanted Harvard. Badly. When I received a letter, not accepting me but telling me that I had been wait-listed, I put on a brave front and looked on the bright side. It wasn’t a rejection, so there was still a chance that I could get in. So many things in my life had changed just because I had been given a chance—I had done great at Prep, had won the New York Times Scholarship, and had my Angel Brigade. Going to Harvard could still be another thing on that list. But underneath the positive face I wore, part of me wondered if, after all I had come through, my luck had just run out. Was this dream simply too much to ask for?
The uncertainty frightened me. I refused to leave anything to chance, so I decided not to take this wait-listed thing lying down. Phone calls were made and letters were written on my behalf. I even managed to land a second interview and everyone pitched in to help me get ready. The staff at Prep called on New Visions, a New York–based group that helps alternative high schools like ours; they sent over a representative to take me shopping at Banana Republic so that I would have something professional to wear. Lisa and I were like two little kids in the store, laughing, tearing things off of racks, holding up clothing high for each other to see. She helped me pick out a long black skirt and dainty long-sleeved sweater. They bought me some real dress shoes too.
The second interview, like my first, went well, and things felt promising. But afterward, I still wasn’t sure what would happen. I was told to expect a letter to arrive, telling me my fate. So, I waited.
Those last few weeks of high school became all about the mailman and what size envelope he would bring me. According to my teachers, a large envelope meant good news, an acceptance letter or packet stuffed with pages of orientation material and calendar dates transporting me back to those stately redbrick buildings in New England. But a small envelope, that would mean bad news, a single sheet of paper whose formal statement of rejection would appear on letterhead stamped by the crimson crest that is Harvard University’s logo. That crest had appeared everywhere for me in the last few months, in my countless Internet searches, on the application materials that I labored over in empty offices of my high school, in my dreams.
Over the past several months, Harvard had become my mind’s single focus. It had started out reasonably enough, with research on admission statistics, course offerings, and campus life. These inquiries, I decided, were understandable, given my status as a hopeful applicant. But being on the wait-list, the standard four-month window of time between application and answer had dragged out into six agonizing months, and that’s when my fascination deteriorated into admittedly pointless and obsessive fact-finding.
For instance, who knew that during the Revolutionary War, cannonballs had been dropped right out of dormitory windows, causing huge dents in the Harvard Yard sidewalk? Also, occurring inside Harvard Yard twice a year is an event called the “Primal Scream,” which is a ritual that takes place at exactly midnight on the night before final exams. Students gather in the yard to relieve their exam stress by running at least one lap around the yard, completely naked—even in the winter. The most compelling moment in my research was the day I used the Internet to map out the miles—almost two hundred exactly—between Harvard Yard and my doorstep.
Those days I spent scouring the Internet for needless information felt like progress to me. I couldn’t just wait it out; I had to feel like I was doing something. It felt better reading the same information over and over than it did just sitting there.
For this very same reason, I absolutely lived for my trips to the mailbox. Each day I walked briskly from the D train on Bedford Park to my apartment building, where I jammed my key into the mailbox, eager for news. But for weeks I found nothing. During those moments, I couldn’t help but feel like Ma on check day, impatient, unable to put myself at ease, pacing my apartment, as though pacing would bring the mail any sooner. As though anything I was doing in New York City would have an impact on the decision of a committee all the way in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This pressure I put on myself was familiar to me. My whole life felt as though it had been packed with situations shaped just like this: Something crucial was at stake, the outcome could go either way, and it was up to me to change it—like those nights on University Avenue when Ma and Daddy placed themselves in danger, leaving the house at all hours of the night, while I waited by the window ready to dial 911. Would my one emergency phone call be the difference between my parents’ injury and well-being? And when I was starving as a kid, what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten a job? Who would have fed me if I hadn’t fed myself? And now, wait-listed at Harvard, faced with agonizing uncertainty, the same questions persisted: What would I do about it?
From Prep, I called the office of admissions every Friday like clockwork to ask whether or not a decision had been reached and if so, had my letter been mailed, and every Friday I got the same response: “The committee has not yet rendered its final decision,” but, I was “welcome to call again,” and of course I should expect an answer by mail, soon.
Then one Friday, at last, something different. While she could not give out specific admission information over the phone, a secretary informed me that a decision had in fact been reached and a response had been mailed. I should receive it any day now, if it wasn’t in my mailbox already. I hung up the phone and all but danced around the office at Prep; I went looking for my teachers.
For months I had hounded them incessantly with my school-related questions, and they had shown me the patience of saints. Caleb’s father was a professor at Harvard, so he’d gotten the worst of it. On more than one occasion, I’d cornered Caleb after hours, in that tiny office of his, interrupting his work and mining him for information. Does your dad know how the committee decides? Do people from the wait-list ever really get in? Perry was another frequent recipient of my pestering. His tendency to listen carefully to others and to take time to be decisive and sincere left Perry totally vulnerable to my relentless need to talk about it. Looking back on that time now, I don’t know how my teachers put up with me, when no amount of talking was enough to have me cease my worrying.
That afternoon, I scoured the office for someone I could share the news with. Luckily for them, most of the teachers were in a meeting. Only Perry was available, in his office, the same office where he’d interviewed me almost two years ago, back when I’d judged him to be one of “those people,” back when I couldn’t look him, or anyone, directly in the eyes. I found Perry at his desk. He looked up at me with friendly curiosity. “Well hello,” he said, putting down his pen to turn toward me.
“Good news, Perry, they mailed the letter. I’m going to find out . . . It could be in my mailbox right now.”
