It was at a two-week-long summer program at Emory University called Blueprint where I had the chance to meet Demetrius, a seventeen-year-old boy from Florida. He had a full head of nappy hair and was always seen wearing about four hats every week to avoid people commenting about his hair and how much he needed a haircut. He always wore these big golden circular glasses that looked similar to the ones Harry Potter wears. Throughout the program Demetrius always wore a tie-dye Odd Future T-shirt or a pink T-shirt and black jeans. His clothes always had to be tucked in during certain times of the day because that was the trend. He would wear these shirts and pants not only because that’s all he had packed but that’s what he preferred. He had a pair of white Vans with the phrase “Free Gucci Mane” written all over with black Sharpie marker. Demetrius’s appearance was overall interesting. People would always call him Steve Urkel because of his big circular glasses, tucked-in shirt, and his pants being waist high making it look like he was wearing floods. However, at the end of the day, he never really cared about others’ opinions on his style because it was a big part of him and made him quite different.
During the whole program Demetrius always had the best attitude because he made the best of everything, whether it was just relaxing with friends, working in the classroom or even participating in some of the activities at night. Demetrius always enjoyed going skateboarding on his beaten-up black and red skateboard whenever he had the chance. He would skateboard to the dining hall, the hallways of the dorms, his classes, and even to places in town like Starbucks or Chipotle because at the end of the day, as he always said, “Skateboarding is life.” Towards the end of the program, he tried teaching me how to skateboard, but I couldn’t grasp his technique because of how scared I was and there wasn’t enough time. Demetrius also enjoyed playing video games. He was the only kid I knew to bring a Playstation 4 to a college program for two weeks. As weird as it was at first, he ended up bringing all the guys in our dorm together and helped our bond become a lot stronger. Whenever Demetrius wasn’t doing this, he always liked talking to Sam, our 6’5" room advisor who played college basketball, as well as flirting with all the girls upstairs from our dorm by coming up with some of the corniest pick-up lines I personally had ever heard. Some of his lines were funny and clever, but none of the girls seemed interested or even entertained by the lines. Whether cracking jokes at Chipotle or teaching people tricks on his skateboard, Demetrius made the program quite special to some people, including me.
One night in our dorm room, Demetrius and I talked about some of the cases with police brutality because it was a topic that had been important to us and our families. As we got further into our discussion, I noticed he started to get quite into it but not in a good way. He started to get angry, and soon his eyes started to get really watery. This was weird for me because I’d never seen him mad, and it was all new to me. I was thinking, what could I have said to get him like this?
“ I haven’t told this to anyone here but……. my brother is Trayvon Martin."
At first I refused to believe this, and he could tell from the expression on my face that I wasn’t believing it. He pulled up his laptop, went to Google images, and looked up his name in the search bar. As the results came in, I started to see photos of my roommate from 2012 with tears rushing down his face as his mother is comforting him. I was in complete shock and my body just went completely cold and numb.
I look at Demetrius and he has a couple of tears coming down his face, but he’s standing his ground and being strong by acting as if nothing happened. The whole time I’m still trying to comprehend what just happened and I’m at a loss for words. As he looks at my reaction, he tells me, “Please don’t let this change your opinion of me. I’ve had people change because of this situation in both good and terrible ways. It’s not fun and this, of course, has made me depressed and it’s traumatized me. The worst part of all this is that some don’t see me as Demetrius anymore. They just see me as Trayvon’s brother, I don’t want that, I want my own identity.”
“I’m so sorry and of course I’d never let this change my opinion of you,” I respond. “This has made me gain a whole level of respect for you and it’s made our bond stronger.” I get up from my bed, look at Demetrius and give him a hug.
Then we both stopped talking about the situation and went back to our daily routine.
Demetrius taught me a lot during my time there. He taught me how to excel at Naruto on the Playstation 4, he showed me his ways of using corny pick-up lines, but most importantly he taught me that you can’t let your worst moments get to you and that overcoming those moments makes a huge impact on your life. Whenever we watched movies such as Fruitvale Station in my psychology class, he shockingly wouldn’t show any emotion, which is significant because that film deals with police brutality. Whenever I think of Demetrius, the first thing that comes to my mind isn’t the Trayvon Martin case but his white Vans shoes that say “Free Gucci Mane.”