'Did I fail, Ms. Darley?'

Third of four parts

Iven Bailey was on the move again. He carried two black trash bags, one for shoes, the other for everything else. He trudged down Harford Road past the wreckage of one abandoned building after another until he found what he was looking for, a dreary little rowhouse with a front door the color of dry dirt.

This would be his home for now. Or, rather, his dwelling.

It was early April of this year, and for the past three months, Iven, 18, had boarded with a neighborhood woman, Betty Jones, in a house two blocks to the north. But lately, living there had gotten downright scary. People came and went all the time. A kid Iven considered dangerously mean-tempered, and with whom he had once fought, had started hanging around.

Then on March 22, someone fired a gun right in front of Jones' house. It was the second shooting in two months on Tivoly Avenue. Everyone scrambled inside to avoid getting hit. When he heard the shots, Iven had been at the dining room table filling out a college scholarship application.

It was too much for him. A few days later, he was on his way down the street with his trash bags.

Iven was among Baltimore's 2,289 homeless students. A portion of them lived without parents or guardians, surviving alone under risky circumstances and with considerable privation.

The mother of a friend of Iven's had agreed to take him in for a while. It was his third move in just seven months.

"Damn," he thought to himself walking through the door, "all new surroundings."

Gary Sells, Iven's best friend, had at least avoided that sort of nomadic existence. He, too, was living on his own without parents. But, for the past four years, he had been able to remain in one place, the East Baltimore home of his late grandmother, Alice Sells.

Alice's two-story house on Guilford Avenue with its pretty stained-glass transom above the front door was the possession that mattered most to Gary. He might not have had much furniture or even a refrigerator, but he did have a key to a front door. He belonged here, and nobody could tell him to leave. Or so he thought.

Unknown to Gary, his father, Gary Sr., no longer held title to the property, which the Sells family had owned for 38 years. Nine months earlier, in the summer of 2004, someone had purchased the house from the city of Baltimore by paying $820 in past-due property taxes.

Gary found out one night in March when several officials in uniform appeared at the door and declared that anyone living there was trespassing.

The court summons they left was in legalese, but Gary understood what it meant. He was a squatter. He and his sisters would go to court in a month to find out when they would be evicted.

The one tangible piece of stability in his life was vanishing.

  Even with his living situation upended again, Iven somehow stayed on track. He seemed assured of graduating from Lake Clifton-Eastern High School in a couple of months. Nudged along by the school's principal, Lisa Tarter, he had even set his sights on getting into a two-year college. Tarter urged him to apply to Allegany College in Cumberland, where other Lake Clifton graduates had done well. He had also decided to apply to Lackawanna College in Pennsylvania and Dean College in Massachusetts.

The primary attraction: They were far away.

After school one day in late March, Tarter assembled a small task force to complete Iven's applications. His English teacher edited the essay while Tarter's secretary did the typing and the guidance counselor worked on financial aid forms.

In his essay, Iven wrote, "As bad as being homeless seems, it gave me my ambition and my dreams."

Iven had taken the SATs once in mid-winter. He got a 200, the minimum, in verbal and 325 in math. (In Baltimore City schools in 2004, the average verbal score was 400 and the average math score, 397.) He knew his scores were pathetic. He decided to try again, even though at that late date registering would cost him $70. That Saturday morning, he still had to wait to see if there would be room for him to take the test.

He got in and was rewarded with a verbal score 80 points higher. Later, on Tivoly, he told neighbors his scores had gone up and proudly accepted their congratulations. Dean College, Iven's first choice, expected a verbal score of at least 300. Iven hoped his 280 was close enough.

If Iven was involved in wishful thinking, Gary was engaged in pure fantasy. During spring vacation in March, he rooted through a shoebox where he had stashed query letters that colleges had sent the previous fall to high school athletes like him.

By that point, four-year schools were already putting the finishing touches on letters of acceptance for their freshman classes. Gary had no concept of what the college application process entailed. At that late date, he filled out forms to two elite universities he picked out of his box, Duke and Vanderbilt. He didn't bother to write accompanying essays or get teacher recommendations.

Even he understood that sending the applications was an empty gesture.

"Doesn't mean I'll get in," he said.

After he dropped the forms in a mailbox, Gary warmed himself in the sun on the marble steps outside a friend's house. The electricity had been turned off again at his house, and the cold seemed never to leave him.

  Gary was sinking, and it both infuriated and frightened Iven. He thought they had an understanding that they would make it together to graduation. Iven held out hope that the two would go off together to Dean College. But to Iven, it was increasingly clear that Gary had given up, which is exactly what Iven told Tarter one day in April.

Tarter was distressed. She immediately sat the boys down at her conference table.

"You used to come in here and talk," she told them. "You two had each other's backs. Now you don't.

