The Invisible Student

Ambrose curls up on the carpet, makes a pillow of his backpack. Autumn has chilled the night air. There’s no heat. He pulls his hooded sweatshirt over his head. There are no sweet dreams, only the lullaby of sirens outside. Gunshots. He shoves aside the fear to make way for sleep.

With no alarm clock, he has trained himself to wake early. He knows it’s morning if he sees the city buses or kids on the street. Ambrose walks two blocks to 31st Street and Humboldt Avenue North and catches the school bus to Washburn High School. There, he showers quickly down in the locker room, where he’ll join his football teammates later for practice, dresses, and heads to his first-period class. So begins another school day.

Ambrose Achua is a seventeen-year-old junior at Washburn High without a home. Homeless, but that’s not how he sees it. “To me, homeless is the guy with the ends of the fingers cut off his gloves, all huddled up, with a long beard asking everybody for change,” he says. “I tell people I’m ‘out on my own.’ ”

Ambrose is handsome and muscular with dark brown skin and long eyelashes that curl over bright eyes. He likes to play video games, plug into his MP3 player and hang out at the mall. Sometimes he does his homework, sometimes he doesn’t. He’s wary around strangers, but once he warms to someone, he speaks quickly and articulately.

Ambrose fought with his mom. After stints with an older brother, with his grandparents, and in a shelter, Ambrose moved in with his older sister in Minneapolis, where he had been born and lived seven years before his mom moved to Des Moines. His father, who had never married his mother, lives in North Carolina, but Ambrose didn’t want to have to start over there. His sophomore year, he enrolled at Washburn, where he stayed out of trouble, earned As and Bs, played football, and ran track. But he wasn’t happy. His sister, almost twenty years older, bossed him too much.

When the school year ended, Ambrose returned to his mom’s house in Iowa. That lasted a week. After another fight, Ambrose left to live with an aunt in Ames. His aunt wanted him to spend his junior year in school there, but Ambrose was determined to return to Washburn in time to play football. “I was tired of moving around school to school,” he says. “I wanted to stay in one school.”

He announced his plan to ride his bicycle to Minneapolis, more than 200 miles north. No way, people said. That’ll take you three, four days. No, it won’t, he replied. “People tell me I’m hardheaded because I don’t listen to what they tell me to do,” he says. “I’m very determined. Whatever I feel needs to be done, I’m going to do what I need to do.”

He made it a little more than thirty miles up I–35 on his blue Mongoose mountain bike before a cop pulled him over and called his mom to fetch him. But Ambrose wouldn’t give up. He hitched a ride with some neighbors headed to the Mall of America and landed in Minneapolis. On his own. Homeless.