A Hope in the Unseen Read Online Free PDF

“Right, just look at him, would you? Kind of pants are those?”
    “He needs a good beating,” murmurs a third, just loud enough for Cedric to hear.
    Cedric cuts forward like a torpedo. Around the next bend comes Phillip Atkins, a tough, popular fellow junior sporting a C- average who is, lately, in Cedric’s face.
    “Oh, look, it’s the amazing nerdboy,” Phillip chides as he approaches. Cedric tries to slip by, but there’s a crowd up ahead watching a craps game in the hall, causing a backup. There’s nowhere to go.
    “Come on nerdboy, you and me, let’s do it, right now,” says Phillip, feigning a punch as a girl holds him back and two boys, standing nearby, giggle. Phillip is known for his sense of humor.
    “Why don’t you leave me be, Phillip?” says Cedric after a moment. “What’d I ever do to you?”
    Phillip, satisfied at getting a rise, just smiles. The two stand for a minute, eye to eye: Cedric in a white shirt, khakis, and black felt shoes, math book in one hand, the other hand clenched in a fist, shaking nervously; Phillip, a bit shorter and wiry, dressed in a brown T-shirt with jeans pulled low. The latter offers a menacing deadeye stare, copied immaculately from the gang leaders he admires, and Cedric breaks it off, looking away, flustered.
    The craps game is over, and his exit has cleared. Throwing a sidelong scowl at Phillip, Cedric slips forward through the dispersing mob, in the midst of which Delante Coleman collects his dice and rises from a crouch. Delante, known to all as “Head” because he helps run one of the school’s largest gangs, the Trenton Park Crew, is short and stocky, with caramel-light skin, hazel eyes, and the temerity of a killer. He helps manage a significant drug dealing and protection ring, directs a dozen or so underlings, drives a Lexus, and, in his way, is every bit as driven as Cedric. It’s what each does with his fury and talents that separates these two into a sort of urban black yin and yang.
    Cedric passes tight against the lockers, and Head, flirting with some girls, doesn’t see him—which is just as well. Head and some of his crew enjoy toying with honor students, or “goodies,” as he calls them, messing with their hair, taking their books (if they’re foolish enough to carry any), scuffing them up a bit.
    By now, Cedric has cut hard to the left into a different hallway, one that leads toward the cafeteria, which is a few feet ahead. He often tries to eat in empty classrooms—the cafeteria being the type of free-fire zone that someone of his lowly social status is wise to avoid—but today a friend of his, a girl, convinced him to meet her at the cafeteria. Just inside the side entrance, she is waiting for him.
    “’Bout time you got here, Cedric. I’m starving,” says LaTisha Williams, arms folded but smiling radiantly. “It’s wrong to keep your boo waiting.”
    Cedric says nothing, just smirks at her and rolls his eyes. LaTisha is not his “boo,” slang for girl- or boyfriend. She’s bubbly and has a pretty face, but she’s huge—five-foot-two and maybe 250 pounds. She’s an outcast, just like he is. But, he concedes, handing her a pinkish tray, she usually manages to cheer him up.
    Mostly, she talks and he laughs, offering modest rejoinders, and now off she goes again. Today she’s doing a riff—mostly for the benefit of another girl with them in line—about Cedric’s long-ago flirtation with Connie Mitchell, a gorgeous, light-skinned ingenue from the Bolling Air Force base area, who arrived here midway through tenth grade.
    “You see, Cedric goes up to her and says, ‘Hi. Hi, you new here? Can I do anything for you. Can I, can I?’” says LaTisha. “He was on her like a dog, sniffing her up and down.” Cedric chuckles at this, appreciating any story showing that, sexually speaking, his clock ticks in the traditional fashion. He’s made passes at other girls, though it never amounts to much, and he’s begun to see