In the predawn darkness, Gerson Gonzalez wakes without an alarm.

He always wakes this way. He lies silently in bed for a moment under his blanket. The January air is cold. Gerson showers quickly and dresses in the dark in the back room of the narrow trailer.

The trip to North High School will require a bus, then light rail, then another bus. But he wants to be there early. He is always hungry in the morning, and school means a free breakfast.

Gerson lives in this trailer with two other young men. They are all seniors in high school, and they are all in the country illegally.In the aftermath of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which made it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant, Gerson's father was deported. Jonathan Labrada's family moved away, and Alejandro Sau's family, such as it was, began to fall apart.

The boys moved into this trailer on the west side of Phoenix with a plan to finish high school and begin their lives. They would find a way to pay the bills. They would be brothers.

Gerson throws his backpack over his shoulder, steps out of the trailer and shuts the door silently behind him.

Chapter One

Alejandro Sau had been alone before. When he was a boy in Mexico, he said, his mother left him at a friend's house and didn't come back. That friend took him, and his two sisters, to a home for abandoned children in Sonora. He lived there for a year until his grandmother came to take care of them.

His mother later returned. But after a few days, Alejandro said, she took his younger sister and left again. She said she was just running an errand.

In November 2007, when Alejandro was 15, his grandmother paid to use someone else's visa for him to cross the border. She put him in a car filled with people he did not know. Alejandro was afraid.

"It was very quiet. Nobody talked," he said. "I didn't know their names."

The car dropped Alejandro at a gas station in Nogales, Ariz. His grandmother picked him up and drove him to his new home in Phoenix. He enrolled at North High School.

They lived in a one-bedroom apartment behind a shopping center. His grandmother cleaned hotel rooms, and Alejandro helped on weekends.

In summer 2010, his grandmother lost her job. The new immigration law made finding work more difficult for her. Alejandro began to feel like a burden.

That fall, during his senior year, Alejandro decided to move out so his grandmother could get a smaller apartment and not need to feed him. He called his friend Gerson.

In 2006, lawmaker Russell Pearce introduced legislation making it an Arizona state crime to be an illegal immigrant.

He proposed a law like it again in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In 2009, Pearce wrote that his bill was necessary to stop an "illegal invasion." The law, he wrote, would mean "less crime, lower taxes, smaller class sizes, shorter lines in our emergency rooms and reduced deaths, murders, maiming, drugs, home invasions, carjacking and kidnappings. There will be fewer jobs taken from Americans and increased wages."

In January 2010, Pearce introduced the idea again, as Senate Bill 1070.

In February, the bill passed the state Senate, as it had before.

Then, on March 27, an Arizonan named Robert Krentz was checking fences on his ranch in Cochise County when he was shot and killed. Authorities followed tracks from the scene 20 miles south to the Mexican border.

Suddenly, SB 1070 found traction. People were frustrated and angry. Polls began showing widespread support for the bill.

On April 19, an amended version of SB 1070 passed the state House.

On April 23, Gov. Jan Brewer signed it into law.

Gerson Gonzalez grew up in Iztapalapa, a borough of Mexico City. His mother sold trinkets and candy at a corner store to earn a living.

In 2007, his mother told him she had uterine cancer and was afraid she would not be able to care for him. She told him he had to go live with his father in the United States.

"I was afraid I would never see her again," Gerson said. "I did not want to come. I could not understand why she wanted me to go."

Gerson was 15 years old at the time, no longer a boy but not yet a man.

In March of that year, Gerson stood next to the fence in Nogales, Sonora, and looked through the slats.

The houses on the other side looked bigger. To him, the United States looked like a dream.

His father -- a man he had never met -- was in Phoenix.

Maybe we will become close, Gerson thought. Maybe he will call me mijo.

That night, he jumped the fence with a coyote and four other men and started walking north.

He carried a gallon of water, a gallon of Gatorade and a can of beans. He thought of the crossing as an adventure, a mission.

The first attempt failed. The second attempt succeeded. The coyote crammed him into a truck and drove him from southern Arizona to a Phoenix house, where he stayed until his father came and paid for him.

