I loved any subject that involved writing and labored through precalc. I was
a half-decent French student. I had peers who were always a step or two ahead of
me, whose achievements seemed effortless, but I tried not to let that get to me. I
was beginning to understand that if I put in extra hours of studying, I could often
close the gap. I wasn’t a straight-A student, but I was always trying, and there
were semesters when I got close.
Craig, meanwhile, had enrolled at Princeton University, vacating his back-
porch room on Euclid Avenue, leaving a six-foot-six, two-hundred-pound gap in
our daily lives. Our fridge was considerably less loaded with meat and milk, the
phone line no longer tied up by girls calling to chat him up. He’d been recruited
by big universities offering scholarships and what amounted to a celebrity
existence playing basketball, but with my parents’ encouragement he’d chosen
Princeton, which cost more but, as they saw it, promised more as well. My father
burst with pride when Craig became a starter as a sophomore on Princeton’s
basketball team. Wobbly on his feet and using two canes to walk, he still relished
a long drive. He’d traded in his old Buick for a new Buick, another 225, this one
a shimmering deep maroon. When he could get the time off from his job at the
filtration plant, he’d drive twelve hours across Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and
New Jersey to catch one of Craig’s games.
By nature of my long commute to Whitney Young, I saw less of my
parents, and looking back at it, I’d guess that it was a lonely time for them, or at
least required some adjustment. I was now gone more than I was home. Tired of
standing through the ninety-minute bus ride to school, Terri Johnson and I had
figured out a kind of trick, which involved leaving our houses fifteen minutes
earlier in the morning and catching a bus that was headed in the opposite
direction from school. We rode a few stops south to a less busy neighborhood,
then jumped out, crossed the street, and hailed our regular northbound bus,
which was reliably emptier than it would be at Seventy-Fifth, where we normally
boarded. Pleased by our own cleverness, we’d smugly claim a seat and then talk
or study the whole way to school.
In the evenings, I dragged myself back through the door around six or seven
o’clock, in time for a quick dinner and a chance to talk to my parents about
whatever had gone on that day. But once the dishes had been washed, I
disappeared into homework, often taking my books downstairs to the
encyclopedia nook off the stairwell next to Robbie and Terry’s apartment for
privacy and quiet.