Show Them You're Good

A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College

Jeff Hobbs

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982116354
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace presents a "carefully observed journalistic account [that] widens our view of the modern 'immigrant experience'" ( The New York Times Book Review ) as he closely follows four Los Angeles high school boys as they apply to college. Four teenage boys are high school seniors at two very different schools within the city of Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the nation with nearly 700, 000 students. In this "exceptional work of investigative journalism…laced with compassion, insight, and humor" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review) Jeff Hobbs stunningly captures the challenges and triumphs of being a young person confronting the future—both their own and the cultures in which they live—in contemporary America.Blending complex social issues with each individual experience, Hobbs takes us deep inside these boys' worlds. The foursome includes Carlos, the younger son of undocumented delivery workers, who aims to follow in his older brother's footsteps and attend an Ivy League college; Tio harbors serious ambitions to become an engineer despite a father who doesn't believe in him; Jon, devoted member of the academic decathalon team, struggles to put distance between himself and his mother, who is suffocating him with her own expectations; and Owen, raised in a wealthy family, can't get serious about academics but knows he must.Including portraits of secondary characters—friends, peers, parents, teachers, and girlfriends—this "uniquely illuminating" ( Booklist ) masterwork of immersive journalism is destined to ignite conversations about class, race, expectations, cultural divides, and even the concept of fate. Hobbs's portrayal of these young men is not only revelatory and relevant, but also moving, eloquent, and indelibly powerful.

PART I

Fall

Chapter 1

AUGUST 11, 2016

It’s school so it gets crowded, there’s noise. But even when it’s loud, it’s a healthy loud, people wanting to express their opinions. It’s a peaceful loud.

—Tio

Tio

A young man wearing a navy blue collared shirt and khaki slacks walked north along Juniper Street. A light backpack was strapped tight to both shoulders, and he tucked a battered, much-decaled skateboard between his forearm and hip. His hair was carefully treated to form a slick vertical wave off his forehead, and he walked with a slight limp gained from a skate park crash the previous afternoon, his last of summer. He’d lost purchase on his board during that weightless instant between upward momentum and downward fall; he’d also heard a popping sound within his knee upon contact with the asphalt but thought little of it. His skin was bronzed by both his Mexican heritage and the myriad afternoons spent skating over the past June and July, and his body was lean and strong. At the corner of Juniper and 103rd Street, he tossed his board to the sidewalk pavement and jumped on in a fluid, propulsive motion. At seven thirty in the morning, the sun already blasted down at a steep slant and he quickly sweat through his shirt. The summer’s heat wave felt fixed and eternal. Gingerly, he pushed himself from his family’s current bungalow, past the bowed stucco apartment complex they used to live in and the lot where at another point they’d occupied a trailer home for a time (Tio had spent his entire life on Juniper Street). He proceeded in a stairway pattern alternately left and right, west and north, along busy Compton thoroughfares and quiet residential streets, passing the elementary school at Ninety-Second and Grape Street, then the tall electric towers standing over dense weed entanglements on Fir Avenue, the Rio Grande Market on Eighty-Eighth, the Church of God in Christ on Milner. Cars made hard right-on-red turns in front of him despite the solid white walk signs giving him the right of way. Soon he met the massive concrete anchors of the blue Metro line connecting downtown Los Angeles with Long Beach along Graham Avenue, and he made his way due north, parallel to the tracks, toward school.