“Oh . . . Well, good,” Perry responded, and he leaned back in his chair and began smiling widely at me, an amused expression across his face. “Great,” he added. And then he didn’t say a word, nothing else. I had expected just a little more enthusiasm than that.
“It’s exciting,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, Liz, it is exciting,” he said, laughing a bit. His expression was more of a smirk than a smile.
“I mean, this is it,” I said, as though to force my excitement onto him. “It’s the moment . . . Soon I’ll know.”
Perry’s expression, familiar to me from two years of being his student, told me I was about to get some advice.
“What?” I asked, smiling nervously at him. “You have this look.” I respected Perry’s opinion, and if he had some private joke in his head, I wanted to know what it was. He leaned forward and with a shrug of his shoulders he said something that will stick with me always.
“It’s exciting, Liz . . . But I hope you understand that no matter where you go to school, you’ll always be you. Wherever you go, college, job interviews, relationships, all of it . . . the answer from Harvard really is only incidental to who you are. So cut yourself a break . . . You really will be fine either way.”
If I didn’t love and trust Perry, I might have thought he was undermining something very important to me. Or, at the very least, that he was simply too privileged to understand why Harvard mattered so much for someone like me, because unlike him, I could not afford to be so casual. But I did love and respect Perry, and my trust in him told me to take his words into consideration. I nodded and said, “Okay, Perry,” but I was obviously unsettled.
“Look, Liz, all I mean is, wherever you go, you’ll make the best of things. Look at your life, you already have . . . That’s why I know you’ll be all right. . . . Try and relax, have some compassion for yourself.”
Those words stopped me. The idea that I deserved or could even afford to relax, and the notion of compassion—for myself . . .
On the train ride home and in bed that night (after I returned to find nothing in my mailbox), I lay awake and mulled over Perry’s words, let them echo in my head as I considered their implications. In my ceaseless fight for survival, I had simply not taken even a single moment to consider the enormity of all that had happened to me, and how I might have been impacted by it. But how could I take a moment? There had been too much to do. Every day there had been some pressing need to handle, some schoolwork to complete, some urgent problem that needed solving.
But lying in bed that night, Perry’s words slowed my life’s frantic pace and gave me permission to take time, not to do anything, just to think and to feel. In my darkened bedroom, alone, what surfaced was not easy. Underneath all the achievement and bustle of my life was a heartbreaking catalog of losses: Daddy surrendering me to the state with absolutely no protest; Ma in the hospital room that day, her mouth moving noiselessly over words; nights spent alone in a staircase, wondering how long it would take anyone to notice if I disappeared. Under the blankets, I lay there and allowed my feelings to take me over. I tasted the salt of my tears, let them flow, felt the places in my heart that were the most broken, and I finally allowed myself the space to mourn. I cried until I no longer had to.
When I let myself experience my sorrow and I did not resist it or cover it with any distraction, another experience surfaced. Willing to face my pain, I began to see its inverse. The invisible victories of my life came into focus: the countless acts of love toward my parents; getting myself out of bed those mornings at friends’ houses to go to school; earning a paycheck that I used to take care of myself; taking the hair out of my face to risk eye contact; my loving friendships; and every single day that I kept on going, when I would so much rather not have. Accepting my sorrow, I then was able to accept my strength in the face of so much loss.
More than anything, though, I took into my heart the knowledge that I was in fact all right, as Perry had said. Terrible things had happened, but they were not happening now. I was no longer sleeping outside, but safe in my bed. And then for the first night in months, I focused on something other than my admission letter, and I let the knowledge that I was finally safe relax me to sleep.
The next day, on a sweltering Saturday in June, I took a book out to the front stoop and had a seat, where I waited for the mailman. Hours passed. The ice cream truck circled the block. I saw mothers wearing spandex pants and plastic flip-flops, clutching thick key chains, perched on stoops, eyes trained on their children. Latin music blasted from someone’s speakers high up on a floor above. I tapped my foot relentlessly, sweating under the sun, ticking away at the pages of my book. I kept my eye on the corner, searching for any sight of him.
Finally, some time in the early afternoon, I looked up to find the mailman standing just four buildings away from me. I shut my book. Someone stopped him to make conversation, holding him there.
Will the envelope be big or small?
The ice cream truck pulled over and children clamored to the window ahead of their parents. Someone had opened the fire hydrant for relief from the intense heat. Nearby, teenagers bounced a basketball. I watched the mailman drawing closer, slowly. I knew that very likely in that bag he was carrying the letter. But in this moment of anticipation, I soothed myself using Perry’s words, “You’ll be fine either way.”
With months of angst and worry, fret and fuss, here was the answer I’d been waiting for, and yet I did not feel the distress I expected to feel as I waited. A simple realization took its place: The letter already stated whatever it stated, and there was nothing I could do now to change that. In this moment it was clear to me that I had already done everything I could do.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference . . .
Things turning around for me had been the result of my focusing on the few areas in life I could change, and surrendering to the knowledge that there were many more things that I just couldn’t make different.
I could not rescue Sam from her family life, but I could be her friend. I could never change Carlos, but I could leave that relationship and take care of myself. I couldn’t heal my parents, as much as I wanted to, but I could forgive and love them.
I could also choose to carve out a life for myself that was in no way limited by what had already occurred in my past.
Watching the mailman approach, I realized that the letter from Harvard, whatever it would reveal, would not make or break my life. Instead, what I was beginning to understand was that however things unfolded from here on, whatever the next Chapter was, my life could never be the sum of one circumstance. It would be determined, as it had always been, by my willingness to put one foot in front of the other, moving forward, come what may.