Cross-country was a little better—mostly because he was really good at it. He relished the speed of it, the few moments when he wasn’t thinking, only using his body—but he wished he wasn’t laboring so under the weight of what Mr. Sasser and Mr. Washington wanted. He had always liked to run—the wind against his face, the pound pound pound of his feet. But back home there was always a stoplight or a missing manhole cover or nowhere to go. Banneker sure didn’t have a team. So he never thought of running as a thing you could do. When he first went out for the team here, he thought he was going to fall out on that first day. He could hardly breathe after the first half mile. But they kept telling him he was good. And he started passing people in practice all the time. The first meet was in a couple of days. He was nervous. Everyone would be watching him.

He worked hard on his Latin assignments, and sometimes he had moments where he actually found himself enjoying the effort of translating, turning one set of words into another; but his papers always came back covered with a sea of red marks and comments like “Try harder, Mr. Bryson” and “Are you sure about this?” Of course he wasn’t sure—he didn’t know Latin. But it seemed to him that a supposed brother could have made more of an effort to help him out. He was trying. And Washington wasn’t helping him a damn bit. He started to sit in class with his feet planted apart, ready for a fight, the way some of the guys back at Banneker always sat.

The other thing that was getting to him was that Washington was very slow to call on him in class. At first Rashid thought he might be imagining it, but after a while he decided to truly put it to the test. He raised his hand every time a question was asked, whether he knew the answer or not. But Washington did not call on Rashid one time. He’d even call on known dummies like Jack Carlson and Todd Rich, who received brisk corrections after their inevitable wrong answers. Rashid would have been wrong on one thing, but he knew some of that other stuff. He knew it. But Washington seemed determined to call only on white boys. What was up with that?

He went up to Washington’s desk after class. The man was standing there whistling through his teeth as he gathered up his papers. It sounded as though it might be that old Temptations song, “My Girl.” Rashid’s heart was pounding, but the fury he carried with him now made his voice even and calm.

“Mr. Washington, can I talk to you for a minute?” he said. He was tall enough to look straight into the older man’s eyes.