Thousands of young men and women were making their way around the South LA gridwork of streets. Many, like Tio upon his skateboard, wore muted colors beneath their backpacks: navy and khaki, maroon and khaki, white and khaki. They were headed to school as well, usually moving in small groups for reasons pertaining to both companionship and safety. Others on the street wore baggy shorts and sleeveless undershirts, brightly colored baseball caps tipped at odd angles, and multiple tattoos to signify allegiances or aesthetics or both. If those guys were out this early, it meant they’d probably been out all night—working—and were on their way home to sleep, too exhausted to bother anyone. Traveling alone and by skateboard put Tio in an inherently vulnerable position in this stretch bridging the neighborhoods of Compton (where Tio lived), Lynwood, Watts, South Gate, and Florence-Graham (where Tio went to school). The in-between spaces made the dominant gang entities harder to ascertain. But he’d been getting to school this way since fifth grade, after he bought his first used board, much preferring the wobbly platform to the cramped, loud buses lumbering through Los Angeles traffic. Aside from witnessing a man take a fatal shot to the head from a car window when he was eleven (five steps away with a female friend, Tio had crouched and pushed her against the fence with his lanky fifth-grade body shielding her, relieved when the squeal of tires signaled the shooter’s flight), he’d never had any trouble beyond the occasional empty taunt. Schoolboys were mostly left alone. Even the most menacing types tended to be respectful if not admiring of the aspiration required for young people—mostly poor, mostly black or brown—to trek to school early each morning. If any sketchy person approached, Tio just said, humbly, “I don’t bang,” and kept rolling. Police had halted him now and again, as skateboarders were generally associated with drugs and truancy. Usually they would just ask if he’d seen any suspicious activity or tell him to stay in school, stay away from drugs and bad sorts, stay off the street after a certain hour: all the tired commands he’d been hearing since toddlerhood. He figured that throughout the course of his youth, ninety-nine out of one hundred transits had been uneventful, so Tio always moved casually in the context of the ninety-nine while maintaining a modest alertness for the prospect of the one.

At the Firestone Boulevard Metro station, dozens of teenagers wearing the same navy/khaki binary streamed down the steps from the elevated train stop, past a colorful mosaic wall depicting a human body in prayer. Tio pivoted through and around them across the intersection, sometimes playfully tapping the head of someone he knew. He rolled past a long row of small furniture restoration and auto repair storefronts, really just one-car garages open onto the street, facing the tracks, replete with detritus. A right on Eighty-Third Street followed by a quick left on Beach Street brought him to the front gate of the one-story, modern building that was Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School. Students who’d already arrived kicked soccer balls or loitered in the narrow, paved space between the fence and the school’s glass door, or splayed themselves along the row of white picnic tables occupying the grassy side lot. The principal, an unflappable white man in his late thirties, gently ushered students inside with his kind, calm demeanor in advance of the shrill PA announcement indicating five minutes before first period.

Beach was a relatively quiet street, residential on the east side with single-story stucco bungalows on small plots sporting citrus trees, laundry lines, and the occasional fuselage of a decades-old car resting dormant. On the west side, where the school occupied the southern corner, stood a row of tall warehouses guarded by bent gates. A collarless Jack Russell wandered in and out of the driveways. The train tracks heading to and from downtown Los Angeles, four miles north, cut a graveled swath a few meters behind the school grounds.

Tio kicked up his board and limped inside. Ahead, he recognized a thicket of hair resembling an unmade bed atop a tall, wide, shambling frame. He yelled, “Yo, Luis, you got fleas in that thing, bro!”

Luis turned around, gave him the finger, and replied, “You know that because you can hear them talking?” This dig was in reference to Tio’s large, protruding ears. He had heard variations of the same joke since elementary school, including from elementary school teachers, and found them uncreative. He didn’t even bother with a rejoinder.

“Why you limping, bro?” Luis asked with more humor than concern.

“Ah, I fucked up my knee. Like maybe I severed some nerves or something? It’s fine.”

“People get surgery for that.”

“Nah, nah, I’m good.”

Carlos

“Shut the fuck up,” Carlos whispered to Tio in AP Calculus class later that morning.

“I’m sorry, man. I just can’t handle that it’s August eleventh,” Tio replied, exasperated. “They can’t even say school starts in mid-August anymore. This is early August.” He shook his head in unaffected grief, big ears rotating side to side. “I’m just not down with this.”

Two hours into the year, they’d all gained a foreknowledge that the novelty of new classes and teachers would stale by the end of the week, and thirty-five more weeks would follow, and Tio could not help but express his dismay—his exhaustion with being seventeen—vocally. (Tio knew this wasn’t a charming quality of his.)

“Just chill,” Carlos said. He was slight in stature, five foot four with narrow shoulders. The growth spurts that had elevated Tio and Luis and so many others toward six feet and beyond since ninth grade had passed him over, and presumably wouldn’t loop back around since he was already taller than his father. His voice was slight as well, though he deployed it with authority: “Pay attention.”

“You’re just as depressed as me, admit it.”

Carlos paused before saying, a little mournfully, “Yeah, I am.”

