Breaking Night

by Liz Murray

  “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 m
y 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.