TWENTY-EIGHT
Save me! pleads Roan’s face. Damn, I have to haul myself up out of this chair and once and for all set Winn and Jared straight, publicly. I have limited time left to leave a lasting leadership impression, so it’s now or never. My water didn’t break with Xandra, so I cross my legs and hope this baby is not planning a slip-and-slide entrance into the world. I hold my breath during a contraction and slowly rise.
“The specifics of acceptances are confidential until each family has been informed of their status. Emails will be released to all families directly following this meeting.” I sweep my eyes around the room to make sure every board member is picking up what I’m putting down: the policy is acceptances to Royal-Hawkins are none of the trustees’ business. “And even after that, it’s up to each family to share their outcome or not. Roan and I do not share this information,” I conclude, forcing eye contact with Winn, then Jared, and lastly catching Courtney’s darting eyes. Her skin’s gone from a gray pallor to ghostly white and shiny with sweat. Is she sensing what’s going on with me and sympathy stressing, or is she losing it over not getting her way with the Royal-Hawkins athletics department?
“I only want to know about two students who will make a significant impact on the school. I don’t think that’s asking too much,” Winn insists, his strained calm giving way to heightened irritation.
“And what impact might that be, Winn?” I ask point-blank. I want to force Winn’s ego to reveal to the entire board what he’s been up to the past couple of months.
“Nina, it’s no skin off your back to admit these boys into the school for a couple of years, particularly at my asking. As well, I don’t think anyone here needs a reminder that I’m the only Hawkins in the room. There would be no school, there would be no you,” Winn growls at me, “without me and my family.” In mansplaining the school history that I’m intimately familiar with, Winn has managed to evade my question. “At the end of junior year, if Dontrelle and Marcus aren’t cutting it in school, we’ll send them back to their local high school, so their GPAs don’t ruin the class average, nor does their academic performance screw with our top-tier college acceptances. With my plan, for the first time ever, Royal-Hawkins will become an athletic powerhouse with zero impact on our excellent college acceptance rate.”
I don’t acknowledge Winn Hawkins’s unimaginable words of Olympic-level privilege. While Winn’s leaning back in his chair, wholly satisfied with his strategy to turn Royal-Hawkins into a sports mecca and trash Dontrelle’s and Marcus’s lives, I lean forward to grab Jared’s attention. As the only two Black people in the room, I know his blood’s boiling as furiously as mine. I also know there’s no way Jared knew this was Winn’s plan for the twins and went along with it. This is where, our history aside, the brotha and sista in the room will come out swinging. I arch my right eyebrow at Jared to say, Are you taking down this clown, or am I? Jared points at himself to signal he’s got this.
I lob Jared an easy question so he can engage his Harvard-educated smooth-talking skills and put Winn in his place. “Jared, what do you think of Winn’s plan for Dontrelle and Marcus Burns?” I barely get Burns out before another contraction wallops me. I grip the edge of the table and slow moan with my lips sealed shut to not give myself away. To my best guess the contractions are now about eight minutes apart, but they’re growing longer and harder to mask. I have about two more contractions in me, three max, before I’m going to be doubled over in pain.
“Winn’s plan is how I got to Harvard. I gave him the idea,” Jared shares with the room, rubbing his hands together and revving up to tell a riveting tale.
I’m sure I heard Jared wrong, as his answer came in the middle of a contraction. Active listening and unimaginable pain do not go hand in hand.
“Can you repeat that, Jared?” I’m back to a clear head and slower breathing so I can concentrate on his every word.
“The plan for Dontrelle and Marcus was mine. It worked for me exactly ten years ago.”
WOW. So, I did hear correctly.
“A kid in my youth basketball league, his parents applied him to Chester Hill Academy. I had never heard of it, but his dad was an alumnus of the school, a huge donor, still is in fact, and he wanted me to come coach there when I graduated from Harvard. I knew I wanted to be here, though,” Jared reassures, so his board and his boss don’t think he’s defecting.
“Anyway, this kid’s dad told the Chester Hill basketball coach about me, and BOOM I was in.” Jared has the rapt attention of every Royal-Hawkins board member, including me. “Of course, I went. My local high school was rough, and my parents wanted me out by any means possible.” All parental heads around the room bob up and down in agreement.
“At Chester Hill, I had to study HARD to even hang in the lower middle of the class, but people helped me out because I was bringing in the wins on the basketball court. Eventually, I learned how to study right and began to take pride in myself as a student.”
I think about my email to Carmel in my draft box. Is Jared’s story rocking my conviction?
“Chester Hill prided itself on being an Ivy feeder school. When the boys in my class talked about college, they might as well have been speaking another language. I had never heard of most of the schools. But I had heard of Harvard, and after three years of seeing how the boys in my class lived, Harvard was where I knew I wanted to go. It was clear there was no way I could compete with the two dozen or so in my class who would be applying there. The school knew it, too, and they didn’t want to mess with their acceptance stats, so at the end of my junior year they kicked me out on some sort of trumped-up academic explanation, and I went back to my local high school.”
I can’t believe that during Jared’s interview process, and through his first year of teaching, I never heard this story. “You must have been devastated, Jared. Your parents, too,” I react. This kind of heartbreak is exactly what I do not want our school to be responsible for heaping on the Burns family doorstep in three years. I notice Courtney perched on the edge of her chair, staring wildly at Winn, veins popping out of her neck. From the looks of her, I suspect this plan wasn’t shared before she made her sizable contribution. Now, more than ever, I’m pleased I was judicious and did not cash in on Courtney’s generosity.
“Nah, I wasn’t devastated. Since I couldn’t compete with the kids at Chester to get into Harvard, I figured I might have a shot from my local high school. Before me no one had gone to Harvard from there, ever. In my neighborhood school, I was an exceptional student and had no competition. Elite colleges love plucking kids of color out of what they think are ‘difficult situations.’ They think they have discovered diamonds in the rough. Only thing is, the joke was on Harvard—I didn’t have a difficult situation. I had a great family, grew up in a neighborhood I loved, got a topnotch education for three years at Chester Hill, and won a string of basketball championships. The math program at Chester Hill taught me how to play the numbers game, and that’s exactly what I did to get myself into Harvard. Graduating from my local high school was the right gamble, one that clearly paid off because it all worked out for me in the end. I’m living proof it could work out the same for Dontrelle and Marcus.” Jared bangs the table with his fists, marking the end of his education journey. Winn gives Jared a hearty man slap to his back in joint victory.