Ultimately, being home alone wasn’t my biggest problem. Friendship was. This school was ghetto; once you walked through the big metal front doors, you could practically feel the hate and broken dreams. We kids sat in this big, brown building with square bulletproof windows so itty-bitty no one could see out of them, in classrooms designed like office cubicles. The classrooms had no doors, paper-thin carpet, and literally no walls.
My first day there, I didn’t know what to make of either how the school was situated or the wild students that inhabited its space. The kids made quick work of making me, the new girl, feel like I didn’t belong. I deserved some of that. After all, within seconds of my arrival, I’d already broken one of the codes: I went to the first day of school dressed up in a new outfit. I had worn floral culottes and a ruffle shirt that stretched up my neck, with a bowtie that matched the print in my pants, plus loafers with shiny pennies tucked in the slots across the top of the shoes. Apparently, I’d missed the memo that said, “Don’t be pressed to wear new clothes on day one.” More, with my hair curly and pushed to one side of my head, I looked like Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie—like an Amish girl who’d just been let out into the world for the first time. My teacher made it that much worse when she made me stand up in front of everybody and introduce myself. “Hi, um, I’m Taraji,” I said, nervously fiddling with my bow tie while everybody in the classroom laughed. By the time I slid back into my seat, I was wishing the floor would open up and swallow me and my desk whole. But a quick wave from a girl who’d turned around in her seat to give me a knowing look—one that said, “It’s going to be all right and we should totally be friends”—quickly made things better. “I’m Tracie,” she mouthed, her introduction coaxing a quick smile from my lips.
From that moment on, it was Tracie and me in Friendship, the worst school ever. Looking back on my time at Friendship now, as a grown woman who put her child through a patchwork of private schools that she handpicked based on how they fit her son’s learning style, I can honestly say, “Whoa, that shit was kinda fucked-up.” They didn’t care about us kids. It was as if they were setting us up to fail. All too many of the teachers were giving a halfhearted effort, the curriculum was substandard, there was no money for books and supplies, noise from the classes spilled over into each other because of the ridiculous design, and no one could get a handle on the student body, half of whom came from homes where crack cocaine had devastated their families. These kids had issues: parents who were addicts, siblings who, caught up in the drug game, were either experiencing or committing violence or being sent to prison for dealing. They were exhausted on both a physical and mental level. Kids were coming to school hungry, confused, angry. Shit was real for them. And they brought all of that to the makeshift classrooms at our school. Honestly, looking back, it resembled juvie hall. Thank goodness I never experienced that for real, but this seemed close to it.