Gerson remembers going to his father's apartment and eating a heaping plate of food. He sat down on the bed and fell asleep before he could untie his shoes.

He had walked into a life he had not expected. His father had another family, and Gerson had half-siblings.

Gerson was angry that his mother had sent him. But he was here. He enrolled at North High School and started learning English.

Gerson lived first with his father's other family. Then, when his father and girlfriend broke up, he and his father moved out and lived on their own in a one-bedroom apartment off Indian School Road and 12th Street.

In September 2010, Gerson's friend Alejandro called him, needing a place to stay.

By then, the two were 18. Alejandro moved in with Gerson and his father.

Alejandro was the only one of the boys who owned a cellphone. In October, the phone rang. Gerson's father, also an illegal immigrant, was calling -- from Mexico. He had been picked up and deported.

The two boys could not stay in the apartment for long. Two weeks later, they called their friend Jonathan.

As 2010 progressed, families living illegally in Arizona faced new pressures.

The economy was worsening, and as of July, suddenly the state had the toughest immigration law in the country.

"Things became unmanageable for these families," said Nina Rabin, a law professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It was so disruptive, people could not stay here."

Rabin is the co-author of a report released in September 2011, based on a survey of 70 students, parents and teachers in Pima County.

It was a small sampling, but Rabin's findings were consistent: In the face of the law, families were separating, with parents making the choice to leave their children in Arizona to continue school.

She interviewed a school counselor who specialized in working with students without parents.

In a typical year, the counselor reported working with 40 to 60 students. In 2010-11, she worked with 120.

The passage of SB 1070 was not the sole reason for the departures. But it was, Rabin found, the last straw. She called it the "determinative factor."

"Arizona," she said, "became unlivable."

In 2006, when Jonathan Labrada was 14, he and his mother took a bus north and walked across the desert to join his father in Arizona.

He was picked up by Border Patrol agents once and then again. On his third attempt he made it.

His younger brother and sister, who had both been born in the United States but lived in Mexico City, came later. The family lived in a two-bedroom mobile home, in a trailer park off West Van Buren Street and 31st Avenue in Phoenix.

Jonathan went to North High School, began learning English and joined the wrestling team.

After the immigration law passed, Jonathan's father moved to a small town in central Texas, where work was easier to find. Jonathan and his mother, brother and sister stayed in Phoenix.

In October 2010, his friends Gerson and Alejandro arrived at their door.

Yes, Jonathan's mother told them. You can stay here.

Jonathan, Gerson and Alejandro shared a room in the back of the trailer. Jonathan's little brother slept on a bed in the kitchen. His mother and sister slept in the front room.

Jonathan's father sent money, the boys went to school and Jonathan's mother cooked for them every night. It was the most stability Gerson and Alejandro had felt in years.

But it was short-lived. Weeks after the others moved in, Jonathan's mother sat him down. We will all move to Texas, she said, and we will be a family again.

Jonathan said no. He wanted to graduate from North High School, the place where he learned English and made friends. The teachers there cared for him. And he wanted one more season wrestling for the Mustangs.

Over fall break, he drove his mother, brother and sister to Texas in the family's aging minivan. Then he turned around and drove back to Phoenix.

He and his two friends had a plan.

Jonathan, Gerson and Alejandro would stay together. The trailer would be their home.

Chapter Two

At first, the three teenagers living on their own without rules or limits had a terrific time. They played video games whenever they wanted. They had friends over whenever they felt like it. They played music as loud as they could.

They would clean whenever they thought it was necessary. It never felt necessary.

Alejandro, now without his grandmother telling him to go to sleep, watched movies late into the night.

In the mornings, Gerson and Jonathan would yell to him: "�Lev�ntate, lev�ntate, lev�ntate!" "Get up, get up, get up!"

Gerson read books and thought about his mother and worried about her cancer.

Jonathan wrestled. After a strong junior year, he thought he could win state at 145 pounds. His coach did, too. A good senior season, the coach told him, could open doors for him at colleges.

At school, their teachers helped them. Jane McNamara, who taught them English, tried to make sure they were eating. Heidi Garcia, who taught Spanish literature, was smart and warm and demanding.

