Beginning in grade nine, I commuted every day on the Q35 bus from Queens to Brooklyn, straight down Flatbush Avenue to Midwood High School. Midwood had a magnet program that formed half the school, attracting kids from all over the city; the other half consisted of kids from near the school that couldn’t get in otherwise, and it made the school severely segregated –one program a model working- and middle-class mosaic, the other one almost completely West Indian and poorer. Gym was the only democratizing, and extremely fraught, force. 3,000 kids in one building in the middle of Brooklyn, sorting through adolescence and societal fissures together and all at once in 1990s New York.