He couldn’t believe how much he didn’t know. At Banneker, he’d done all right—had good enough grades to get on the honor roll and won the praise of his teachers. But now—it seemed as though he’d learned almost nothing. In history class the other day, there was this huge discussion of the discovery of America—did Christopher Columbus find it or not, and what changes did that bring about—and he didn’t know one single name of any of the other explorers. Vasco da something. Magellan. He’d just been taught about Columbus from the old, falling-apart history books they had at school. It was like that with everything. Jokes he didn’t get because he didn’t know who some snowboarder was. Seeing a picture of this bearded German guy, Freud, and being the only one who didn’t recognize him. It was all making him so tired. It seemed he would never get enough sleep again.

After Mr. Fox’s speech, a student had to give a chapel talk. Rashid generally perked up for these, mostly because next semester he was going to have to do one. All of the freshmen would. What you had to do was pick a topic that you found interesting and do research and then get up and talk about whatever it was for ten minutes in front of the whole school. Rashid supposed it had to do with that “man among men” stuff they were always talking about.

At 9:00, after chapel, classes started. The movement of these boys through the hallways was very different from what Rashid was used to. Back when he was at Banneker, class-changing time was a study in barely controlled chaos. Security guards watched closely as the kids walked, tumbled, and ran through the halls. Sometimes a phalanx of them surrounded two fighting students, but more often they just stood stern watch, making sure nothing happened. The assumption was that the kids couldn’t be trusted. Some lived up to that assumption; others tried to duck it, act like they didn’t know it was there; some, like Rashid, spent an inordinate amount of time pushing against it, trying to show that they were different and not get beat up or teased or ranked on for it. In any event, it always seemed as though a disaster had been narrowly avoided by the time everybody got to class.