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percent of the men between eighteen and thirty-six were somewhere in the criminal justice system, where four hundred students out of fourteen hundred were absent each day (but never the cops and security guards manning the building)—my eyes began to adjust. Did I consider these students, many of whom would end up in jail or worse, fundamentally different in some essential way from the kids in my suburban high school in Wilmington, Delaware, most of us bound for college? It’s a stop-and-think question I wouldn’t have asked—asked of myself—in my earlier days as a reporter, hustling forward, head down, working sources in day-to-day competitions to break the news or find that perfect anecdote to lead a story.
    Looking at these discarded students, did some part of me see the way people stared at my son, seeing him flail and murmur just long enough to dismiss him? No doubt, though I wouldn’t have said so at the time.
    What I did do was spend days with the kids at Ballou, just listening to them—these delicately coiffed girls and baggy-panted boys, encased in their protective shells—as best I could. They were closed off to me, wary of the world I came from; we spoke different dialects, had few common references. But for every few words they’d utter, whatever the subject—a dispute in the halls, a new kind of Nike, the latest rap song—I’d follow their cue, wherever it led. Months along, they began to show me a few tiny glimpses of what was real in their lives.
    One of the kids, a lonely, isolated honors student named Cedric Jennings, a geeky pariah in halls ruled by gang leaders, dreamed fervently of making it to the Ivy League. Though no one from his high school had made it to one of these esteemed schools in a decade, he was convinced his path to victory would be assured by acceptance into a highly selective MIT summer program for gifted minority students between their junior and senior years. He’d banked everything on a long-shot chance of getting in and could think of nothing else, even as everything around him collapsed—his dad in jail, his single mom struggling, drug dealers ruling every corner of his neighborhood, and even teachers saying, in his words, “You can’t, you won’t, why bother.” He called them “dream busters.”
    Did I feel that everyone we talked to about Owen’s prospects for an independent life was a dream buster?
    Of course. Did I recognize it? Not in the least.
    Not until I found myself in the empty Wall Street Journal office at three A.M. trying to bring to a close a five-thousand-word narrative about the struggle of Cedric and his classmates to summon hope when there was no reason to be hopeful. I’d arrived at my final notebook: about the night, after a long prayer meeting at church, when Cedric and his mother—a “church mom” who’d sacrificed everything for her son—passed the street-corner drug dealers, out in force at midnight, to grab the mail from the box in the foyer and ascend the crumbling steps to their apartment.
    It was quiet in the deserted bureau. I don’t know how long I sat, but at some point I wrote:
Under the TV Guide is a white envelope.
    Cedric grabs it. His hands begin to shake. “My heart is in my throat.”
    It is from MIT.
    Fumbling, he rips it open.
    “Wait. Wait. ‘We are pleased to inform you…’ Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” He begins jumping around the tiny kitchen. Ms. Jennings reaches out to touch him, to share this moment with him—but he spins out of her reach.
    “I can’t believe it. I got in!” he cries out, holding the letter against his chest, his eyes shut tight. “This is it. My life is about to begin.”
    I’m not much of a crier. I’ve cried just a handful of times in the twenty years since my father passed. But I wrote those sentences through tears.
    I straggled home at four A.M. Cornelia had been awake for hours with Owen; just got him back to sleep. It’d been a tough few days of her trying to get through to