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Shortly after starting junior year, I noticed that I hadn’t seen Devon hanging out in the hallways or driving around with Kelly in her Range Rover. The next time I saw Anton, Devon’s friend from the football team, I approached him. “What’s up, man, where’s Devon?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”
Class had just let out, and Anton was sitting on the ground with his back against the wall of windows at the far end of the hallway in Bullis’s North Hall, home to most of the Upper School’s classrooms. He shook his head and looked up at me, disappointed. “He got caught on some shit and had to leave,” he said.
“What happened?” This wasn’t the first time I’d heard of an athlete being suspended or even expelled. Bullis was pretty strict about academic and ethical standards. “Was it his grades?”
“Nah,” he said, “he got caught fucking Kelly in the wrestling room.”
I asked a few other people over the next week or so. They all said it was probably because Devon was failing or had been caught stealing calculators from empty classrooms and the school store to sell at a pawnshop in Rockville. But I wondered if Anton was right. I knew one thing for sure—if Devon had gotten expelled for being caught with Kelly, she hadn’t suffered the same fate. I still saw her around all the time, sometimes hanging out with other guys on the football team.
This made me even more cautious about how I talked to girls at Bullis. I was friends with some white girls. I was friendly with everyone. But I made sure to spend time with them only in public or in a group. I considered what people might have thought if I’d dated a white girl I was interested in or asked her to homecoming. I’m sure many students would hardly think twice about it, but I wasn’t so sure about certain parents and teachers. Despite my interest in girls of different races at Bullis, I never pursued a relationship with any of them. On a few occasions, I’d even been asked to come over to a girl’s house after school to study together or to go to a party she was throwing on the weekend. Though I often wanted to, I always came up with an excuse to say no.
My mom had first taught me about respectability politics—the pressure on blacks to alter their behavior to earn the respect of whites—back when I was at GPA. Years later, her advice on how to carry myself had led me to a book called Righteous Discontent by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. By the time I was a junior at Bullis, I’d read a good bit about respectability politics and what it meant for black people to seek the acceptance and approval of their white counterparts.
I knew that respectability politics was just another way of surviving and resisting the effects of racism. I knew that in the American imagination, fantasy and fascination could envelope the foreign and forbidden. As much as I may have resented it at times, the reality of racism meant that, if I cared about my own success, I had no choice but to seek the approval of whites and care what they thought of me. My mother had drilled into me that, in order to be accepted, I had to neutralize certain fears and anxieties. That meant constantly monitoring how I sounded, how I looked, and especially how I presented myself.
Yet I was also aware of the fact that in the black community, respectability politics was often seen as being at odds with what it meant to be “authentically black.” To me, there was no such thing as being authentically black. Of course, being seen as “authentically white” wasn’t something my white peers had to concern themselves with. By then, I’d been around black people of all types—black athletes, black poets, black academics, and black criminals. Yet I had cousins who’d told me I sounded white when we were little. I’d seen my friends’ parents look surprised when I said that I enjoyed listening to classical music.
No white person at Bullis had to tell me that his or her perceptions of race were shrouded by unacknowledged fear and curiosity. But everything my mom told me and all the things I’d read about race had made me painfully aware of the myths and stereotypes that reduced black people to objects of fear, hatred, curiosity, and desire. My mother’s influence had amplified these things in my mind. So I did my best to steer clear of anything that might confirm someone’s tacit suspicions.
But I was a normal teenage boy who was interested in girls. I had no intention of becoming a monk. One day about halfway through the year, I was at Chipotle on the weekend with a friend when we saw a cute girl of mixed race eating with some friends. My friend dared me to ask for her number, so I approached her, introduced myself, and talked to her for a little while. Her name was Noel. She gave me her number, and I made a point of staying in touch.
Noel was great—beautiful, smart, classy, and sweet. She went to a local high school in Maryland, and I felt I could just be myself when I was with her. We dated off and on for a couple of months. It was never anything serious, but there was always the potential for things to blossom. At least, that’s how I saw it. I liked the idea of talking about deep subjects on the phone and over text, but she was more interested in having fun.
One Friday night, we went to dinner and then went to the library on a whim to see if they had a book I needed for a school project. We ended up hanging out there for a bit, playing around and sneaking up on each other as we picked up different books and then returned them to the shelves. We were on the bottom floor, and the library was about to close, so it was quiet down there. It felt as if we were alone. With the sun going down outside, the stacks were dim.
I glanced at Noel and flashed my eyebrows. She winked back, nibbling on her lip, as her chin rested in her hands, her lower eyelids resembling crescent-shaped curves. Then I turned my back to her as I perused one of the bookshelves. Noel snuck up behind me and started kissing the side of my neck. I turned to face her, and we kissed more deeply. The moment felt right, and, alone in between those stacks on an almost empty floor, I thought it would be my first time. She leaned back against the bookshelf, and I could hear the lilt in her voice as my hand moved up her inner thigh. Her legs pressed against mine as we kissed.
