When Rashid got in, there was no party, no tears, and if there was an announcement at church, he wasn’t there to hear it. The kids who had always hissed at Kofi, “Think you white, huh?” now hissed it at Rashid, if they spoke to him at all. Ms. Havens was happy—she had always been on his side. She gave him a big hug when he showed her the letter and said nothing about Kofi. The look they shared said it all. But she was the only one. When the time came to go, Rashid’s primary emotion was relief. Scared as he was to go, it had to be better than home.

Chelsea was a foreign country—and even though Rashid had signed up for the trip, it was a shock. The grass everywhere. The barn—a barn! With cows! At his interview, when he’d asked about it, they’d explained that they had this class in Animal Husbandry, but when he arrived for the first day of school, he still couldn’t believe it. He had never even thought of cows as real before. Just images on a carton of milk or something he saw at the children’s zoo.

At first Rashid was a little nervous, having so much space around him, so green and open and quiet. He thought of how the kids from his junior high used to ride on the subway, loud and defiant, taking up as much room as they could. As if being loud enough would allow them to take what the world didn’t want to give them. But these boys didn’t need that. The world was just waiting to give them whatever they wanted. They didn’t have to struggle or yell for it. It would be presented soon enough. So they weren’t quiet, exactly. But their raucousness didn’t have the same fear in it. Nothing to be scared of, really.

They were, of course, almost all white. White people were everywhere, hair flopping in their eyes, that faint wet-dog smell. At the first assembly, Rashid found himself scanning the crowd for faces like his own. He found only a few—twenty, maybe—out of the whole school. This wasn’t a surprise, really, but now that it was his life, he found himself uneasy. There was one black teacher on the stage with the rest of them, welcoming the incoming freshmen. He looked almost as uncomfortable as Rashid felt. He was older—maybe fifty or so—with dark African-looking skin, black horn-rimmed glasses, and very short, neatly cut hair—what was left of it. His skin looked polished. He wore a tweed jacket and a bow tie. Rashid leaned over to the guy next to him and whispered, “Who’s the black guy up there? The teacher?” He felt a little funny putting it that bluntly, but his race was what made the man stand out.