﻿Most people associate Hershey with chocolate, or the theme park named for the chocolate, located in a Pennsylvania town by the same name. All three things—the chocolate, the park, the town—are owed to one person: Milton Hershey, the candy magnate, who died in 1945. He left behind a fourth institution that also bears his name. A clue can be found in small print on the wrapping of Hershey chocolate bars, stating that every candy sold "helps educate children in need through Milton Hershey School."
Miss Holmes knew nothing about the school when she visited Hershey's theme park in the early 1980s. At the time, she was a teacher at P.S. 307 in Brooklyn. Most of her students were poor and had never left the city. So she took them on trips, to show them new topographies and unfamiliar settings. She wanted them to know what it felt like, for instance, to walk through a college campus.
"It's exposure. How do kids think out of the box when they haven't seen anything out of the box?" she says. "It was almost like taking them beyond the walls of the boroughs. I'm not saying they went to college. I'm saying they saw."
On trips to Hershey, they rode roller coasters and toured the chocolate factory, their lips stained with Kisses. One day, Miss Holmes was standing in the park when she spotted a distant and majestic building with sweeping lawns. "I was nosy," she says. "I wanted to know what that building was." She led her students to the edge of this property. They stood there, looking at the manicured grass, which no one dared touch.
Miss Holmes returned to New York and did some research. She learned that Hershey was a boarding school for poor children. Starting at age four, they can attend for free and all of their needs are met—medical care, meals, clothing, even piano lessons. If they perform well enough, they can graduate with an $80,000 college scholarship.
"Hershey's one of a kind," Miss Holmes tells me one afternoon in June. Six months have passed since the series on Dasani was published, and I've continued to follow her life as a reporter. I had never heard of the Hershey school. I ask Miss Holmes if she knows anyone who has attended. She says that she has tried to get students in, but none were accepted. The last candidate wound up leaving New York City for a boarding school down south.
Dasani might have a better shot, the principal says: She is athletic, bright, and already on the public radar. Her sister Avianna would have a harder time getting in. She failed the recent state exams for sixth graders.
But both sisters must apply, Miss Holmes decides. Nothing could be worse than separating them. Either they go together or they don't go at all.
On June 23, the principal summons Dasani and Avianna to her office.
"We found a school that can give you an opportunity ... some opportunities ... that I don't think New York City can give you," Miss Holmes tells them.
It pains her to say these words. But after seventeen years at McKinney, Miss Holmes knows the limits of the public school system. Arguably no year has been as hard as this one. McKinney wound up losing its top floor to the Success Academy charter school, whose founder and CEO, Eva Moskowitz, is at war with the new mayor.
In March, Moskowitz closed her twenty-two charter schools—including the one at McKinney—busing eleven thousand students, teachers, and their families to the state capital to protest de Blasio's policies. His rival, Governor Cuomo, had taken her side. A few weeks later, Cuomo announced a deal on the state budget, giving de Blasio $300 million for universal prekindergarten but requiring the city to find space for charter schools or to cover the cost of housing them.
For Moskowitz, this was a coup. In six more years, her first large crop of seniors would graduate with a 100 percent acceptance rate at four-year colleges, including Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Tufts, and Cornell.
Miss Holmes, now sixty-three, had watched the Albany showdown with a sinking feeling. She is certain it comes down to money. Moskowitz has the backing of hedge fund investors.
This will be Miss Holmes's last year as principal. She is retiring after thirty-four years of service in the public school system. And now she is scrambling to leave things in order.
She looks at Dasani and her sister.
"It's a beautiful place," Miss Holmes says. "I know you've heard of Hersheypark. And Hershey candy. Yummy."
The girls nod.
Their first step, Miss Holmes explains, is to fill out the applications. She will do her part by pulling together the records. She has already secured their mother's permission and asked Miss Hester to write an evaluation.
"Do you have any questions?" Miss Holmes asks.
"Is the rooms ... cabins?" asks Avianna, for whom rural Pennsylvania conjures the deep woods.
"I didn't say you goin' to a freakin' camp," Miss Holmes says.
Dasani is less naive. She has studied the brochures of boarding schools like the one attended by her cousin Sheena. Dasani imagines Hershey to be more like that—big buildings and generous lawns.
Suddenly Dasani winces. Her jaw is in pain. The principal walks over and peers inside Dasani's mouth, seeing a broken tooth. There is a second hole among her bottom molars. It has been years since she saw a dentist. That would all change at a place like Hershey.
"I need for both of you to think this through," Miss Holmes says. "And please keep your fingers crossed. This is a long shot."
Dasani crosses one set of fingers, then the other. She holds up both hands.
One for her, one for Avianna.
Dasani is the first sister to reach adolescence. She is now thirteen, and the boys are noticing. She ricochets from liking them to wanting to beat them up. She is back to training with Giant down the block.
When Chanel's food stamps run out in late June, she tells Dasani to ask Giant for $10. He has not given Dasani a penny since Supreme took her earnings. Dasani decides to halve the amount to $5 so as not "to go overboard." She just needs to ask.
