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Brothers seek a way up and out

Bus 19

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 28, 2011|By Billy Baker

Johnny Huynh (foreground) and his brother, George, ride the bus every weekday… (Yoon S. Byun/globe Staff )

Fourth in a series of occasional articles chronicling the people, and the world, of Bus 19.

It’s 6:30 in the morning. The bus will be there in 15 minutes, and as usual George Huynh is still sleeping. He’ll sleep as late as he can. Teenage late. Ten minutes is all he says he needs, and he can pull it off. He showers at night, and eats breakfast at school because he likes that food better and, unlike at home, he knows there will be food there.

His older brother, Johnny, is already up and ready. He was awake until 2 doing his homework, but is always up in time to make sure George doesn’t push it too late. He watches for George’s light to come on; he’ll knock if it’s getting close.

With 10 minutes to spare, the light comes on and George shuffles down the dark hallway to the bathroom. He moves quietly. His older sister is still sleeping. So is his mother; or at least the door to her bedroom is shut. It’s usually shut.

With two minutes to spare, the brothers head down the stairs, past the second-floor unit that always reeks of weed, and out onto a cold morning on Geneva Avenue. The blue lights of police cars that rake the street many nights are gone and a pale blue dawn is spreading behind the three-deckers across the street.

The bus stop for the No. 19 is directly across the street from their house. This is the MBTA bus that goes from Fields Corner and Grove Hall in Dorchester to Dudley and Ruggles in Roxbury, connecting the dots between neighborhoods where struggling to make it is the norm.

But as Johnny looks down the street toward Fields Corner, he is looking for a different Bus 19, one that will carry him and George out of those neighborhoods. For once a day, the 19 becomes a charter bus to Boston Latin School.

Johnny spots the bus making its way up Geneva Avenue, and moves toward the street to signal the driver. Sometimes the driver will miss them and keep going. Johnny is 17, a junior in high school, and George is a 15-year-old sophomore, but they are small. They are easy to miss.

They board and immediately it feels like a different place. At the front, kids are playing chess on a portable board. The rest of the seats are full of kids reading or doing homework or sleeping. Most of them are white kids from the Irish-Catholic neighborhoods of Dorchester; few have been handed much in life.

Since seventh grade, this has been George and Johnny’s routine. Wake up on their own. Get themselves on the bus. Go to school. Work extraordinarily hard.

They do this because they have been promised something by Boston Latin School, something they both desperately want - a better life - and they are trying to study their way there. They are two of the top students in the city; theirs is the kind of Geneva Street story you just don’t often hear.