"Stop this."

Then she left.

Gary knew right away what was on Iven's mind. He leaned across the table and confessed.

"It is just - I don't know why I didn't apply to Dean," he told Iven. "Was bluffing."

Stacks of new computers sat on shelves in unopened boxes around them. The windowless room was warm, the atmosphere tense. Gary crossed his hands and continued in a low voice, "I am real confused in life. I don't know what I want to do. ... I got a place to stay, but not a stable place."

Maybe he'd forget about college or a real career. Gary said that maybe he'd shoot for whatever job he could get, even though both knew that a minimum wage wouldn't pay for food and rent.

Iven scoffed. "That is temporary, man."

Gary was thinking short-term. He'd never get out of the neighborhood that way.

Iven couldn't help believing that Gary, like so many other people in Iven's life, was letting him down. If Gary dropped out, Iven felt that he would be in the struggle all by himself, and he wasn't sure he could handle it alone. And even if he could, he knew that without Gary there at the end, he would not take the same joy in whatever he achieved.

Iven seethed. Gary could see it in his face. He couldn't stand having his friend disappointed in him. He began speaking again, filling the silence with reassurance. He'd pull it together. He'd get his English grade up. He'd get his diploma. He and Iven would apply to Allegany. They'd go off to college together just like Iven wanted.

"I'm with you all day," Gary said.

Iven was only too happy to believe him. The mood lightened. The boys started joking. That night, Gary picked up Iven in his cousin's car, and they headed for an evening together in Towson.

It was a short-lived reconciliation.

The next day, when they saw each other in a school hallway, it was as though they had never had their heart-to-heart. Gary said that if he didn't get into college or find a good job, he would just go back to dealing drugs.

Iven was shattered. He slouched into Tarter's conference room, where he began to cry. He covered his face with his hands; his chest heaved with each sob. Tarter handed him tissues.

It wasn't just that he felt betrayed by Gary. Maybe Iven was kidding himself about getting into college. Maybe when school got out, he'd wind up homeless again, killing time once more on the neighborhood basketball court or dealing drugs.

It wasn't a groundless fear. The Social Security benefit from his father's death, which he relied on for food and shelter his senior year, would stop after he graduated in June. "Now it's coming down to the wire. I ain't going to lie," he said. "My money is going to run out."

He insisted to friends that he really didn't want to return to dealing drugs. Maybe he would enlist in the Army, go to Iraq even. "I'm not afraid to die."

  April 27, the day of the eviction hearing, arrived, but Gary was too upset to go to court with his sisters. "I'm scared of what the judge might say," he said. He thought it was just a matter of time, perhaps days, even hours, before he would be on the street.

But, when his sisters returned, they had surprising news. If they paid $47.12 toward the water bill, the new owner would allow them to stay in the house for 30 days. They'd won a reprieve.

"I'm blessed," said Gary outside the Guilford Avenue house. "See the sun shining down on me."

Gary began working harder in school. With about a month to go until finals, he had decided that it was time to make a stand. He had started working on a school computer to make up three courses he had previously failed. But he was also failing the English class he was taking. His teacher gave him extra essays and other assignments to afford him the chance to catch up. As May began, he thought he had brought his grade up enough to pass.

He began to think he would graduate and stopped by the guidance counselor's office to ask about applying to a college he might have a chance of getting into.

"You think I could get into BCCC [Baltimore City Community College] or Coppin or somewhere like that?" Gary asked Patricia Waters, the school's guidance counselor. "Where the application at?"

"What's your GPA?" Waters asked.

Gary didn't know, so she looked it up. His grade point average was 1.4, a D.

"That is terrible," said Gary, amazed at his own underachievement.

Iven happened to be nearby and overheard the exchange. He shook his head.

  Tarter began to worry when Iven didn't show up for his two final exams. That wasn't like him. Despite being homeless, Iven had a nearly perfect attendance record. She couldn't imagine he would willingly miss the only tests left between him and a diploma.

She telephoned the Harford Road house where he was living. Disconnected.

The rest of that day, all she could do about Iven was fret.

The next morning, Iven reappeared. He arrived in Tarter's office, his clothes a mess, his face drawn. He said he had just gotten out of jail.

Iven said he had been arrested the day before, during a run-in with police on Harford Road.

He gave the principal his account of what had happened. It would prove different from the police version.

Iven said that on his way to school, he had passed a park bench where police officers were confronting some kids from Tivoly. Suddenly one of the cops ordered him to join the others on the bench. Iven said he ignored the officer, who then pulled him over by his dreadlocks. Iven lost his temper, cursing and shouting.

The police arrested him and charged him with disorderly conduct. He was held for 20 hours and released at 4 a.m. He walked the nearly three miles home, and now here he was at school.