Other people are better at this. No matter how hungry Dasani gets, her pride is greater. If Chanel and Supreme were the same way as children, they no longer show it. A closed mouth don't get fed. About halfway through practice, Dasani works up the courage, telling Giant that she needs $5.
"Tomorrow," he says.
Dasani blinks. Food is needed before tomorrow. "He acted like he didn't hear me," she says.
With Supreme no longer around, Dasani is talking back to her mother and coming home late from the local pool. "She's acting grown," Chanel complains. A boy named Jay Jay has caught Dasani's eye. He is also thirteen and living at the shelter, where the children pass their afternoons crowding the stoop. When the guard appears, they scatter like pigeons. Then they return to their former spots.
By mid-July, all eight siblings are together again, walking beneath a gray Harlem sky. Chanel is weighing whether to take Supreme back.
I miss you, baby, he purrs. I want to be with you.
She has heard this before. They pass a pawnshop containing the family's Xbox. It sits among watches, gold chains, and televisions swapped for cash, a shimmering collection of desperate acts.
The children step onto the 145th Street Bridge, where cars spit up a gravelly exhaust. Their flip-flops slap the ground. The route home is so familiar, they no longer look up. No one notices the Empire State Building off in the hazy distance.
After crossing the bridge, they head toward the Harlem shelter. At the bodega, Papa spots his father.
Supreme has stitches in his left brow, a bandage on his forearm, and a sprained ankle—all from fighting with another homeless man.
"Daddy got a cane!" Papa says.
He also smells of antiseptic, like the hospital he just left.
"I'm too old for this fighting shit," he says.
Chanel walks to the shelter, with the children—and now Supreme—trailing behind.
Nearly eleven years have passed since they met, here in Harlem. It is Chanel's pattern to take him back.
Giant is looking for Supreme.
Dasani makes the mistake of telling him the truth: Her stepfather is upstairs, at the shelter on West 145th Street.
Chanel frowns.
"That's why I always tell you: In the hood, you don't know where a person's at, you ask, 'Why you want to know?' If he wants money, you say, 'He's not here.' "
Giant does not want money. He wants to face off with Supreme. "You know what your husband put on Facebook?" Giant hollers at Chanel from his car. The feud began, according to Chanel, when Giant told her to bring water to an event. If she failed to do so, he would "shit on her." (Giant denies this.)
In retaliation, Supreme went on Facebook July 14, posting that "Brooklyn Gods" were coming to shoot Giant in the park with "big guns." YOU DONT KNOW WHO YOU FUCKED WIT PUSSY MAN, Supreme posted. NIGGAZ IS COMING FOR YOU.
Texts fly in all directions, from Giant's phone to Chanel's, from Chanel's phone to Supreme's. Anyone could have seen this coming. It was only a matter of time before the two men clashed. In Supreme's family, there is only one "King Me!" as he had written, years ago, on the wall of Auburn shelter.
Dasani sees no choice but to take her stepfather's side. She officially parts with Giant and his Bartendaz team. In her last text to the fitness guru, she writes, "When people say Bartendaz they think of me, not you."
Still, Dasani has reservations about Supreme, who continues to court her mother but has yet to move back in. She wonders if something is "a little off" in Supreme's "brain."
When Supreme was recently evaluated at Bellevue Hospital Center's methadone program, the doctor concluded that he suffers from a mood disorder and a panic disorder "with agoraphobia." His panic attacks last up to ten minutes, "primarily triggered in crowded areas such as the subway," wrote the doctor, adding that Supreme's paranoia rises in public.
Supreme refuses to seek psychological treatment. His anxiety deepens three days after the clash with Giant, on July 17, 2014, when a Black man in Staten Island is killed. A video of the incident goes viral. Supreme pulls it up, watching a white police officer choke the man, who gasps again and again, "I can't breathe."
Supreme stares at the victim's grainy image. He is stunned.
"That's my man E."
Over the years, Eric Garner had sold Supreme the untaxed cigarettes known as "loosies" because they are pulled loose from the pack. This underground trade, ironically, had been fueled by Mayor Bloomberg's antismoking campaign, which raised the minimum price of a pack of cigarettes to $10.50. Few of Supreme's peers could pay that much to smoke, so they began buying individual cigarettes, smuggled from Virginia.
This had given Garner, the father of five children and two stepchildren, his livelihood. On a noisy stretch of Staten Island's North Shore, Supreme would pay Garner a dollar for two loosies—preferably Newports or Kools. Garner had a soft spot for his regulars.
"I could be short, and he'd still give me a cigarette."
Supreme plays the video over and over, staring at the officer's white hands on Garner's brown neck.
Soon after their first kiss, Jay Jay lures Dasani into his apartment. He shows her to the bedroom and asks her to sit on the mattress. Then he asks her to lie down and take off her shirt.
This is how girls get pregnant, Dasani tells herself.
She gets up to leave. He pulls her hair.