Sarah’s Hope: Final Installment

By ERIC ADLER The Kansas City Star

Sept. 18, 1999. Senior year.

Turn up the music.

Pass the chips.

It’s 11 at night, and Sarah Clark’s party is rolling.

All around, her friends are gabbing and laughing.

At last Sarah feels like a carefree teen. Still, she doesn’t want to push it. “Not in my grandfather’s house,” she cautions a friend who pulls out a joint. “Smoke it out back.”  Sixteen months ago Sarah, 17, was living in an empty house with no heat. No water. No lights. She read by flashlight. But ever since she and her brother, Brian, 15, moved in with their grandfather, life’s been better than it has been in a long time.

Her junior year grades were perfect: eight courses, eight A’s. She scored 19 out of 35 on the ACT, her college entrance exam. Not great, but not too shabby, considering she was sick and didn’t study.

“I’ll take them again,” she says. “I’m thinking of going to Wash U in St. Louis or Loyola or maybe Harvard. But I know the scores will have to be better if I want get in there.”

Four years ago, when Sarah sprinted onto the gym floor at F.L. Schlagle High School, kids laughed at the preposterous, overweight girl who dared to try out for cheerleader. But no one knew how driven Sarah felt to escape her miserable life outside school, her irresponsible mother, her criminal father, the poverty. No one knew how badly Sarah wanted a better life for herself.

Now, she’s not only popular — “

At her grandfather’s house, the party wends on. Sarah reminds her brother: “Just make sure everyone’s out by 10 (a.m).”

That’s when her grandfather will be back from watching her 9-year-old brother Jordan play football in Warsaw, Mo., where he’s been sent to live with their aunt, Denise.

Occasionally Sarah’s grandfather leaves her alone for the weekend. When he does, she and her brother push their luck by throwing one of these get-togethers for their close friends. Inevitably, a few kids end up sleeping sprawled out on the couch or floor so they don’t drive home drunk.  Early the next morning Sarah, Brian and their sundry friends — some hungover, some still slightly drunk — make a mad dash to dump cigarette butts and beer bottles before grandpa comes home. They turn on fans. They spray Lysol to mask the odor of stale booze and vomit.

By nature, Charles Lombrano, 74, is quiet and solitary. A retired grain inspector who likes to fish, he took in Sarah and her brothers to keep them from being sent to foster homes. He thought he’d be taking care of them a couple of weeks. He loves them, but he never banked on having them a year and a half.

Sarah can tell his nerves are shot. Time and again he’s threatened to boot them out of his house. The strain of trying to corral two teen-agers has been too difficult. When he complains, they ignore him. Their rooms are littered with clothes. They stay out late.

At 10 a.m. Sarah’s grandfather arrives to a home reeking of cigarettes and Lysol.

Sarah’s gone to work at Subway and won’t be home till late. But the last partyers are still there, lounging in Lombrano’s living room.

Next morning Lombrano raps on Sarah’s bedroom door.

“OK. OK. I’m up,” Sarah says.

Her grandfather opens her door.

“By the way, sweetheart,” he says sharply, “I want your ass out of here.”

Three months later, just before Christmas 1999.

Sarah stands arguing in the school library.

“I’m sorry,” says the cheerleading coach, Kerry Kubicki, the former Miss Norbury. “But, no.”

“No? What do you mean, `No’?” Sarah asks.

“Just that,” Kubicki says flatly. “No. You’re not quitting cheerleading. That’s all there is to it. No.”  Sarah’s so frustrated she can hardly respond. Does Kubicki think she made this decision lightly?    For four years Sarah has cheered at nearly every football game. Every volleyball game. Every basketball game. Nights. Days. Weekends. Even though people laughed at her, she was there.

But ever since her grandfather tossed her out and shipped Brian to live with Jordan in Warsaw, the pace is draining her.

She’s on her own.

Every day she’s in school. Nights and weekends she works at Subway. In between she goes home to a dimly lit, low-income apartment in Shawnee, 10 miles from Schlagle. Her two teen-age roommates, former high school friends who became common law man and wife, spend nearly every night getting stoned.

If that was all Sarah was facing, maybe she would keep cheering. After all, she lived for a year without heat, water and light, and no one even knew it. But it’s not just that.

“I’m failing math,” she tells Kubicki.

And Sarah has never, never failed anything or even gotten lower than a B.

She wants Kubicki to understand. More than being Sarah’s coach, Kubicki is the only adult Sarah has ever confided in.

Kubicki won’t give in. She believes Sarah needs cheerleading.