She had known "these boys," as she called them, since their first day at school four years earlier.

"When they came here, I came here, too," Garcia said. "They were freshmen; I was new."

The boys usually stayed on campus late to finish their homework because they had realized that no schoolwork would be done once they got home.

Jonathan and Gerson could not cook at all. Alejandro could, but his meals made a mess. There would always be time, they thought, to do the dishes later.

Just before Thanksgiving, the boys received a free turkey from school. They had big plans for roasting the bird and having a traditional dinner. On Thanksgiving morning, a neighbor told them they needed to thaw the frozen bird.

So it came out of the freezer, and they waited. It stayed rock hard for hours.

Finally, they decided they needed to put the turkey in the oven to start warming it up. That is when they learned that their oven, which nobody could remember turning on since Jonathan's mother left, no longer worked.

They took their turkey to a Food City grocery store. Within minutes in the parking lot, they approached a woman, who had two young children, and gave her the turkey. She was thrilled.

That night, the boys ate spaghetti and drank coffee. And they laughed at their first Thanksgiving together as a family.

By the end of January 2011, Jonathan was worrying about the rent.

The trailer belonged to his parents, but the cost of the space at the trailer park, plus the utility hookups, was $400 per month.

The three boys were facing adult decisions.

They were working for a commercial cleaning agency that had contracts with big Valley hotels. They used fake papers to secure employment, but because none of them could work full time, they rarely got calls to come in.

They tried to find work as laborers on weekends.

Jonathan thought they needed to work more to pay for rent and insurance for the van.

"We didn't have enough work. It has been very difficult," Jonathan said. "I didn't know if we were going to make it."

Teenage boys, they were hungry nearly all of the time.

"We had to pay the lights instead of food," Gerson said. "We had to buy less food to pay the bill."

All three boys received free meals at high school. Five free breakfasts and five free lunches per week. But dinners and the weekends were another matter. Groceries were expensive.

The boys learned from a school counselor that they qualified for food from a food bank. At their age, as high-school students and without parents present, they were considered essentially homeless.

They began going to St. Mary's Food Bank Alliance on West Thomas Road.

Clients at the food bank are given one of three numbers: a 2, a 4 or a 6. The greater the need, the higher the number, the bigger the box of food.

The first time they went they were 2s.

In January, the volunteers told them they were 4s.

There would be more food, and they were excited, bumping fists in celebration.

Then they looked around them. They looked so strong compared with the others in line.

Alejandro was the first to notice. He grew quiet and lowered his eyes. Gerson was next. He saw a woman leaving with her small child and looked away. Jonathan smiled sheepishly to the woman on the other side of the counter when he gave her his paperwork. Thank you, he said, and tried to look anywhere but at her.

A volunteer with a grocery cart helped them walk the food out to the parking lot.

The back of the van was nearly filled with the bounty.

They looked at the bags of frozen chicken and loaves of wheat bread, the boxes of frozen vegetables and bags of apples and oranges.

As they shut the door to the back of the van, Gerson grabbed a bag of sugar cookies and ripped it open. They stood in the parking lot and ate the entire bag. They were hungry.

At home they unloaded the van and started eating in earnest.

Alejandro was still the only one who could cook. But by late January, he was cooking less often. He said he just didn't feel like it.

Tensions in Arizona had been rising even before SB 1070 was signed.

Talk-radio shows and letters to the editor raged about problems caused by illegal immigrants.

The death of the rancher made things louder.

"That changed things," Gerson said. "I felt like people were looking at me differently. I didn't kill that man. I have never hurt anybody."

It reminded Gerson of the isolation he felt in his first months in the United States. He spoke only two words of English on the day he arrived at North: "yes" and "no."

All of the boys learned English as a second language in Mrs. McNamara's class. Gerson was certain that when he learned to communicate, he would be embraced.

"I learned English very quickly because I thought it was my duty to learn and contribute to this country," Gerson said.

Then he began to understand what some people were saying.

"As soon as I learned English," he said, "I realized people don't want us here."

Mrs. Garcia, the Spanish-literature teacher, says the day SB 1070 was signed into law was devastating for some of the students at North.

