out Daquan’s friends. “They told me Daquan was so glad I was home,” he said. George then got up and told me he had somewhere to be.
Chapter 15
I Ain’t Going Nowhere, part two
AUGUST 20…AUGUST 21…AUGUST 22…
Dressed in loose-fitting gray sweatpants and sweatshirt, Anita Stewart, the Harper High School social worker, pulls up in front of Thomas’s house midafternoon. The mechanical lift in front and the NO TRESPASSING sign affixed to the beige siding mark the location. Earlier in the summer she had learned that because of budget cuts at the Chicago public schools, she wouldn’t be returning to Harper. The school would have to make do with one social worker. She hadn’t broken the news to Thomas yet. She told me that she worried how he’d respond, but in truth I think she was also worried how she’d hold up, worried that she might break down.
Thomas’s mother, who floats in and out of his life, stands on the front porch, her arms across her chest to keep warm in the unseasonably chilly air. Anita explains why she’s there. “It’s going to break his heart,” Thomas’s mother muses. “You’ve come a long way with him.” Anita smiles. It feels good that Thomas’s mother appreciates her efforts. The front door opens and Thomas emerges, dressed in an oversized sweatshirt that reads “Lincoln U Township,” his long hair pulled back into a ponytail. He seems groggy, as if he’s recently awoken, though he has actually just returned from a day of summer school classes.
“What’s up, Thomas? You didn’t get none of my texts? Did you finish your Spanish class? Where’s your paper?” Anita can’t help herself. She’s on him from the get-go, desperately wanting to see him graduate.
“I don’t know what I did with it,” Thomas says, not so much apologizing as matter-of-factly explaining the situation.
“You don’t know what you did with it? You got to keep it. That’s proof you took it. What you been doing?”
“Nothing,” Thomas replies, as he picks at his fingernails.
“So what do you think this year’s going to look like, Thomas?” Anita asks, trying to ease into the news. She has a habit of invoking his name when she wants his attention. “You remember, Thomas, when they were talking about all those budget cuts and not having the money for certain positions?”
“Yeah.”
“They didn’t have the money to fund my position. So when you step in there, there won’t be a bunch of old faces. I won’t be there.” Thomas pulls the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his hands. “But Crystal will.”
“Y’all got to find new jobs?” For all of Thomas’s frostiness, he can be empathetic. Anita thinks to herself, Here I am worried about him—and he’s worried about me.
“I found a new job, at an elementary school. What exactly does that mean for you? That doesn’t mean you’re not going to be going to class. That doesn’t mean you won’t graduate. I’ll be over there to see you. It means you go to school and do what you got to do to get out. It means you got to listen to whoever the social worker is. Thomas?”
“Yeah.” Thomas pulls his sweatshirt up over the bottom half of his face. He’s finding distance, drifting, like flotsam at sea. Anita senses it and tries to pull him back in.
“You think you could find that paper for me?”
Thomas shakes his head. “I got a C.”
“You got to find that paper.”
Thomas has a knack of changing direction to deflect what he perceives as disapproval, and so he quickly shifts the conversation to a subject that will undoubtedly elicit sympathy from Anita, about the boy who allegedly shot and killed Shakaki. It’s been on his mind because of the pressure being applied on him to testify.
“We was looking Monkey Man up online. They shipped him to County,” he said, referring to the jail.
“I don’t think he likes to be called Monkey Man,” Anita says.
“That’s his name,” Thomas asserts.
A scraggly middle-aged man with an unkempt beard and jeans hanging off his hips staggers down the middle of the street, talking to himself, and he notices Thomas on the porch. “What’s up?” he hollers, giving Thomas a thumbs-up before returning to the conversation he was having with himself.
“I like that,” Anita says to Thomas. “He says ‘What’s up?’ and then gets back to talking to his own people. I think that’s pretty good.” She gets a laugh out of Thomas. She tells him to keep texting, that just because she isn’t at Harper