was Tracie and me in Friendship, the worst school ever. Looking back on my time at Friendship now, as a grown woman who put her child through a patchwork of private schools that she handpicked based on how they fit her son’s learning style, I can honestly say, “Whoa, that shit was kinda fucked-up.” They didn’t care about us kids. It was as if they were setting us up to fail. All too many of the teachers were giving a halfhearted effort, the curriculum was substandard, there was no money for books and supplies, noise from the classes spilled over into each other because of the ridiculous design, and no one could get a handle on the student body, half of whom came from homes where crack cocaine had devastated their families. These kids had issues: parents who were addicts, siblings who, caught up in the drug game, were either experiencing or committing violence or being sent to prison for dealing. They were exhausted on both a physical and mental level. Kids were coming to school hungry, confused, angry. Shit was real for them. And they brought all of that to the makeshift classrooms at our school. Honestly, looking back, it resembled juvie hall. Thank goodness I never experienced that for real, but this seemed close to it.
Tracie and I survived it, though, because we were different—we had mothers who held down jobs and worked tirelessly to keep the madness of DC’s crack epidemic from crossing our thresholds, and Tracie was lucky, too, to have her father at home. Stability at home translated into the two of us excelling in class (I even made the honor roll), diving headfirst into extracurricular activities like the pom-pom team (Tracie and I were cocaptains), and being noticed by the few teachers who cared about us kids—teachers who could identify and nurture our passions. It also opened the door for both Tracie and me to pursue our passion for acting, even in a school that fell far short in programming that appealed to that particular desire. One teacher in particular, Mrs. Hawkins, saw enough good in Tracie and me that she recruited us to star in a junior high performance of Macbeth as part of a competition in a local Shakespeare festival. We played the witches and so thoroughly slayed our performances that we won an award for it—a huge deal considering our school wasn’t known for its dramatic pursuits. The recognition, and Mrs. Hawkins’s belief in us, only pushed Tracie and me to hunt for more opportunities to show off and show out. One summer, I even put all that dancing I’d done in front of the mirror back at my grandmother’s house in North Carolina to good use: Tracie and I performed DeBarge’s hit single “I Like It” in the school fashion show, and I hit that high note El DeBarge rides the song out on like there was nobody else watching—like the world consisted of only me, the stage, and that microphone. We killed it, and we were thirsty for more.
So good were our grades and our extracurricular accomplishments that by the end of eighth grade, both Tracie and I were invited to the math and science program for advanced students, a curriculum that would take us out of that godawful junior high school and place us in a specialized series of courses at our local high school. It turns out, though, I wasn’t ready for the transition. Maybe I was too young to be around all those high school students, or perhaps it was simply developmentally appropriate for me to act the donkey at that age, but when I got to Ballou High School, I was the good girl gone bad. I laid all my nerdy ways to the wayside, dumbed myself down, stepped away from acting, and quickly established myself as the class clown. I was still creative, but now it was in much more distracting, destructive ways, which helped me fit in with the rest of the student body at Ballou, a school in which a creative child like me did not belong. One teacher, Mrs. Esther, kept me from going off the deep end. She could have easily failed me in her English class, but instead, she’d laugh at my disruptive ways and embrace all my drama. Even when my mother sat in front of her in those little chairs for the parent-teacher conferences, Mrs. Esther had my back. That first meeting, I was sitting wide-eyed and