"They became darker, more somber," she said. "SB 1070 was like 9/11. It was a destruction, not of buildings but of dreams."

Alejandro, Gerson and Jonathan, she thought, were better prepared than most to deal with it.

"These three boys had each other, and they had a place to be, a place to be," Garcia said. "We helped them as much as we could. But they were together, and they were in a place."

Chapter Three

After Jonathan's parents moved to Texas, he found work cleaning dishes at a steakhouse at a Phoenix resort.

He used fake papers, and in spring 2011, the height of the tourist season, he worked more days than not.

The pay was low, but with each shift came a real perk: a free meal made by the chefs.

"The food is so good," Jonathan said, placing his hand on his stomach. Jonathan, chronically late for every appointment, always made it in time for a meal before work.

He began to think that he would be able to become a supervisor and perhaps make enough money to enroll at a community college after graduation.

Gerson had a grade-point average of 3.9 but decided not to take the ACT in February with Jonathan, even though a counselor could arrange for him to take it for free.

He had never been a good student in Mexico before his mother, sick with cancer, sent him here. But he became one at North.

Still, Gerson decided he couldn't afford a four-year college. Even the classes at junior colleges didn't seem feasible.

"I can afford one class at a time, yes," Gerson said. "But I cannot study here. I want to be a neurosurgeon."

He thought he would need to return to Mexico and join the military to continue his education.

So, for now, no ACT.

"It didn't seem fair to take for free since I am leaving," Gerson said. "Somebody else should be allowed to take it."

He, too, paid for fake documents and found steady work cleaning office buildings at night.

It was the most money he had ever earned, and it felt good.

For the first time in his life, Gerson had a girlfriend. Her name was Alexis, and he could not talk about her without smiling.

In his junior year, they were both in the North High School Army Junior ROTC program.

"And now she likes me, too," he said, sitting at lunch at the school. His friends teased him mercilessly.

When Alexis approached the table, he stood up, straightened his shirt and held her hand.

The howling commenced.

Alejandro was at school less. In late January, he began to regularly miss classes.

He was thinking every day about his mother and why she abandoned him without ever saying goodbye.

Gerson and Jonathan couldn't rouse him anymore, even by shouting.

Through February, his attendance became worse.

Mrs. McNamara, who taught them English when they arrived on campus as freshmen, always had been an advocate and counselor. She made sure they were doing their homework.

And in their senior year, when they were suddenly on their own, she made sure they were eating enough food. She asked them about their families and their work and their futures. What will you do next? she would ask.

She always kept food in a drawer at her desk and made sure the boys would walk out of her classroom with a granola bar or a banana.

But not even "Ms. Mac" could get through to Alejandro.

"I don't feel like doing anything" was all he would offer in terms of explanation. "I don't want to be like this my whole life."

He said he would like to see his mother again but only to ask her why she left. "She said she would be right back. I don't get it," Alejandro said.

Sometimes, he would say he no longer considered her his mother at all. "When she left is when I really needed her," he said. "Not anymore."

Alejandro said he couldn't find motivation, couldn't get out of bed in the morning. He was tired all the time, and yet he could not sleep.

He knew these were symptoms of depression.

"I thought living in the trailer would be hard," Alejandro said. "And it is hard. I don't know. I was not counting on the depression."

By mid-March, he stopped going to school.

"I know what I should do," he said. "I just don't do it."

On March 22, Mrs. Garcia said that Alejandro was "off the rolls." Less than two months from graduation, he was a high-school dropout.

Alejandro started spending less time at the trailer and more time back at his grandmother's. There was always a couch for him there, and his grandmother was always happy to see him. She never told him he had to get out of bed.

"We don't know what to do. We cannot force him to go," Gerson said. "We get tired of it. At some point you have to do it yourself."

Each spring, the best students are honored at the North High School Academic Excellence Awards ceremony.

Seniors need to have at least a 3.7 grade-point average.

Gerson qualified easily.

The ceremony arrived at the end of March, a warm spring evening.

