The Better Half(8)

Jai,

Courtney

This has to be a head of school record, I think to myself as I rest my forehead on my keyboard, chin dangling off the desk. The cool of the space bar soothes my skin. My left hand feels around for the wastebasket under my desk. Located, I draw it directly into my sight line. I might need it before my first board of trustees meeting in ninety minutes and counting. You would think I’d have an ironclad immune system after twenty years working with teenagers, but damn if I didn’t make a rookie mistake last week by shaking hands with every incoming middle school student on the first day of orientation. Germy tweens. I couldn’t help myself, though. I love this age of firsts—first pimple, first pube, first period. I’ve always been partial to kids who are old enough to pack their own lunch and can write a solid five-paragraph essay.

Without looking up, I use my right hand to search the desktop for my cell phone. I can text for reinforcements without moving my head.

Nina 4:26 PM

Sol, happy first day of school. I’m sick.

I can’t believe I had to start my first day of school at the helm sick. From 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. I duct-taped myself together with iron will and desperation and feigned great excitement for the fresh start that every school year brings. I think I sold my fake enthusiasm well. Since 4:22 p.m., though, I’ve been sequestered in my office staring down the barrel of a metal trash can. My whole career, hell my whole childhood, has been leading to this exact day, and all I have to show for it is a growing fever and nausea. Maybe I’m lovesick.

My brother, Clive, is two years older than me, and the morning my mother, my father, and I took him to his first day of kindergarten was one of the worst days of my life. I still remember it clearly because when I was a kid, my father only took a handful of days off work, and two of them were for my brother’s first day of school and for mine. I thought my mother had borrowed the itchy plaid wool dress I wore that day so I, too, could go to school. After all, I matched Clive’s crisp white button-down, blue V-neck sweater, and miniature tie my parents made him wear despite the eighty-degree weather. Turns out there’s no such thing as a summer and winter uniform when your immigrant parents are busting their behinds to make ends meet. Clive and I simply wore my mother’s version of dressing on a dime.

At the new kindergarten family coffee on Clive’s first day of school, my parents stood in the corner of the classroom, also dressed in their Sunday best. The way they tell it, the year before they had been in church when a handsome young man, fresh from his graduation from Princeton and brimming with potential, was invited to the pulpit to speak. He was just like us, from Queens with working-class parents from Jamaica who also had big plans for their children’s futures. When he spoke, my mother took notes on the back of a grocery list she had fished out of her pocketbook. In large block letters, underlined, she wrote down COLLEGIATE SCHOOL. From that day on, in her mind, there was no other education option for Clive. My folks had no clue how difficult it was for the privileged sons of New York to get into Collegiate, and even less of an idea who Clive was competing against. Mom just believed she wanted it more than any other mother out there. Getting her son into a good school was nothing compared to her efforts to get herself and my father into America.

That first day of school, Mom and Dad were more relieved to have found a path for their son into such a storied institution than intimidated by the foreign culture of New York’s Upper West Side. Clive was the one stuck in it for the next thirteen years. In the brief time they had been in America, my parents felt luck had been on their side. They applied my brother to private school with that same optimism, never considering Clive might not fit in or excel. In our home there was one thing my immigrant parents were convinced of: that their children were capable of high achievement.

The ancient director of admissions had reluctantly shared during an early tour of Collegiate that the board of trustees was encouraging a little more color in the school’s sea of white. Naturally, our parents threw Clive right into the deep. Clive was the only brown-skinned boy in his kindergarten class. Even with best intentions at play in the early eighties, schools across the country had yet to figure out that perhaps their lone Black student might need a few peers to pal around with and maybe an adult or two to have his back on campus.

At the time, I don’t think my parents were worried about Clive and his lack of familiar playmates. For a couple of Jamaicans who only had the opportunity to complete their primary education, they believed they had managed the American dream successfully. The childhood Clive and I had, compared to how our parents grew up, made it difficult for them to sympathize with the challenges of race and poverty in America. They figured the hopes they had for their son were sure to come true if Clive worked as hard as they did.

While my folks dreamed of Clive’s future life as an engineer or doctor, I, too, felt like I was in a dream. When my brother ran off to join some other boys on the playfield, unimpressed with any academic offerings indoors, I walked around the classroom touching every pencil, running my fingers along the spine of every book on the low shelves, deciding my favorite color on the circle rug where I would sit when the teacher rang the bell.

When it was time for families to leave, the expectation was that a few skittish students would melt down. The teacher was experienced at tactics to overcome separation anxiety and stood at the ready for attempted escapees who sprinted after their parents. What no one expected—particularly my parents, for whom appearance and propriety were everything—was the little sister, me, becoming an unmovable force because I did not get to stay. When I realized the purpose of my dress was so I would look presentable dropping my brother off and that the three of us were leaving, I was inconsolable.