Tio kept muttering jokes under his breath, trying to make proximate kids laugh; Carlos knew that this was what Tio did when the material or something else caused him stress. He elbowed Tio gently and told him to shut up, again.

“But we’re talking about rate of volume change in a can of soda—what does that have to do with anything in life?”

“That’s a good point.”

“Right?”

“But you still gotta quit fucking around.”

“What would you do without me fucking around?” Tio asked. “You’d be so neglected and sad.”

“And I would have finished this problem set fifteen minutes ago.”

A week earlier, Carlos had been walking around the familiar streets of his Compton neighborhood with his older brother, Jose. They were wearing street clothes, eating fast food, in no rush to be anywhere or do anything, lamenting the end of summer while talking about girls and music, the school year ahead and the things each needed to organize in order to be semiprepared. His brother’s company had always had a grounding effect on him, and so in their light talk he could harbor a sense of confident equanimity with the moment he inhabited, this quite lazy and aimless moment on the precipice of the most consequential stretch of school—and hence life—thus far. He had a premonition that elements would align over the course of the year, and high school would pass him over to a college that suited him in a very simple progression. In odd moments, usually alone, a small pressure lanced his chest as he wondered if all the potential he’d amassed during his first eleven years of school would prove illusory in the end for a kid who, from the perspective of any ignorant person driving past on Central Avenue, might well be dismissed as “just another Mexican without a real job.”

Such a person wouldn’t know, for instance, that he’d just spent three weeks at a Brown University academic camp taking college-level instruction, sleeping in his own room, meeting bright kids his age from all over the world. The time hadn’t necessarily changed his life—it was just more school, far away—but it had proffered a glimpse into the human reach of the planet beyond South Los Angeles. He’d befriended a boy of Chinese descent who, having grown up in Alabama, spoke with the deepest of Southern drawls. He’d met white people who seemed genuinely interested in knowing him better, and were genuinely interesting once he came to know them better. He marveled at peers discussing immigration policy in lengthy detail who didn’t seem to know who Cesar Chavez was. He’d turned in work to professors famous in their various, highly specific fields. He’d won a $30 bet that a preppy classmate would not only buy a bag of crushed kale posing as marijuana, but would smoke it and fail to notice the difference. And he had come home from Rhode Island with a long-distance girlfriend, his first.

Such a person also wouldn’t know that his older brother walking beside him was about to begin his sophomore year at Yale.

Now his last high school summer had ended, and Jose had left again for New Haven, and Carlos finished his first, light homework assignments at the kitchen table in the compact backyard shack his family had been renting for ten years. Textbook notes for government, a sheet of equations for calculus, a chapter summary for English, reading about the structure of matter for chemistry, all of it basically interesting and conceptually simple for him, beginning-of-the-year stuff. Throughout, his phone dinged with Facebook direct messages and group chats, friends either asking for help on math or else transmitting inane, usually vulgar memes.

Then he opened a folder that contained form I-821D and its dense thicket of accompanying documents, which his school advisers had been helping him compile. In addition to a photocopy of his Washington State driver’s license (Washington had a much more lenient ID process than California, so he and his brother had been licensed there: a sixteen-hour drive each way upon their respective sixteenth birthdays), most of the documents were school attendance records exhumed from the file cabinets of his elementary, middle, and high schools. He’d also gathered what records he could of doctor appointments, national exams, awards that he’d won, proof of extracurriculars like mock trial, Students Run LA, Minds Matter—essentially any official piece of paper bearing his name and a date in order to prove his continuous presence and schooling in the United States. Even though his parents had been as meticulous as they were capable of in keeping track of paper over the years, the gathering process had been arduous and basically a full-time job over the summer.

His sister, a seventh-grader, deferred her own homework by watching TV in the adjacent living room and fussing incessantly with her eyebrows—always her eyebrows, plucking, combing, lining. His father, having just gotten home from his job driving a delivery truck around the mammoth Chutes and Ladders board that was Los Angeles, tended to a pot of ravioli. His mother was working her three p.m.–to–eleven p.m. shift as a dispatcher for a different delivery company. Their home was somewhat removed from the street and its invasive noises. Even so, the firecrackers that blew up four or five times each night felt like they’d been set off right in their yard; Carlos had never understood the fondness Latino men maintained for their recreational explosives. All his life, they’d interrupted his homework on a nightly basis. Tonight was no different as he neared completion of his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals application, about the size and weight of a standard college packet. The stack of documents held such promises as the ability to work for wages and apply for federal college financial aid and to no longer endure the good-natured yet really-fucking-irritating jokes his friends made constantly about his status. Yet DACA also meant formally declaring his illegality while sharing with federal authorities the home address and places of employment of his parents. Deportation efforts were supposedly focused on the criminally inclined, but they’d been applied to people he knew: expulsion without warning, sometimes in the middle of the night, neighbors who had children in school and paid taxes, like his family.

