Prize Pupil

"Every now and then I realize it has made a difference -- their lives have been redirected." Tears well up, and Hill beats a fist on her chest. "Stop it, Wanda." She takes off her glasses and squeezes her eyes shut.

Not all the children Hill sent off made it to graduation. A girl whose mother was being abused returned home to try to protect her. A mother who missed her daughter bought her a new car to induce her to come home. One boy, who had a brother in jail and another who had been killed in a drive-by shooting, fought with his boarding school classmates and had to leave.

But Hill thinks Amir can make it. "This is my pride, my prize child," she says. "I always said that he represented my 25 years of work . . . I'm going to be there when he graduates, and that is going to be the conclusion of Project Match."

From the time Hill met Amir, he intrigued her. He had a movie-star smile, high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes. (His mother is Jamaican Indian, and his father is, as he puts it, "a regular black guy from D.C.") His father had returned from the Vietnam War shellshocked and convinced the government was out to get him. He then served time in prison, where he converted to Islam (that's how Amir got his first name and his middle name, Ibn-Faruq). Because of his father's deep distrust of the government, he wouldn't let Amir and his two older siblings go to public school, but he couldn't afford a private Islamic education. Amir's mother and sister taught him to read, but he never learned math, science or writing.

As Amir grew older, he says, his father became increasingly paranoid and violent. When Amir was 10, his 13-year-old sister decided to run away. Amir and his 11-year-old brother left with her. The three were farmed out to relatives, and Amir and his brother bounced between their maternal grandmother's apartment and foster families or group homes.

Despite his five-year gap in education, or perhaps because of it, Amir adored school. "I just enjoyed the whole learning process," he says. "And it was something I was never able to do. So my guess is if I had done it [from the beginning], I wouldn't have had the same passion for it as I did, just jumping into fifth grade."

In seventh grade at Paul Junior High, he grew close to his English teacher, Bill Kappenhagen, and would linger after school to wash the blackboards, straighten the desks or play chess. "He kicked my butt all the time," Kappenhagen says, "but sometimes he'd let me win."

Kappenhagen would drop Amir off at his grandmother's apartment on his way home, but he didn't know what lay behind the door. He learned about Amir's troubled childhood through casual comments the boy made while they shot hoops or played Trivial Pursuit. One day, when Amir was in ninth grade, Kappenhagen returned from a weekend away to find his Siamese fighting fish ("I named him Faruq, after Amir"), which he had left in Amir's care, in the classroom of a math teacher. "With water in his eyes, Amir told me he was living in a group home," says Kappenhagen, who had become an administrator at Paul. Amir had fought with his grandmother about staying out late.

That was around the time Hill met Amir. She'd gone to his school to administer a practice SSAT, a test used by many private schools to gauge academic ability. Amir did well enough to interest her. His grades were outstanding, and he had the kind of personality -- outgoing, vibrant, alert -- that appealed to admissions officers. She took him on the tour of New England that she reserved for her program's most promising applicants. But she didn't really know what he'd been through until an admissions officer at Exeter asked how many brothers and sisters he had, and he replied that he didn't know anymore.

Hill called Kappenhagen and told him how impressed the admissions people had been with Amir. But they were worried about his lack of a stable living situation. Where would he go, they asked, on holiday breaks and in the summer?

Kappenhagen, then 26, had an audacious idea. He could foster Amir, or even adopt him. Becoming a foster parent meant giving up time, money and freedom. But the role felt natural to Kappenhagen, who had signed up for Teach For America, a nonprofit group that supplies teachers to low-income communities, right out of college. He took foster parenting classes and became Amir's legal guardian. In May 2002, Amir moved into Kappenhagen's home in Petworth and began preparing for his first year at boarding school.

At Groton, Amir quickly realized that the pecking order he had learned on the streets of Washington didn't translate. "My biggest thing was, like, can't get punked . . . You know, like someone walks up and, like, pushes you or something, or someone looks at you wrong, and if you let them get away with that, then you're punked."