Prize Pupil

But at Groton, he noticed boys pushing each other, wrestling and jumping on each other's backs, and none of it seemed hostile. Even when there was a conflict, it was solved differently. "At Groton, you talk out your problems, which I at first didn't want to do because I'm so used to fighting," Amir says. But the boys didn't fistfight -- they wrestled. "And, like, afterwards," he says, incredulously, "they shook hands and went to Denny's."

For the first time, Amir was exposed to preppy styles (pastel shirts with turned-up collars, khakis and flip-flops) and to cultural phenomena (the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) that his classmates took for granted. Classes were different, too. Work that would have earned an A in Washington was unacceptable at Groton. So was certain behavior. "Mr. Crowley, my history teacher -- on the first day of class I was chewing gum, and he just stopped me and said: 'Please don't chew gum. I teach children, not cattle.' I kind of blew him off and said, 'My bad,' and he's, like, 'My bad?'"

Amir can't recall being homesick--most likely, he says, because he'd never had a real home. He bonded with his roommate Jason Oxner, of Canada. "He had an accent, I had an accent; I'd laugh at his, he'd laugh at mine."

Oxner, now 20, says he had never met anyone like Amir, who took a while "before he started trusting people. But we found that once he liked you . . . he was the best friend you had, and he would do anything to protect you."A few months later, they got a third roommate, Ian, whom Amir describes as "a tea-and-crumpet guy."

Ian and Amir couldn't have come from more disparate backgrounds. "He went to yacht clubs; I went to the street corners. I played ball in the street; he played squash," Amir says. Yet the two clicked, Amir says, because neither tried to be something other than what he was.

"I think that's why I like Ian so much, because Ian is Ian, no matter where he is. Like Ian and I were on the subway, in the Bronx, heading to the zoo. And Ian was just talking, wearing his pastels, and I was just kind of noticing how everyone was staring at him, but he didn't care, the same way I was at Groton."

He pauses, trying to sum up Ian. "Like, he would call people petty-minded worms, which I thought was funny."

Back in Washington, Hill fretted. Amir's first grades were barely passing. She sent him a letter saying that it was a good start but that she knew he could do better. She called the school each week to check on him.

Kappenhagen worried, too, though less about Amir's grades than about whether he would feel socially isolated in a place with so few poor and minority kids. "I was really concerned that some white kid would say something horrible to him, and Amir wouldn't be able to hold back his temper."

There were times when this almost happened, especially in the beginning. People could barely understand his heavy slang, Amir says, and some were rude about it. Amir remembers a wealthy boy from Washington -- "a real bitter snob" -- saying hostile things, "Like, 'Hey, so you're from the projects in D.C., eh?'" Others provoked him in a different way. "You know how there are some white guys who dress up and try to act black? 'What's up dawg,' and 'Yo, what's up.' " Amir hated that phony ghetto persona.

But Jason and Ian were always there to calm him down. And the verbal taunting and near-fights soon tapered off. Far from feeling isolated, Amir joined the student activities committee, acted in plays and joined the lacrosse, football and basketball teams.

During breaks, Amir returned to Kappenhagen and their cat, a skinny tabby named Fubar that each insists the other named. Kappenhagen went to Groton for parents' weekends. When they told people they were father and son, they'd get double takes.

Hill kept worrying, but she stopped calling as often after a Groton admissions officer said something that struck her. "She said, 'He is adjusting better than most of the kids here,'" Hill recalls, "and I realized that he's been adjusting all his life. This wasn't new for him."

On a mild day last winter, Amir stepped up to the lectern of Groton's St. John's Chapel, holding his life story in his hands. Sheltered by the chapel's 105-year-old stone walls, surrounded by 350 or so classmates and teachers, he gave his chapel talk, a tradition in which Groton seniors read a personal essay aloud.

Chapel talks are often lighthearted, making funny references to teachers or telling anecdotes about school. But Amir had some things to say that no one besides Jason and Ian had heard before.

He started by describing being grounded the week before for sleeping through too many classes. As punishment, some of his senior privileges were suspended, and he was not allowed to leave his dorm at night. Being grounded, he explained, wasn't a concept he'd grown up with.

"Up until the age of 10, me, my brother and my sister lived with our parents," he said. "The horrible thing is they never grounded us, sent us to bed without dessert, told us we couldn't go outside or any other cliche punishments. They abused us.

"I remember many times when the three of us would cower in a corner, screaming, as our father kicked and punched us until he tired himself out . . . I don't know what exactly caused him to think that the government was against him, but in his fits of paranoia, we were the ones that were accused of being spies and beaten for treason.

"Eventually, we feared for our lives. We were getting older, and our father was hitting harder. When I was 10 years old, me, my brother and my sister ran away from home . . . In seven years, I have been to four group homes, six foster homes and four facilities for foster kids with behavioral problems."

In the hushed chapel, Amir told of fighting and stealing, of shuttling between judges and lawyers. He described arriving at Groton, where everything was unfamiliar.

"Most of you that know me know that I'm not religious at all, but if there are such things as angels, Wanda Hill is definitely one of them. To this day, I haven't the slightest clue why she spent her valuable time and money on a kid like me, but it was her and my seventh-grade teacher Mr. Kappenhagen that completely changed my life. I still think I got into Groton because someone in the admissions office dropped a stack of papers and, somehow, my name got mixed up with some other kid's. No matter how I got into this school, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me."

By the end, many people were crying. Amir cried, too.