His older brother had received his Dreamer status last year so that he could work at a data analytics company over the summer rather than manual-labor jobs in area warehouses as he’d always done before. Jose’s application had been processed within two months, and no one dressed in black, bearing holstered firearms, had come to their door. So Carlos and his parents, after much recent dinner discussion, had decided that the potential benefits outweighed the risks. He’d communicated the decision to the school faculty, and they’d supported him through the technical process. Once submitted later this month, the mysterious standby period would settle in. All of his fellow seniors would spend much of this year waiting for colleges and universities to inform them as to their deemed worth or lack thereof. In Carlos’s case, these universities would be among the most prestigious in the world. But because he’d been brought to the country a few months after he was born instead of a few months before, and thus was still here illegally seventeen years later, he would also be waiting for the United States government to inform him as to whether or not he could be called an American—well, not quite “American,” but something adjacent, something temporarily legal. He hoped that this particular wait would not be a long one.

The windows were open and a nocturnal breeze had mercifully kicked up, but the residual heat from the day caused sweat to fall from his brow onto the papers that he filled out methodically, checking and rechecking each entry, as Carlos did in all things.

Owen

A tall, lanky, pale-skinned teenager lurked near the portal to the swimming pool, wearing a Speedo swimsuit and nothing else. A water polo game was in play, the first of the fall season. At a certain point, with the ball live on the far side of the twenty-five-meter pool, this kid crept across the beige deck tiles and then paused a moment on the pool’s edge, the way comedians sometimes do before delivering a punch line. He jumped into the water sideways and upside down. He was capable of swimming skillfully, but he chose to doggie-paddle around in a circle. The spectators—fourteen or fifteen parents in the stands—didn’t seem to notice as they alternately watched their children and intently tapped cell phones. He did some splashing for the benefit of the camera: a friend was filming this stunt. He spit water in a weak arc like a fountain statue. He back-floated. Then an intercepted pass led to a thrashing of swimmers in his direction. Now people began to see him and he felt their eyes. The time had come to exit the pool, and he did. His longish sandy-blond hair was matted down over his face, and his body shivered slightly as a coach stalked toward him.

“What are you doing?” the coach asked.

“I’m on the team,” the boy replied.

“No you’re not.”

“I’m on the JV,” he amended.

“I’m the JV coach!”

A moment passed while the coach simmered. Then this prankster, Owen, cocked his head slightly to the side and extended his forearms palms-upward in a sign of low-level contrition. “Okay, look, I played freshman year.”

“But you’re not on the team.”

“I’m not.”

“So… what were you doing in the pool during a varsity game?”

“I just had to do this.”

“What?!”

“I’m sorry, I just had to.”

The words didn’t make sense to the adult, who maybe even half-smiled at the inexplicable nonsense of children. He jabbed a thumb toward the bleachers. “Just get off the deck.”

As he walked away, Owen received a thumbs-up from his friend, indicating that the video was saved and Instagrammable. Still wearing the Speedo and now a towel over his shoulders, Owen ascended into the bleachers and sat apart from the crowd, on a wet bench in a growing puddle of water. He parted his hair from over his eyes and put his glasses on and watched the coaches shout and point while the players splashed around seriously, and he remembered his own brief, unhappy water polo career, which had begun and ended during his freshman year three years ago—a lot of treading water interspersed with typically fruitless bursts of effort and the occasional fingernail gash across his shoulder or knee jab to the crotch. He didn’t know why he’d ever played in the first place. Freshman year, he’d wanted to join a bunch of things before realizing that joining things for the sake of joining had little value when it came to passage through high school—though obviously much value when it came to college admissions. He w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Part I: Fall
• Part II: Winter
• Part III: Spring
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• ‘Children of the State’ Teaser
• About the Author
• Copyright