A Hope in the Unseen Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself through other people’s eyes, wondering if he’s just not manly enough to have any success with women. Though his voice has yet to change, he has no feminine affectations. He’s pleasant looking and tallish, his dress unflamboyant but neat and usually color coordinated. He suspects that it is this terrain that’s atypical and upside down—but he’s not sure. All he knows isthat, here, no one wants to be with an honor student—a pariah—except maybe LaTisha, who has few alternatives. Cedric Jennings simply has no social currency at Ballou.
    “Cedric, you just ain’t a woman’s man,” LaTisha says a few minutes later, once they’re seated, certain she’ll get a rise out of him. But Cedric, increasingly glum about the subject and anxious to leave the cafeteria, bears down on his grilled cheese and doesn’t get into it. LaTisha quietly eats her undressed salad and leaves to get a second one.
    Looking across the raucous cafeteria crowd, Cedric is reminded of the assembly—probably most of these kids were there—and what he said that day to Mr. Taylor, about how not going made him feel ashamed.
    Ashamed
. The word has been smoldering inside him for weeks. What he said, it didn’t track somehow. Was he ashamed of getting all A’s? No, he was proud of that. So why wouldn’t he show his face? Is it maybe that he’s ashamed of being alone all the time, of being so lame? No girlfriend. No close guy friends. He tears at an empty carton of milk with his long, agile fingers. No, that doesn’t seem right either. That’s all part of his solitary mission to get out of here and off to a famous college.
    LaTisha comes back. “You okay, Cedric? You look kind of bad.”
    “Yeah,” he says. “I’m all right. Just been thinking about why I feel the way I do.”
    With the afternoon temperature reaching seventy, students start slipping out early from one of Ballou’s ten exits. Cedric sits through his afternoon classes and finds himself absently watching the clock. After the dismissal bell, he runs into LaTisha in the hallway and tells her he’s not going to stay his usual two hours or so after school. He thinks he’ll just “go home, watch TV, and crash.”
    She says she’s going home, too, and they walk outside to the bus stop just in front of the school. In the very late afternoons, when Cedric often leaves the building, this stop is empty. At 3:30, though, it’s jammed and rowdy with kids who’ve been cooped up for the winter in nearby public housing projects, small apartments, or modest homes, all now feeling the free sunshine on their faces.
    He and LaTisha take different buses home, so she’s talking fast to fill the few moments they’ll have before parting. He’s nodding and half listening. Then something happens.
    A boy a few feet away from them grabs another boy around the neck, pulls out a pistol, and holds it to the other kid’s head. People are screaming and trying to get away, bumping into each other, not sure which direction to run. Cedric, backing onto the grass, turns to see the gun again and feels himself flinching. He sees that LaTisha has fallen down, her great girth slumped onto the concrete.
    And then it’s over. The kid with the gun runs across the street and disappears. No shots were fired, and some kids murmur about whether the gun, which was an odd greenish color, was real.
    Cedric’s bus comes and, after helping LaTisha up, he gets on, shaken, and finds a seat. He pushes himself tight into the seat’s corner, leaning his shoulder against the bumpy tin siding as the bus rolls up to the avenue stop. The dealers are out in force today, and, looking at them, he realizes that he’s been fooling himself, that there is no safe distance, no safe place to go, not in school, not on the street, not anywhere.
    His breath feels short. He closes his eyes, presses his fingers against them, and feels that his hands are trembling. In the dark field behind his closed lids, he sees clearly the