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By the time the summer before my junior year rolled around, I was ready for football to start. The stadium was at the new campus and that was where we met to kick off the football season.

Like a lot of high schools, Briarcrest had a group of kids who played a sport every season. They would go from football to basketball to track or soccer or whatever else was available. What was so great about Briarcrest, though, was that most of the guys didn't act like the typical high school jock-jerks you see in teen movies. They were actually great people who made me feel welcome and helped look out for me. I had gotten to know some guys a lot better with basketball and track, but I started to make some solid friendships once football practice started that summer.

Summer also marked the beginning of another important change in my life. While my teachers were working on my academic needs, I was still left with the very basic problem of where to live. I had decided I couldn't keep living with Tony and Steve all the time because I felt like I'd worn out my welcome with other members of the family. But I didn't really have an alternative. That was when a couple of wonderful families stepped up to help me. There was Matt Saunders, who was one of the coaches for the football team. He let me stay at his home a few times. There was the Sparks family, whose son Justin was on the team with me. They had an absolutely enormous house very close to Briarcrest's new campus. They invited me to stay with them a lot, and it was my first real look into the side of Memphis I'd never known: the lives of wealthy white people. But amazingly, with the Sparks family as with just about everyone else at Briarcrest, our racial difference was not even an issue.

The family that did the most for me during that time, though, was the Franklins. Quinterio Franklin was on the football team, and I felt like I had more in common with him than pretty much anyone else at the school. He was black and his family was not very well-off financially and, to be honest, that just felt more comfortable to me. The Franklins lived about thirty miles south of Memphis, so it was a long ride to school each morning and a long drive back in the evenings--especially after games. But they didn't seem to mind having an extra person crammed into their small trailer house. I'm sure I made things feel even smaller, but it was so nice to be with a family that made me feel at home. They let me keep some clothes there, and they were generous with their food. They had nothing to gain by taking me in; they didn't do it for any reason other than that they had big hearts and they knew I needed a place to go.

At that point, one of the challenges I was facing was knowing that if I went back to Alabama Plaza, where my mother was living, or if I went back to my favorite barbershop for a straight-razor shave, which helps me avoid painful razor bumps, I was now an outsider.

My mother was fine with the fact that I was going to a different school, but she didn't really care that it was more demanding and made me responsible for my work in a totally new way, and she didn't even seem that interested in what I was achieving athletically. If Tony picked her up before a game or a meet, she would go to cheer me on. But otherwise, she simply didn't get involved. It felt like she didn't actually have any interest in what I was doing or even where I was living.

I felt like an outsider around a lot of other people, too. I was now going to a fancy private school on the other side of town. Some people wanted to tease me about it and other people saw it as a kind of betrayal--like I wasn't being true to who I was or where I came from. I just didn't have much of a place in the old neighborhood. So I owe a lot to the Saunders family and the Sparks family, but especially the Franklin family for opening up their homes to me and letting me stay there for as long as I needed. They will always have a special place in my heart for the amazing kindness that they showed