Before the event, a photographer gathered the group for a photo on the campus as the sun set. Moms and dads called their children's names to try to catch their attention. Gerson forced a smile.

At the start of the ceremony inside the auditorium, the lights dimmed. Gerson sat low in his chair.

Principal Laura Telles told the students that each award will come with a "parent pin," a token of appreciation for all the parents have done to help ensure their students' success.

"Without them, you are not here today," Telles said. Then she told the honorees to turn around. "Students," she said, "I would like you to look at your parents and give them a hand."

The students around Gerson waved from their seats. Their families clapped and cheered and yelled in response.

Gerson looked at his hands and clenched his jaw.

Jonathan, the wrestler, did not qualify for the awards. He had a 3.5 grade-point average.

He sat in the back of the room, waiting for the promised buffet.

He smiled as he heard his best friend's name called out and watched Gerson walk across the stage.

Finally, after the awards were presented, there was one last speaker. The evening was sponsored by Grand Canyon University, a small private school in west Phoenix. An admissions counselor from the school took the stage.

An education, Paige Nichols told the group, was for anyone who wanted to pursue one. Learning would set them apart, she said.

Look for opportunities and chase them down, she said. Work hard.

"You have a chance to set your own limits," Nichols said. "Choose them wisely."

It was boilerplate stuff.

The students before her were the best at the school. They were used to hearing these kinds of speeches. They were already ready to leave.

But Jonathan had never been to a ceremony like this one. He was sitting in the back, and he was listening.

Chapter Four

On the morning of April 5, 2011, four days before the most important night of his senior year, Jonathan realized he had to go shopping.

This would be his first and only prom -- "An Evening in Paris" was the theme -- and he wanted to look good.

He went to Ross Dress for Less and found a lavender shirt, a vest to accent all of the work he had done in the gym during wrestling, black shoes, a black tie and even new socks.

By Saturday evening, just hours before the dance, the trailer was nearly reverberating. Jonathan and Gerson and their friend Asrael were lifting weights and showering and fixing their hair just so.

Gerson was the best ironer, so he was busy.

"When I was little, I had to wear a uniform to school," Gerson said. "I can iron."

They were listening to music. Loud music. "Tu Me Matas," an overwrought love song by Mexican goth metal band Anabantha, exploded from the speakers.

The title means: You kill me. It is meant colloquially. It is about wanting somebody and how complicated that can be.

Between songs, the boys talked about their future. They had changed their minds a lot. Increasingly, they talked about leaving.

I'll probably go back to Mexico the day after graduation, Gerson said.

I may go to Texas to be with my family, Jonathan said. My father can find a lot of work there.

But on this night, they wanted to stay.

In school, Gerson was reading "Las Ataduras," "The Ties that Bind," by Carmen Mart�n Gaite. It's about dependency and loneliness and family.

"About how everybody in life chooses their own path," Gerson said. "We are only bound to people if we choose to be. It describes the way I feel about my mom. She needs me, and I need her. But you need to choose your own path."

Gerson had not seen his mother in four years. He knew that choosing to be with her would make him feel like a child.

And he was falling in love with Alexis.

As the sun set, a steady rain began to fall. The boys began to dress for the night.

First the dress pants and then the new dress shoes. They walked around the trailer as if they were on ice skates, their hands extended to the sides as if they might fall. They grimaced and laughed.

Next came the shirts and the ties.

Each stood before the mirror, one end of the tie in each hand.

They crossed their arms before them, making ups and unders, their faces twisted in concentration, each attempt a greater failure than the one before.

They began looking at the clock. They still had to pick up their dates, go to dinner, then make it out to the Buttes, the Tempe resort that was the site of the prom.

They faced the mirror, then they faced each other, then they swore and laughed and tried some more. They wished their friend Alejandro was there. He wore a tie to church every Sunday.

Finally, one tie got knotted. Then a second. Then, at last, the third.

They scrambled out to the van, and Jonathan stopped in his tracks, the keys in his hand, his shirt crisp, his vest tight, his tie perfect.

He had forgotten about the driver's side headlight, which went out the night before.

The boys knew that driving without a headlight was an invitation to be pulled over.

