Free A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind

Today, though, he enunciates the words with a measured clarity, like he’s addressing an audience. For now, the convenientaphorism “kids from other, harder schools” is metamorphosing into real flesh and bone. He’ll be hearing from MIT any week now. As he sees it, it will be those kids or him. Lately, he’s managed to conjure them up and hate them. He doesn’t analyze what he’s doing, but he knows it’s working.
    Among other things, it crowds out a vision that drove him all but crazy: the look on some MIT professor’s face when he sees Cedric’s abysmal score of 75 out of a possible 160 on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT. He tortured himself for a week with this one—various Ivy League faces staring in horror at his application. One was an old, venerable white-haired guy with bifocals, another was some young brilliant Jewish guy, like one of the teachers he had at Jefferson. Cedric panicked on the PSAT last fall. So much was riding on it. He pumped himself up too much, and, racing through, not considering the questions carefully, he had lost track of how much time he had. Then he went back to recheck answers and started erasing some ovals right before time ran out. It was a nightmare. His PSAT score is equivalent to a 750 on the SATs out of a possible 1600, which would put him in the bottom third percentage of test takers.
    That was then. He’s past all that now, no longer dwelling on his fear. He gets up from the computer and moves like a missile through the crowded hallway to first period. His mother’s right—what’s the point of getting down on himself and his prospects?
    As he considers what his hated competitors—those smart black and Hispanic applicants from much better schools—are up to each day, the daily curriculum at Ballou looks increasingly like a thin academic soup. Cedric’s response is to eat every lesson plan in sight. He’s wrecking the curve in Unified Math II, piling on answers to problems he knows cold, making sure he always gets the A+. In physics, he’s extended his lead over LaCountiss in accumulated points, though she probably has the greater gift for science.
    By offering some competition to keep Cedric’s edge, the morning’s regimen of math and science can funnel his up-at-dawn enthusiasm. But come midday when math/science kids must start to mix with the rest of the student body for other subjects, there’s simply nothing to push against. Passing grades are granted for just showing up.
    Cedric settles into a chair for history class. Tired and graying, Mrs. Mildred “Midge” McBriarity is one of about 40 percent of the teachers at Ballou who are white. There are twenty desks; the class roster lists as many kids who should be here. The starting bell rang more than ten minutes ago, but only Cedric and one other boy are present.
    “All right,” she says finally. “Our reading for today was about Calvin Coolidge and the coming Depression.” She continues, “Were the 1920s a period of true intellectualism, or was it just a facade of intellectualism?”
    Cedric raises his hand. She looks up and hesitates, as though there are many to choose from.
    “Ummm. Let’s see … Cedric?”
    “What’s a facade?”
    “It’s a fake front, a veneer of some kind, maybe of, for example, sophistication. Do you understand?”
    “Yeah, facade, okay …. It was, you know, also a time of materialism,” he says, ducking the trickier subject of intellectualism.
    “That’s right. And how, Cedric, did that materialism manifest itself?”
    “With get-rich-quick ideas.”
    “Right,” she adds. “In the stock market, they bought stocks on margin. Do you know what that is?
    “Buying something?”
    “Well, sort of,” she says, skipping past that.
    As the class discussion limps forward, Cedric finds it hard to remember what he felt like at dawn. In his afternoon classes—Government, SAT prep, and Spanish—he is often the only student to have completed homework. The