In the last few months, she’s watched a young fearless girl become … what? Not defeated, because Sarah would never allow that, but fatigued, Kubicki says. Tired.

There are times when Sarah, who could jump as high as the best girls at Schlagle, walks with a weary shuffle. For months there has been something too serious, too somber in her face.

So, again, Kubicki says no.

“Sarah, this is your senior year,” she says gently. “And you will never repeat this time again. When you look back, I want you to look back and be proud of something you finished and at a time when you were happy.”

She offers Sarah a deal. Cheerleading is expensive: uniforms, fees, shoes. Sarah still owes more than $300.

“Quit,” Kubicki tells Sarah, “and you still have to pay me. Cheer some, just two days a week, and you owe me nothing.”

In Sarah’s life no adult has ever been so generous.

“OK,” Sarah says.

Saturday, Feb. 5, 2000.

Sometimes Sarah feels so alone, she forgets how her classmates see her. Tonight she will find out.

It is 9:30 p.m., the evening of the Schlagle High School

Winter Formal 2000. The main ballroom of the Jack Reardon Civic Center is boiling over with partying teenagers.

Close to a third of the student body, 300 kids, dance under flickering lights and red, white and blue balloons. Like mini rap music executives, boys sport urban-cool suits, derbies on their heads and spats on their feet. In their hands, they grasp metal-tipped canes.

The girls – hair piled high, necklines cut low – weave through the crowd in body-hugging dresses or billowy confections in crayon colors.

But tonight’s more than a dance. It’s also the night students will find out who, among three senior girls, will be crowned Queen of the Winter Dance. The crowning is purely a popularity contest. Earlier in the week seniors voted. When the votes were counted, three girls stood out: Kia White. Camille Graves. And Sarah Clark.

“I heard someone might’ve put my name on the ballot,” Sarah said earlier in the week, shrugging, as if neither winning nor losing mattered much to her.

None of her closest friends would be at the dance. Some had to work, others just didn’t want to bother. Really, it’s no big deal. She isn’t even bringing a date. She’s going, you know, just to see.

The night of the dance, she takes two hours to get ready.

She piles her hair regally atop her head. She wears a new dress, midnight blue and lace, and drapes a black shawl across her shoulders. The look is Spanish, like a lady out of a Goya painting.

When Sarah leaves her apartment, no one is there to say goodbye or good luck, to offer her a hug or take her picture.

She drives to the dance alone.

Inside, beneath the pounding rhythm of rap, hip-hop and techno music, she mingles and chats amiably. She dances in groups beneath the lights.

Minutes before the crowning, Sarah, Kia, Camille and their ceremonial escorts gather outside the ballroom. Students and teachers clear the dance floor. They crowd the perimeter, clapping, whistling, cheering as each pair files in.

Miss Kia White escorted by Mr. Joel Webb.

“Yo, Kia!” “Do it, girl!”

Miss Sarah Clark escorted by Mr. Jontell Jones.

“Hey, Saraahh!”

Miss Camille Graves escorted by Mr. Adrian Washington.

The cheers grow louder.

“Whoooo, Camille!”

“That’s my daughter!” Camille’s mother shouts from the back of the room.

At the center of the dance floor, the three girls stand, their faces lit with beauty-pageant smiles when, straightaway, the emcee announces the vote.

The second princess is …

Their smiles freeze.

… Kia White.

The students clap, whistle. Kia’s smile barely has a chance to wither when the emcee begins again: And the first princess is …

Now it’s between Sarah and Camille. When the first princess is announced, everyone will know the winner.

… Sarah Clark.

The cheers and whistles crescendo. Camille Graves, statuesque in a tight leopard dress, is the Winter Formal Queen 2000.

Students and teachers flood the dance floor to congratulate the girls. It is then, for a mere moment, that Sarah finds herself standing alone in the middle of the dance floor.

No close friends are there. No family. Before the moment lingers, Sarah moves off to congratulate the other girls.

For the rest of the night, she dances and smiles. She talks.

She poses for photos.

The next morning she calls a friend, Rachel Vernon, a freshman at Ottawa University in Kansas. Immediately Rachel scolds her for not saying she had been nominated to the Royal Court.

“Sarah,” she says, “you should have said something.”

Six weeks later. Late March 2000.

Sarah feels burned out. On school. On work. On her friends. She’s tired of all the struggling, all the garbage. And she knows time is running out.

Graduation is two months away, and she still hasn’t applied to college. She never applied for scholarships. She never even took the ACT again. And now, before bed every night, she’s getting high to help herself sleep.  With the end so close, she wonders: Is she sabotaging herself? Afraid of the future? Is it failure she fears or maybe success? She doesn’t know.

