Read Online A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ron Suskind
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hating that she erupted, wondering how Jesus might help her with her anger, wondering where it springs from. For now, though, she flips the channels fast, barely able to make sense of the flashing pictures.
3
RISE and SHINE
T he sun rises at 6:12 A.M. on a March morning a few days before the start of spring. In the dewy dawn mist, a shadowy figure descends the crumbling concrete stairs outside 1635 V Street, two steps at a time.
Cedric Jennings has been sleeping fitfully for the past few weeks, waking up briefly to check his digital clock at 4 A.M. , then 5 A.M. , and finally at 5:30. That’s when he bounds into the shower. By 6, he’s dressed.
A few nights ago, Barbara told him that she thought he was losing his mind getting up at such crazy hours, and he just laughed. There’s nothing he needs to talk to her about. It just feels better to get up, head to school, and start working. At least then he’s not just sitting around worrying about MIT, or his all-important junior year grades, or the upcoming SATs, or some fuzzy notion of his future. He’s actually doing something about it.
Yesterday after school he tried to explain this swelling anxiety and his desire to meet it head on. “It’s like I’m at this crossroads,” he told Mr. Taylor once he was convinced that a few other kids milling around the chemistry class weren’t listening. “Like it’s going to happen now or it’s not, like I’m gonna either make it or crash.”
Mr. Taylor looked at him nervously.
“It’s not like I’m planning to do anything—it’s just a feeling,” Cedric said, exasperated. “Oh, whatever.”
This morning, as he cuts across the apartment building’s moist front lawn and skips onto the street, he thinks about that conversation with Taylor. He decides it’s better not to talk about this sense of urgencywith anyone. No one understands that this is the crucial moment for a show of academic force, a display of pure will. He feels himself getting riled up. Now is the time!
When he first started waking in the darkness at the beginning of March, he discovered that sunrise is the best time to pump himself up like this. Marching through the eerie silence of V Street, cutting through the long shadows and wedges of morning sunlight, he feels heroic.
He hits the corner of 16th and V—as always, open for business.
“What’s up?” Cedric barks. The drug dealers—one guy in his late teens, the other in his thirties—shake their heads and kind of chuckle. They see him every morning. He usually just hurries by.
“He sure is ‘all that’ today,” one of them says to the other, plenty loud, so that Cedric nods an acknowledgment as he passes.
At 7:15, the only sounds echoing down the first-floor hallway of Ballou are those of the tapping keys from the computer lab, where Cedric is already at work.
Later this morning, he will work on his school science fair project, an assessment of the growth rates of hydroponic plants. He plans to research another science experiment—a chemical analysis of acid rain on monuments—after school, to be entered in a citywide science fair competition sponsored in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last year, he won third prize for a project on asbestos hazards.
With his whole day mapped out, Cedric leans into the computer like it’s a bobsled.
“You sure are making me get here early these days,” says Mr. Govan from across the room. He runs the computer lab and opens it up before classes begin, mostly for Cedric.
“It’s the only way I’ll be able to compete with kids from other, harder schools,” says Cedric, defining a block of text from one screen and moving it to another. “I mean, what choice do I really have?”
This is Cedric’s standard line—he’s been saying it as a sort of half-apology since he arrived in ninth grade and realized that with so little work being done during class time, extra-credit projects would be crucial to learning anything.
3
RISE and SHINE
T he sun rises at 6:12 A.M. on a March morning a few days before the start of spring. In the dewy dawn mist, a shadowy figure descends the crumbling concrete stairs outside 1635 V Street, two steps at a time.
Cedric Jennings has been sleeping fitfully for the past few weeks, waking up briefly to check his digital clock at 4 A.M. , then 5 A.M. , and finally at 5:30. That’s when he bounds into the shower. By 6, he’s dressed.
A few nights ago, Barbara told him that she thought he was losing his mind getting up at such crazy hours, and he just laughed. There’s nothing he needs to talk to her about. It just feels better to get up, head to school, and start working. At least then he’s not just sitting around worrying about MIT, or his all-important junior year grades, or the upcoming SATs, or some fuzzy notion of his future. He’s actually doing something about it.
Yesterday after school he tried to explain this swelling anxiety and his desire to meet it head on. “It’s like I’m at this crossroads,” he told Mr. Taylor once he was convinced that a few other kids milling around the chemistry class weren’t listening. “Like it’s going to happen now or it’s not, like I’m gonna either make it or crash.”
Mr. Taylor looked at him nervously.
“It’s not like I’m planning to do anything—it’s just a feeling,” Cedric said, exasperated. “Oh, whatever.”
This morning, as he cuts across the apartment building’s moist front lawn and skips onto the street, he thinks about that conversation with Taylor. He decides it’s better not to talk about this sense of urgencywith anyone. No one understands that this is the crucial moment for a show of academic force, a display of pure will. He feels himself getting riled up. Now is the time!
When he first started waking in the darkness at the beginning of March, he discovered that sunrise is the best time to pump himself up like this. Marching through the eerie silence of V Street, cutting through the long shadows and wedges of morning sunlight, he feels heroic.
He hits the corner of 16th and V—as always, open for business.
“What’s up?” Cedric barks. The drug dealers—one guy in his late teens, the other in his thirties—shake their heads and kind of chuckle. They see him every morning. He usually just hurries by.
“He sure is ‘all that’ today,” one of them says to the other, plenty loud, so that Cedric nods an acknowledgment as he passes.
At 7:15, the only sounds echoing down the first-floor hallway of Ballou are those of the tapping keys from the computer lab, where Cedric is already at work.
Later this morning, he will work on his school science fair project, an assessment of the growth rates of hydroponic plants. He plans to research another science experiment—a chemical analysis of acid rain on monuments—after school, to be entered in a citywide science fair competition sponsored in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last year, he won third prize for a project on asbestos hazards.
With his whole day mapped out, Cedric leans into the computer like it’s a bobsled.
“You sure are making me get here early these days,” says Mr. Govan from across the room. He runs the computer lab and opens it up before classes begin, mostly for Cedric.
“It’s the only way I’ll be able to compete with kids from other, harder schools,” says Cedric, defining a block of text from one screen and moving it to another. “I mean, what choice do I really have?”
This is Cedric’s standard line—he’s been saying it as a sort of half-apology since he arrived in ninth grade and realized that with so little work being done during class time, extra-credit projects would be crucial to learning anything.
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