And then I froze, all hope of what was to come now lost in the dark, trying to find its way out into the light. I sighed, feeling I’d lost my window, as if I’d hit a wall or gotten stuck and lost my clarity. Noel hadn’t noticed. Her hands were unbuckling my belt as I began to perspire, wishing the thought of my mother would fade away like some distant apparition that could be ignored or forgotten. I kissed Noel again and told her that I wasn’t sure I was ready. She was cool with it, but things fizzled out between us soon after.
Even then, my mother was like gravity for me, an invisible, heavy weight that pulled me down, no matter how hard I tried to resist it. In my report cards, my teachers referred to me as “the perfect young man” and “a rarity—an intellectual who possesses a poet’s heart and an activist’s passion.” I’d won the Citizenship Award and the Outstanding Service Award at the end of my sophomore year at Bullis for being such a strong and ethical student leader. None of my friends or teachers, and certainly not Noel, had any clue what was going through my mind most of the time. But the truth is that my mom’s impact on me was an obstacle that I worried about more than I ever let on. I resented my mom for this. But I never told anyone how it made me feel.
Soon after, James’s parents invited me to spend the weekend at their bay house in Roanoke, Virginia. It was one of three homes that James’s family had on the East Coast. This one had six bedrooms in the main house, a guesthouse, a pool house, and a six-car garage with basketball and tennis courts on opposite ends of the six-acre property. I was used to visiting the homes of wealthy friends, but this mansion was one of the most luxurious I’d ever seen.
Over dinner outside on their bluestone patio, James’s parents bragged about me to some of their friends. “He’s just the nicest young man; he’s like our adopted son,” James’s mom said. “He’s going to be president one day, I’m telling you. He reads all these books and remembers them all. I don’t know how he reads so many.”
I smil
ed warmly, as everyone around the glass-top aluminum outdoor table looked at me with piqued curiosity. “We should get him to help Anna with her student government speech. He’s a terrific writer.”
“Happy to help whenever I can. You guys are like family,” I said.
“I told him to call me Mom,” James’s mother said affectionately. She paused and smiled at her friends. “Zach is going to go to Harvard, and he’s going to win the Potomac Youth of the Year Award.”
I’d put unreasonably high expectations on myself, and now I struggled under the weight of those intentions. All the while, my ability to cope with everything outside of school felt diminished and near exhausted. I’d pushed through everything for so long without complaint, but a part of me still felt like I’d underachieved, like I hadn’t done enough, like I was living just to prove that I could be of greater value to those around me. That, in some sense, was the only thing that got me up every morning at 4:45 to catch the bus.
One person I felt I could talk to a little bit during this difficult time was my English teacher, Mr. Kinder. He was young—in his late twenties—and felt sort of like an older brother. He gave me his best advice about whatever I asked him. One day I was in Mr. Kinder’s class when Dr. Boarman, the Bullis headmaster, stuck his head into the classroom and gestured for me to come over to him. I got up and walked out into the hallway. Dr. Boarman was standing there with an older, handsome couple.
“Zach, I would like you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Johnson,” he said, and I shook their hands. “I want you to tell them what you think of Bullis,” he told me. “Tell them about the diversity here and how you feel different groups interact with each other. You can be honest,” he said, giving me a friendly pat on the shoulder.
I knew what Dr. Boarman expected me to say, and I didn’t hesitate. He’d pulled me out of class for similar reasons once or twice before, and he did so again later that year. “Bullis is a place where you’ll meet people from a variety of backgrounds,” I said smoothly. “Even more so, it’s not just that diversity exists. I’ve built relationships with peers who do a variety of things, from theater to academic decathlon to football. We have a community where the diversity we have does not create tensions. It creates bonds that are of value to the students.”
Dr. Boarman looked on with a proud smile. “I’ve got to tell you,” he said to the Johnsons, “Zach here memorizes long passages and can quote them at the drop of a hat. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s one of our best and brightest.” The well-groomed couple shook my hand again and told me what a pleasure it had been to meet me, and I went back to class.
Soon after, the administration chose me as one of the students to be profiled and highlighted on the Bullis website. Some of the most prominent students from each grade were featured, and Todd, Hollis, and I were selected to represent our year. For the photo shoot to go along with my profile, I walked down to the Blair Family Center for the Arts. I had my pictures taken and was interviewed about the clubs I was involved in and what I appreciated about Bullis. I was asked again to comment on the school’s diversity.
When the profile went up soon after on the Bullis website, I brought my laptop downstairs so that my grandma could see it on my computer. She had finally retired from her job as a janitor, and her mobility was getting worse. She had to pause on each step whenever she walked upstairs. So whenever possible, we tried to make sure she didn’t have to get up and walk around. In our small, cluttered living room, she leaned against the table for balance as I pulled the profile up on the screen. “Oh, look at you!” she said with a joyful laugh that made me smile.