“I just feel so much pressure,” Sarah says wearily, sitting in a restaurant booth on a miserable, rainy night. With her eyes downcast, she picks at her food. Her speech is slow, her shoulders slumped.

“I feel like I’m being pulled in a million directions.”

A few weeks back, coach Kubicki told her: Sarah, get out and go away to a four-year college. Get away from here, and start a new life away from everything that’s weighed you down.

Kubicki even offered to help fill out applications if Sarah would bring them in.

Sarah never did. After she got a D-minus in the third quarter of pre-calculus, Sarah’s energy drained away. She lost her confidence.

When she turns 18 in July, the $619 a month she’s been receiving from Social Security — now sent to her in care of her grandfather — will dry up. She also has about $15,000 in a bank certificate of deposit, a gift from her late grandmother.

But she doesn’t know what to think about college. It’s all jumbled in her head. She has $15,000. But that won’t be enough, so she’ll have to work. If she has to work, she won’t cut it academically. If she doesn’t work, she’ll be poor again.

She doesn’t want that.

And what does she know about college anyway? Relatively few kids from Schlagle even go away to four-year schools, only 30 percent. A bunch drop out. She may be on her own now, but in college she’d really be on her own.  “If I go away to college, I’m going to fail,” she says. “I know myself. I’m too much of a party person. But if I stay, if I let myself slide, it’s like everything will have been for nothing.”

Sarah falls into silence.

Graduation Night. May 22, 2000. 9:25 p.m. 

On the grass outside Memorial Hall, the concrete, neoclassical auditorium in Kansas City, Kan., Sarah stands in her royal blue graduation robe. She clasps her Schlagle diploma. Closing her eyes, she hugs her mother and, for a long while, seems reluctant to let go.

“I’m proud of you,” her mother says. “You did good.”

Sarah knew she would be emotional tonight. So much has changed since the beginning of the year, when she envisioned being named valedictorian and leaving Schlagle loaded with scholarships.

Earlier in the evening, when the vice principal announced Schlagle’s scholarship winners, Sarah sat and watched with regret while one after another, on and on, classmates with grades inferior to her own stood to enthusiastic applause.

She never did get around to applying.

Still, Sarah feels good tonight.

Most everyone she’s ever loved is here. Her mother. Her grandfather. Her brothers. A couple of friends. She even invited Randy, her stepdad, who’s been out of jail for close to two years.

“He’s the only dad I’ve ever known,” she says.

She feels like she’s back on track for the first time in months. In April she moved in with a cheerleader friend and her father. Living with married teens and getting high too often had been bad moves. But those mistakes didn’t keep her from coming close to her dream.

Although she didn’t make valedictorian, she was third in her class of 217.

As she stood in her cap and gown, her family and classmates applauded her.

Then they applauded again as Sarah stood to be recognized as one of 15 students named to the National Honor Society for three consecutive years.  And although no one announced it this night, of all the girls on Sarah’s freshman cheerleading squad, only two made cheerleader all four years. One was Marie Hinson.

The other was Sarah.

“I did all right,” she said. “I’m proud of myself.”  During the national anthem, her eyes welled with tears.
And they welled again during “Pomp and Circumstance.” But nothing affected her as much as Cicely Bledsoe’s speech. When Cicely, a senior, spoke, the words came so close to Sarah’s life, she nearly wept.

“Class of 2000, I challenge you to continue your education. And when you are faced with those negative stereotypes that society has tagged on you, or when you are surrounded by those people who are saying you shouldn’t, you wouldn’t and you couldn’t, lift your head to the sky, and fiercefully, unfearfully and forcefully say without a shadow of a doubt,

`Yes, I am somebody.’

“ `Yes, I will exceed the limits.’

“ `And, no, there is nothing you can do to stop me.’ “

Sarah wants those words to be true. But she knows from her own life how hard it can be.

With high school behind her, she knows what she needs to do. College.

“It isn’t even in my mind not to go,” Sarah says.

This summer she’ll keep working at Subway on Shawnee Mission Parkway. And she figures she’ll take the ACT again. In the fall maybe she’ll enroll at Johnson County Community College. If it’s not too late, she might still try to get into Ottawa University, where her friend Rachel Vernon goes to school.

She’ll find a way.

“I got this far,” Sarah says. “I’ll be OK.”

Outside Memorial Hall, Sarah spends the next half-hour weaving among classmates saying goodbye. At almost 11 p.m., Sarah is one of the last graduates to leave. She walks alone back to her car.

It’s time to move on.

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