Over his final spring break from Groton, Amir strolls through his old neighborhood, past the homeless guys on Georgia Avenue NW, past Lion's Liquor and Spirits, past a sign advertising "Girls Girls." He is looking for a friend who might be hanging out in a vacant lot.

Half the people he passes say hello or give a nod. Amir likes that. "I love this place to death," he says. "It feels like home to me. But when I'm about 25, I don't want to be hanging around here." The trick, he says, is to "find a good mix of the Groton in me and the D.C. in me."

He ducks into a crumbling apartment building to visit his grandmother, a doll-like woman who is wearing a black plastic bag as an apron. Amir towers over her as she stirs spices into a pot of curried peas. She warns him not to be late for dinner, and he dips into a Caribbean lilt to reply: "Me know, Gramma, me know."

His cell phone rings -- the friend he's been looking for -- and his accent changes again. "Aw-ight," he murmurs. "I'm leavin' tomorrow, I was just tryin' to holler to you before I left."

Back at Groton, the gaps in his education continue to haunt him. He's caught up enough in most subjects to stay afloat. But he dropped chemistry in 10th grade after realizing it was over his head. And he needs a science class to graduate.

He's done all the reading for ecology and has gone to the teacher for help, but he still has a 56 average. The concepts are "just a huge jumble to me."

He pushes himself in the final weeks, meeting his teacher up to four times a day. He wakes up early and visits the vernal pool he is studying, wading shoulder deep into freezing water to try to catch wood frog larvae.

"People didn't see me for four weeks. I would stay in the library, miss lacrosse practice," he says. "I wanted to graduate from Groton, you see."

On a humid day in June, Hill sits on a stage beneath a white tent on Groton's velvety lawn. She has watched a dozen Groton graduations, but never participated in one until today. As a former board member, she is allowed to personally present Amir with his diploma.

Which he will be getting.

"I was just praying," Hill says, "please let him make it, please let him make it." Her prayer has been answered. Amir passed ecology with a 62. But he graduated with a 75 average, and he's been accepted to Ohio Wesleyan University.

Hill also faces big changes. For the past year, she has kept her usual hectic schedule: tutoring kids, administering tests, shuttling students to rural campuses. But hip-replacement surgery has slowed her down, and she wants to quit while she can still take cruises and spend time with her 1-year-old grandson, Charlie. Maybe, she says, she'll write a book about how to get into boarding school.

Amir and the other seniors fill in the front rows facing the stage. A weak breeze ripples the muggy air. Storm clouds roil somewhere far off, making the sunlight hazy and unreal. A Groton alumnus reads a long speech. A graduating senior makes another. A Newsweek reporter informs the crowd that John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill were not the best students even though they became great leaders.

Finally, the names are read. One by one, each student mounts the stairs, takes a diploma and steps down. M . . . N . . . O . . . When the headmaster reaches P, Hill, wearing a navy suit and white pearl-tone earrings, rises.

"Amir I. Paul."

His straw hat is tipped jauntily, his smile is huge. Hill's eyes are shining, and Amir falls into her arms. Fighting tears, she pats his back. Then she returns to her seat, and he marches down the steps, fist in the air, diploma in hand.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Hill picked Amir up from the house that he and Kappenhagen had shared in Petworth (Kappenhagen had taken a new job in San Francisco in the fall and had put the house on the market).

Amir knew of a breakfast place -- a restaurant across from Howard University. As they drove there, he spotted a young man on the street who looked familiar, someone Amir thought he'd fought before he went to Groton. But, in the restaurant, that chapter of his life seemed far away.

Hill says they talked about how far Amir had come and where he was going. She advised him, in her motherly way, not to do anything to spoil the progress he'd made. He smiled and said, "Yeah, yeah."

But Hill isn't so worried about Amir these days. In his first semester at Ohio Wesleyan, he earned almost all A's. He plays intramural basketball, has joined the College Democrats, has traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild storm-damaged homes with Black Men of the Future, and he plans to tutor elementary school children with the Columbus Initiative. As a dorm representative, he attends weekly student government meetings, and he is thinking of majoring in economic management and political science. "I want to go into politics and combat the gentrification of Washington, D.C.," he says. He has a summer internship lined up at BET through Hill's son Stephen.

When he visits his old neighborhood, people take notice of him. "I always thought that a lot of people would say, 'Oh, nerdy'" because of his college studies, Amir says. "But it's not like that. I've always been praised for, like, trying to make it out. I've got friends, you know, who smoke marijuana. But the dealers are, like, 'No, I'm not selling it to you because you can't mess up the brain.'"

No one Amir knows from Washington has gone to college -- except his siblings, who surmounted legal and emotional troubles to do so. His brother studies business at Parks College in Ballston, and his sister, who is married, studies child psychology and Spanish at Virginia Commonwealth University. Some of his old friends and classmates have gone to jail, or even been killed. For many of them, just staying out of trouble and paying the bills is a triumph, something that Amir, who has not seen his parents in almost 10 years, recognizes. Often, he says, "I have a lot more respect for some people in D.C. than I do for people at Groton. Being millionaires versus being someone who's helping his mother through crack addiction."

After breakfast, Amir asked Hill to drop him off at the barbershop, one of his old haunts. She says she smiled when he told her why. "He said, 'I walk in there, and they'll make glowing remarks about me.' Because they know what a hard time he'd had. They see him as a winner, because he's going to college. And he said they would welcome him and look at him, I guess, with pride -- one of theirs who had made good."

Tara Bahrampour is a Post education reporter.