Free My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean Page A

voice. Her face is sweet and bright and has absolutely no angles. She keeps her hair chin length and chemically straightened and usually wears it down, but when she sweeps it up in a mini-chignon, she looks regal and much older than seventeen. I spent last Christmas Day with her family, and her mother and her sisters and her aunts are all beautiful, and I got the feeling that Tiffanie grew up being told that she was good-looking, but, more important, that she was smart. Her mother, Cynthia Tillman, is a supervisor at an insurance company. Tiffanie doesn’t know much about her biological father. Her stepfather, Anthony, is a store detective, but he isn’t working currently. Their house in Brooklyn is the first one the Tillmans have ever owned. It is a small two-family, with a little spit of a front yard, on a tranquil side street in Canarsie, a working-class neighborhood that used to be strictly Italian and Jewish but now has a growing black population. They had been eager to leave their apartment in Crown Heights, because the building had got run-down and drugs were sold on their street.
    Everything inside the Tillmans’ house is gleaming and large—a large television set, a large dining table, large chairs—squeezed into smallish rooms. Tiffanie’s room has an oversize black lacquer bedroom set, a computer, and very little space for anything else. Because she is president of the student body, head of the school Step Team, and taking extra courses to prepare for her Regents’ exams, Tiffanie spends very little time at home. When she is home, she is often in her room, e-mailing her friends or talking to them on the phone. A lot of her friends are boys, but she doesn’t have a boyfriend and says that this is because she doesn’t have time. She says that she isn’t that interested in guys right now anyway, but the most annoyed I’ve ever seen her was when someone suggested that her favorite male R&B group was gay.
     
     
     
    PRESIDENT LEWIS IS SELF-POSSESSED , and often quite bossy, as in: “Are you-all going to help me move the tables, or are you-all going to just sit there?” (To her cabinet members, before a Student Life meeting.)
    “Crystal, I really, really like you, and you know you’re my homegirl, but we got to get back on topic right now.” (To her vice president, who had lapsed during a meeting into a discussion about reading her poetry at the talent show.)
    “First, how about you say the idea, and then we’ll decide if it’s bangin’.” (To the chairperson of the school store, who announced that he had a really bangin’ idea.)
    “So you’re on the seven-year plan? Let me ask you, Chickenhead: Are you proud of that?” (To a student known familiarly as Chickenhead, who asserted that he knew more about King than she did, because, as he had put it, “I been at this school since before you were in eighth grade.”)
    One recent school day, I visited Tiffanie at the student affairs office at King, and she told me the story of her campaign. “It was very controversial,” she said. Her voice started inching up her throat. “First, my friend Wellinthon and I were going to run together, but then he decided to run with Crystal, and everyone thought Crystal should run for president, because she’s such a beautiful person and everyone loves her, but she didn’t want all the pressure, so then Crystal and I decided to run together, and, oh God, candidates were tearing down each other’s posters and writing obscenities on them, and it just got very intense.”
    A young man who had been sitting nearby listening to a Walkman took off his headphones and said, “Yo, I was Tiff’s campaign manager.”
    “Robert, you were not,” Tiffanie said. “I mean, okay, you were my manager at the end. But, first, Cherie Starling was my campaign manager. Then I had to fire her, because she was slacking.” Robert frowned and then told me that his name was Robert Benton and that he was the chairperson of the school