Tarter listened. She grew more incensed the more she heard. "I thought we had gotten to the point where you knew to keep your mouth shut and follow instructions," Tarter snapped. "You escalated the situation." She was so angry that she couldn't even look at Iven, keeping her eyes on her computer screen.

Iven couldn't stand her turning away from him. "Please, Ms. Tarter," he pleaded. "Don't be mad."

She remained silent. "I feel worse than when I was in jail," he said under his breath.

Tarter got up and left.

Iven moved to a couch in the office and lay down, tucking a red stuffed animal under his head. Exhausted from his night in jail, he was famished and light-headed. He decided to interpret his arrest as a message from God, revealing to him the dark future of prison if he didn't do better.

Iven's account of what led to his arrest diverged in significant ways from the police record.

Officers had observed Iven smoking marijuana on a park bench with another young man, charging documents said. When the officers approached, the boys took off. The police chased them but caught only Iven. They didn't find any drugs on him, the report says, but recovered a blunt on the ground next to the bench where he had been sitting.

They didn't accuse him of disorderly conduct. The actual charge was possession of marijuana.

  On a Monday morning in late May, after nursing a cold all weekend, Gary took a gypsy cab to school and went straight to Williette Darley's room to learn his grade on the English final. He waited while others ahead of him sifted through a wire basket to find their papers. When Gary located his, he saw "50" written in red ink.

"Terrible," he said.

He turned to his teacher, wondering how this would affect his overall grade in the course. "Did I fail, Ms. Darley?"

With the gradebook in one hand and a calculator in the other, Darley computed. A silent minute passed. Gary blew his nose. When Darley finished, she lifted the calculator to show him.

It was 65. He was five points short of a diploma.

"How can that be?" Gary asked? "I did everything you told me to do."

Darley did not want to be the barrier between Gary and graduation. He had failed the course work even with the extra assignments she had given him, but Darley was willing to build one more bridge to graduation. If Gary were to write an essay that she deemed good enough, she would give him the credit he lacked. At Lake Clifton, dozens of students were given the same opportunity. Darley told Gary to write an essay on the most traumatic moment of his life.

Gary knew immediately what his subject would be: the day his mother died of a drug overdose.

He passed English.

  By late May, Iven hadn't heard anything from the colleges that he had applied to. Every time he dropped by Betty Jones' house, she told him no mail had come for him.

Tarter was getting as anxious as Iven. Finally, she decided to call Allegany College, the college she hoped he would attend. As Iven stood in her office, she dialed Allegany and asked if admission decisions had been made.

Why, yes, the person at the other end said, admission notices had gone out weeks before, in early April. (The Cumberland junior college admits 98 percent of applicants.) And, yes, one of them had gone to Iven Bailey.

Iven had gotten into college.

  Within minutes, Tarter's fax machine spit out Iven's acceptance letter. He folded it and rushed off to Tivoly.

Everything had just changed, but Iven kept his face a blank as he walked down his street. He came upon friends and presented his acceptance letter to each one in turn without hinting what it was about. "You are going to have to read it," he said.

Each reaction was the same. Everyone read the letter and then smiled when the meaning sank in.

"It's official now," marveled David Hooker, an old friend of Iven's. "Iven is out of here." He punched the air in delight.

Everyone was tickled. "Love you, boy," said Leon Miller, a small, thin man with gray-flecked hair, who had always hounded Iven to stay in school. "You the only one from around here is going to leave. You are all right. You are all right." He came down from his porch to the group of boys surrounding Iven and hugged him. "You bring tears to my eyes," he said. And there were tears.

Several of Iven's friends warned that they didn't expect to see him back in the old neighborhood except for brief visits "to chill."

"None of these people are going to let him stop," Hooker said. "All this pain. Get away from here. It ain't fun around here no more." Hooker pointed to the houses up and down the street. "One, two, 35 vacant houses."

Iven, smiling now, seemed in a daze. He remained that way all weekend.

As he lay in bed that Sunday night, trying to imagine what the future would be like, he felt a warmth spreading through his chest. He sensed the presence of his father, smiling at what he had accomplished.

He felt tears coming. "I did it, man," he thought. "I did it myself."

The next day, he took the final exams that he had missed while in jail. Then he sat down on a bench in a school hallway. For once, his CD player was turned off.

He was buoyant, reborn with the knowledge that he was about to escape. The remote expression that he so often used to mask his feelings was gone. He was on the edge of self-confidence, as the worry of his past 2 1/2 years fell away.

He had no idea what college would be like. For now, it was enough to be happy.

He was eager to tell Gary his news, but that Monday was the day Gary had learned he was failing English and in danger of missing graduation. Iven didn't want to make Gary feel any worse.

There were others Iven was dying to tell. The problem was, he didn't know where his sisters and mother were living anymore.