Prometheus 6

Yeah, it's a bag of stuff I could say about the randomness of this rescue, and how many other wonders like this young lady are lost.

Maybe I can just let it lay with that last sentence.

Published: June 28, 2004

Then she was still commuting from a homeless shelter in Queens to her high school honors program in the Bronx, Tabitha F.'s yearning to soar sometimes made the burdens of poverty even harder to bear. Reading "Great Expectations" in her shelter bunk bed, with her mother and four younger siblings sleeping nearby, she said she identified with Pip, the poor boy in the Charles Dickens novel, "when he runs away and starts to cry because he realizes his position in life."

Could she really make it into college? Would her family find a home? After pulling through hardship and sexual danger, would she be derailed by poverty despite all her promise?

Tabitha, whose perilous adolescence was chronicled in a March 8 article in The New York Times, is now living the kind of happy ending that Dickens often gave his readers, along with the real-life complications that endure between the lines.

On Friday, she graduated from a college-bound program at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. The day before, after 16 months in a Salvation Army shelter, her family moved into a spacious subsidized apartment in the Bronx. Next week, she is off to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., which has accepted her to a four-year liberal arts program on its most generous scholarship.

And she will travel there in style: on the private jet of a benefactor who has pledged to underwrite all additional college costs, so that Tabitha can graduate debt free.

The article about Tabitha was part of a series examining the reasons behind a nationwide decline in teenage pregnancy. The series also discussed experts' fears that the decline could be reversed, and Tabitha's case illustrated the way poverty stacks the odds. Her history includes a sexual assault that took place because she lacked money for a cab, the loss of her virginity to a young man who gave her a place to sleep after her family's eviction, and a decision to drop the birth control patch because it cost too much.

After the article was published, many readers responded, as one put it, "to her indomitable spirit" as much as to her vulnerability. She had started a literacy program in the homeless shelter, joined a theater youth troupe and impressed her teachers with her love of literature and political ideals. Along with gratitude for the gifts, letters and personal help that poured in from readers, Tabitha said she was now feeling a mix of conflicting emotions.

"I'm scared, happy, sad and depressed and excited, all in one melting pot," Tabitha, now 18, said after her first night in the apartment, for which she co-signed the lease. "My own room - finally! And I'm leaving. Sometimes I feel like I'm deserting my mother."