EXPECTATIONS.

Like most juniors at Manual High School, in the impoverished northeast quarter of Denver, Colorado, Norberto Felix-Cruz was Mexican, multiply pierced, and laden with chains. Although he was quiet by nature, he clanked when he walked. On his way to school from the small house he shared with many relatives, he sometimes passed a park with brown grass and a curious sign: " 'Tis not birth nor wealth nor state, but get up and get which makes any man great." Norberto wasn't expecting greatness, however, and he often arrived late. His departures were just as unhurried. Manual's peacock-blue hallways were peaceful, owing to the presence of armed police officers, and he found them a good place to linger.

As classes let out one afternoon last spring, he was crouched in front of a metal bookcase in Manual's basement, smoothing and stowing the fat triangle of a folded American flag. This was his duty as battalion commander of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, one of the few elective courses available at Manual, and the only one with negative social status. When the previous commander was discharged--she was pregnant and had started to show--the post had not been hotly contested. Still, Norberto was grateful to J.R.O.T.C. for his appointment, because it had prompted his mother to brag about him for the first time since he shamed his family by picking up a drug charge, freshman year. He was grateful, too, he said, because "J.R.O.T.C. really stands for free food--Country Buffet after Color Guard, all you can eat, and shrimps and wings and chimichangas." Thanks to these subsidized meals, he had progressed since freshman year from scrawny to nearly imposing, an impression that he enhanced with black work boots, a pencil-line goatee, glittery earrings, and a tendency to walk with his chin down and eyes half-lidded. It was a stride of wary resolve, Norberto hoped, and he adopted it as he made his way from the J.R.O.T.C. office, past the cops, and out to the aluminum bleachers by the track, where some of his classmates were taking the sun.

"You got the brains of a stripper," a sophomore boy was saying to a plump, ponytailed girl (another beneficiary of J.R.O.T.C. food) who was dating an older guy whom nobody liked. Seeing Norberto, the boy changed the subject: "Hey, Norberto, you know how people get the teardrop tattoo on their cheek the first time they kill someone? My friend--I'm serious--he put the name of the guy on his face!"

Norberto worked construction most afternoons, with his father, who had brought his family up from Durango ten years earlier. They had a drywall job to finish by the evening. Now, though, Norberto sat and stretched his legs. The bleachers offered a view of the Rockies, forty miles west, and, against them, the towers and cranes of downtown Denver. But his focus soon drifted to the plank on which he sat, which had been freshly tagged with gang graffiti. Studying the elaborate red scrawl, he said to his friends, "The person who did this tag didn't know how to spell the name Chici." The Chici 30s, a local gang, were in ascendance at Manual now that members of their rival gang, the Oldies, had dropped out. "See," he said, "they think the word 'Chici' begins with a 'Q.' "

"So what's the right way to spell it?" someone asked. It was quiet then, until the girl with the ponytail protested, "Norberto, stop looking to me like that, like you're some teacher!"

"Well, I don't care to know," another boy said. "I don't like those dudes, remember?"

"No wonder the whole city thinks we're stupid," Norberto said, addressing a recent turn of events that some on the bleachers still refused to accept. "Like, that's our education in a nutshell--we can't even spell our own gangs right."