On DC’s green-line train headed to Branch Avenue sits a young girl gone weary by the teenage blues and the 3:15 pm school dismissal. She sits on the last of an eight-car train, slouched and coiled — her legs in a pretzel.

By the circumference of her hooped ear-rings, the length of her braids, and the style of her school uniform, I can tell that she is no older than 14 — a DC Public Schools student who spends her school day playing an eighth-grade lab rat under the sterile watch of Chancellor Michelle Rhee for the costly scientific experiment of “education-reform.” If only someone were to ask her what she learns.

Her book-bag is stuffed with materials; a pink ruler veers out of the open zipper. And while a number of large textbooks make their rectangular imprints, she has too much on her mind to take one out for reading.

She munches on a handful of sun-flower seeds, and I can just about predict which of the pending train stations will be her stop. She wears the empty gaze of a girl from Anacostia, with the skin-color of Congress Heights, and the sense of oblivion one can only earn from Southern Avenue.

Surely, one of these stations must be her stop. As if in a forbidden despair, she dissolves her attention into the window, where nothing more than a reflection and the routine of a dark subway-tunnel entertains the moment. She sits motionless, clearly absent of the hope one would expect a young person to have, living in the same city as President Obama.

The train slithers into the Anacostia station; her peers crowd the door with an after-school ruckus. It is their stop. The doors open and they all rush out while she remains entranced. One of her peers yells, “Tanika cmon’!” She lethargically returns from a self-induced hypnosis, and nearly misses her chance at the platform, as the train’s doors chime of closure. The train is now empty of young students, and everyone breathes a united sigh of relief.

For one evening it seems that no one would have to bare the onus of having to press the train’s emergency button for a teenage dispute gone tragically wrong. But today, one year after the election of President Obama, no one on this train is thanking their Commander-in-Chief for this rare evening where young people train-goers will not become an evening news segment for Channel 8.

We sit in our seats pretending that we understand why the president chooses to pre-occupy himself with a war in Afghanistan, instead of the war happening in the very streets of DC, east of the Anacostia River and south of Pennsylvania Ave—the one between young angry black bodies and 9mm bullets.

And as we keep the casual look of “voting citizen” on our faces, we ponder why political pollsters are too chicken to ask Tanika if she thinks National Security has something to do with a place outside of the boundaries of her neighborhood or the classrooms of her school.

One year later, we pretend not to notice a disenchanted Tanika sitting in a voluntary loneliness on a rush-hour train, in the middle of a city where there is too much diabetes, HIV, and shrapnel in the blood. We also pretend not to notice that our president has a discourse about health care that neglects this fact.

A year ago today, like Alice in Wonderland, Tanika had been willing, like all of us, to follow Obama curiously down his rabbit hole as he hopped away feverishly, lamenting running late (she thought “for change”).

And just like Alice, Tanika now finds herself in a long hallway of locked doors, where the very door promising opportunity is too small for her to fit through. But unlike Alice, this place of opportunity behind locked doors is all but déjà vu—a familiar mirage of life growing up in DC’s inner-city.

Surely, it’s nothing to cry about. But, Tanika never imagined that one year later, her new president would have led her to this wretched place, and that all she would ever see from him was his backside getting farther and farther away.

As my stop approaches, I can’t help but notice that the train grows emptier as it gets closer to the end of the line — each passenger having put his or her faith in the ride for as long as they could, until they felt that the train could no longer get them any closer to where they hoped to be.

This emptying train is not all that different from the Obama presidency — a fast moving apparatus on rails once crowded with committed riders believing the destination — now a speeding vessel with too much standing room, with promises of emptiness by the time it reaches the end of the line.

When my stop arrives, another rambunctious group of young students linger eagerly at the edge of the platform. As I head toward the escalator, they board the train; the doors chime and gently close. As I hear the train departing, I begin to worry, for I know that the train will lead them down its rabbit hole — a tunnel of expectations, speeding along as if it were running late, getting farther and farther away from where the young students first started.

No telling how many Tanikas are among them.

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