But even then, I felt I wasn’t living up to my own expectations. Mr. Eist, the learning specialist who ran the student tutoring program, was a visionary who cared deeply about his work, and he wanted to create hundreds of short videos and podcasts for the Bullis website, teaching various topics, from historical concepts to grammatical rules and how to solve quadratic equations. Mr. Eist had seen how good I was at explaining these concepts to the students I tutored, and he asked me to create as many podcasts as I could.
I was drained. I had no more to give. Yet I wanted to be admired, and that meant saying yes even when I wanted to say no. I agreed enthusiastically, despite the fact that I was already spread so thin, and knew that this would be a heavy undertaking.
I was already tutoring up to ten students a week, holding several leadership positions in the school, and maintaining an A average in all AP and honors courses. I’d even given up my study hall that year to take another AP course. I gave up that study hall because I wanted to prove that I could excel with an unusually rigorous course load. But with my commute and personal circumstances, it was a lot to manage, especially given that I always wanted to read more than I had to for most of my classes. I wanted to be prepared for the times in my history and English classes when my teachers would look to me when a student stumped them with a difficult question. “Keep me honest, Zach,” Mr. Kinder once told me before a class discussion about Ralph Waldo Emerson. This kind of recognition meant a lot to me, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to do all that I could to stand and deliver when called upon to do so.
After only a couple of weeks, Mr. Eist stopped me in the hallway. “Dr. Wood”—as he often called me—“how are we doing with the podcasts?” I told him that I’d only been able to make two so far and I didn’t have access to the software at home, so I had to stay at Bullis even later than usual to get them done. “Oh, all right, man,” he said, but I could see the hint of disappointment in his eyes. “When do you think you’ll have time to do more?”
I wanted to help as many people as I could, but I also wanted to help Mr. Eist in particular because his goal wasn’t to sweet-talk wealthy parents into donating money for the school or to priggishly monitor the halls in between classes to reprimand students who were slightly out of uniform. Mr. Eist didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was: a creative learning specialist who was dedicated to improving the academic achievement of his students. To be the student and leader that I wanted to be, I felt that I had to follow through.
At the same time, I wondered what people would think if I stopped making all the extra effort, dropped the facade, and showed everyone how I really felt. Everyone at Bullis knew only the things about me that I wanted them to know, which represented a small sliver of my actual experience. What would happen if that ratio were reversed—if instead of the guy who quoted Plato, held leadership positions, and helped students with their papers, I was nothing more than an average kid from Bellevue?
Ultimately, I had so little in my life to feel good about or look forward to. I didn’t have a big house or even a comfortable house, a family name that meant something, or a guaranteed future by virtue of who my folks were. My mom was a source of pain and conflict. My dad worked hard and loved me, but I couldn’t get ten words out of him when I asked any question with a level of depth. We could talk about sports and sometimes what was on the news, but nothing thoughtful or reflective. No emotion, no weakness, no vulnerability, ever. I knew that was how he dealt with challenges. But what did I have to feel good about? It all stemmed from being hardworking, productive, helpful, and high achieving. That was it.
By the time junior year ended, college visits and applications had become priority number one. Where did we want to go, and what could we do to give ourselves the best chance of getting in? My friends all had family contacts, legacies, and parents who would help them navigate the admissions process. I was on my own, but I was used to that.
I was at James’s house one night over the summer, talking about college. I knew that James wanted to go to Brown. “I know some folks there,” I told James. “I’ll talk to them and see if they have any advice for you about the process.” I had some contacts from various conferences I’d gone to, and this was one way I could help James, a student who already did very well academically on his own.
Earlier in the summer, I’d sent one of Hollis’s poems to Reginald Dwayne Betts, who had stayed in touch with me. Dwayne had become a close mentor. He was someone I could be real with, the only person who knew that there were days when I came home from school and wanted to punch a hole in the wall. Dwayne understood why I felt that way, often without my even having to explain why. But my connection at Brown wasn’t like my connection to Dwayne; it was to a former professor whom I’d met once and didn’t know well enough to ask that kind of favor of.
That night, I was on my way home from James’s house waiting for the bus at Anacostia. It was dark and humid outside. I was leaning against the advertisement on the bus bay, reading an article on my phone. There were people around, waiting at various spots along the bus terminal, but not too many. Though I was looking at my phone, I was vigilant. Always listening, glancing up often to survey my surroundings.
Behind me was a group of guys I’d seen before but never interacted with. The four of them were always together, usually chilling in the lot behind the newspaper stands. But that day they were wildin’ out. They looked a few years older than me. All with tattoos, chains, and one with dreads. I’d overheard enough of their conversation to glean that he was the kingpin.
“Aye, look at that nigga with the backpack young, ha-ha, he look like what’s his name, uh,” I heard one of them say behind me, to the right.
“Ha-ha-ha! Nah, Bob, hold up. I seen this li’l nigga before. This the nigga who told twelve I was moving bricks. Had them patting me down and shit. Li’l bitch-ass nigga about to get clapped quick.”
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