First Semester Read Free

Sometimes, Keisha would come with me. At that point, I was doing any and everything to keep my mind off the fact that one of my boys had recently died in my arms. I’d had so many nightmares about it that sometimes just going to sleep seemed like torture.
    Though I had trouble sleeping, just being around Todd made things a whole lot easier for me. That’s why he was my best friend. He was the only one who stayed in the basement with me until the paramedics arrived. Todd always found a way to keep his cool, even though he was going through the same strife. He grew up in the hood like everyone else, but Todd was the one everybody expected to make it out. When he wasn’t catching touchdown passes for our high school football team, he was making speeches as class president. He was even voted homecoming king. He kicked it with the rest of us on weekends, but somehow always managed to get his homework done. I was tight with a lot of guys in the hood, but none were closer to me than Todd. Although I never said it, at times I looked up to him.
    In Oakland, we were inseparable. Wherever I went, Todd wasn’t far behind, and vice versa. We did everything together—hit up parties, played basketball, went to the movies. Hell, our senior year, we even opened our mail together. And everybody knows that there’s no better feeling than opening your own mail as a high school senior. But sometimes, opening my mail over at Todd’s crib was a catch-22. Although I loved to see him get accepted to virtually every school he applied to, most of the time the letters I received from colleges were rejection letters. Of the six schools I’d applied to, I’d received letters from five of them. All of them started off the same way: “Mr. Dawson, we have reviewed your application. This year, we had an overwhelming number of qualified applicants. Unfortunately, we were unable to accept you into our institution.”
    I never really read further than that. The first couple of times I read the letters, I could barely swallow. I hated rejection. The only school I hadn’t heard from was University of Atlanta. Everyone kept telling me not to worry about getting in, because it was a black college, and they let everybody in. I knew that wasn’t true, because Todd had just gotten rejected from Boward a week ago—and he had a 3.2 grade point average. The digits in my GPA were the same, just the other way around. So, as far as I was concerned, that notion about historically black colleges and universities accepting everybody was for the birds.
    I told people I didn’t care if I got in or not, but I did. I wanted to see the girls in Atlanta that everybody kept talking about, and see the city that hosted Freaknik, which I’d heard so many stories about. I wanted to check out some of the bands I’d seen on the movie Drumline, and go to some of those parties I’d seen on all those Girls Gone Wild commercials. But most of all, I knew that if I stayed I would just end up chillin’ on the block smoking weed all day with my homies, and working a dead-end job. I would probably start off at a community college, but end up in jail with the rest of the O.G.s from the hood. Or worse, six feet deep like some of my boys I played ball with who never made it to our senior prom. I had come to terms with the possibility of staying in the hood, but I wanted out.
    If anybody knew how bad I wanted to get out of Oakland, it was Todd. After a while, he could see that I was annoyed by the whole mail-opening ritual we’d started, so once he decided Crampton was the school for him, he stopped opening letters from other colleges. Instead, he just balled them up and tossed them in the trash, without even looking to see if he’d been accepted. I’d always go dig the letters out of the trash and read them out loud anyway. He always got in. Keisha usually changed the subject to lighten the mood.
    â€œSo, you guys