vocate for all Native Americans. I think other
people sometimes stress that on me,” he said.
But “being aware of my grandma’s story helps
me get through hard situations.”
We moved on to the universe. Jeffrey men-
tioned that Lakota people believe they come
from the stars, and that scientists discovered
that within their life span, stars create all the
elements in the periodic table. “It’s cool to
start seeing all these parallels,” he said. Talk
turned to black holes. “Black holes have this
thing called the event horizon. As light falls
in, if it passes the event horizon, even light
moving at the speed of light will not be able
to be fast enough to escape the black hole. It
swallows up the light.” I can’t say that I un-
derstood what he was talking about, or rath-
er I was hearing something else, from some
layer beneath Jeffrey’s understanding of the
cosmos, a metaphor about escape and light
and darkness; about gravity and the speed we
must reach to not fall in, just to stay afloat.
I asked Jeffrey what he thought about the
idea of the American dream. Maybe it was the
apple pie. “I think it’s very much a dream,”
he said. “It’s definitely not equal for every-
body, for how much they have to work to get
it. It’s complicated.” Nothing about being Na-
tive American is simple. Nor is there a Native
American dream. Just dream catchers that
hang from people’s rearview mirrors, as if ac-
knowledging there’s something we need to see
behind us. Jeffrey’s understanding of his own
life, its context, is astonishing to me. Some-
times there isn’t much more to say than: It’s
complicated. When I was his age, I existed
somewhere between obliviousness and obliv-
ion. I don’t remember having a single conver-
sation with anyone about going to college. I
wasn’t even thinking then of what it might
take to better myself, to achieve anything like
a dream. Jeffrey and I have lived very different
lives, but our shared sense of experience felt
closer to me that afternoon in Fentons. Cook-
ie-dough ice cream and apple pie are surpris-
ingly good together, but neither of us finished.THE NEXT DAY, Jeffrey and I
headed to the train tracks near Jack London
Square. Jeffrey loves trains. He has since he
was very young. One of his favorite movies
is The Polar Express, starring Oakland’s
very own Tom Hanks. He, Martha, and Geri
watch it every Christmas. He likes the gears,
and studying the moving parts. That’s how
he broke his toy Polar Express train when
he was a boy, and how he fixed it. “It had
the remote control that I’d turn all the way
up, and I’d control the speed with my hand,
which overheated the engine and it broke.
I think the final straw was when my mom
came home and the whole room was filled
with smoke. She was like, ‘You’re gonna
suffocate Grandma!’ ’cause she was sitting in
the living room, too. She was like, ‘Turn it off.’
And I was like, ‘Fine.’ It never turned back
on. Recently, I took the bottom part off andremoved a gear that locked it, then put it back
together, so now it moves. And I was like, ‘If
only I knew how to do this when I was five!’ ”
The trains, and their blaring horns, lost their
charm on me pretty fast, but Jeffrey kept saying
things like “I like the vibrating” and “I could
go to sleep to these sounds.” So we talked for
a while alongside the tracks, pausing to plug
our ears each time a train passed.
We discussed college. Jeffrey wants to go
to Caltech. This year, he’s taking both honors
calculus and honors statistics, because he re-
searched which classes would be good to pur-
sue astrophysics. Still, he’s nervous to leave.
“I have severe homesickness. And this recent
full moon has, like, been bringing out my emo-
tions,” he told me. “And I’ve been like thinking
about college, and having to go away from my
friends and the people who have supported me
throughout all these sort of hard transitions.
And beginning that college-application pro-
cess, and I think of having to move away and
split paths. We’ll still keep in touch, obvious-
ly, but there’s still that physical-distance barri-
er. That sometimes scares me.” At some point,
the topic of his college-application essay came
up. I wondered about his approach—how
much he planned to write about overcoming
hardship regarding his adoption, and to write
about being Native American, what it means to
him—knowing it could help him get in where
he wants. He’s aware of the commonly held be-
lief that minorities get special consideration on
college applications, and that the minority ofP. 101