Jonathan had insurance and title and registration. But he had no driver's license.

He made a point of living without apprehension. Looking nervous or trying to hide, he always said, was a sure way to become entirely conspicuous.

But even he would not drive with a missing headlight.

They needed to fix the headlight on the old minivan, which involved working on the backside of the lamp in the engine compartment.

Without saying a word, the boys turned around, headed back into the trailer, carefully loosened their ties and slipped them over their heads, removed their jackets, vests and shirts and grabbed some tools. They began to work in the rain.

Half an hour later, after some creative wiring, the light was fixed.

They piled into the van to pick up their dates. But the van smelled like shoes and gym clothes. They swerved into a parking lot and went into a store for some air freshener. Back in the van, they began arguing over who should be picked up first.

When they finally reached Alexis' home, Gerson walked to the front door.

As late as he was, Alexis was still not ready.

As her mother went to help, her father talked to Gerson in Spanish. Where are you going afterward?

How is school going? And work?

What time will you be home?

Finally, Alexis turned into the family room from the hall. She paused in the doorway, framed. Gerson was speechless. He took her hand and finally said, "You look very pretty." She giggled.

Two pickups later, they headed to the Buttes. They were already far too late to stop for dinner. They ate finger food there but not much. All night they danced -- Gerson only with Alexis, Jonathan only with everybody.

The next morning, Gerson called it the best night of his life.

Chapter Five

May 18 was a surprisingly cool day for a desert spring. Rain fell in the evening as Jonathan and Gerson prepared to go to their graduation ceremony.

Alejandro, who was still living at the trailer when he wasn't at his grandmother's apartment, had gone out.

He had told the boys he would be there for them at graduation. They were not sure if they believed him.

Gerson put on his robe and sashes at the trailer and wore them all the way to Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

Before the ceremony, all of the North High students gathered in a cavernous concrete room in the bowels of the stadium, wearing their blue robes and mortarboards. They formed into small clusters, hugging and laughing, before breaking apart and forming new groups. They were saying goodbye.

"I feel a little sad," Jonathan said. "I don't know what I am going to do next."

Teachers tried to shepherd them into alphabetical order, but in the sea of blue robes, it was nearly impossible to tell the students apart. They all looked so alike.

The graduation itself was a raucous affair. Anytime there was a quiet moment, a mother or father would yell a child's name.

After pomp and circumstance and the national anthem, Principal Telles addressed the students. "Do more than dream your dream," she told the students. "Love your dream."

The valedictorian spoke next. She was going to Europe for the summer and would enroll at the University of Southern California in the fall.

"Leave no stone unturned," she reminded her classmates.

Then the salutatorian: "Each man is the architect of his own future."

Then the senior-class president: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

Alejandro never showed up for the ceremony.

Since quitting high school, he had been taking some shift work cleaning hotel rooms. When he was lucky, he was assigned to the same hotel as his grandmother so they could drive in together.

He said he no longer knew what his dream was.

"This is not living," he said. "I am cleaning the hotel rooms of businessmen. And I don't even get many shifts because the hotels like the cleaning to be done by ladies."

Some days he would sleep until the evening, then maybe take a bus somewhere. He would come home late to watch movies and listen to music.

He heard from men at the trailer park that there was work in Maricopa, an hour south, picking melons for $60 a day. But he had no way to get there.

If there was any future for him at all, he thought, it was not in Arizona.

A few years back, Alejandro had joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His friend Jordie had baptized him.

By graduation time, he began thinking he should move to Utah, that things might be better there.

Jordie was planning to move to Utah with his brothers.

Jordie said his brother told him there was work there and that life was easier for an illegal immigrant.

Alejandro decided he would join them.

Any state, he thought, may be better than Arizona for an illegal immigrant.

Sitting in his cap and gown, Jonathan tried to imagine his future, but it felt difficult to think he was its architect.

His family was gone to Texas, and while he had the trailer, he had little else.

As the spring faded and tourists left, Jonathan's dishwashing hours declined. Money was tight again.

He kept thinking of the afternoons when he would come home from school and his mother would be cooking in the kitchen.

"Are you hungry, mijo?" she would always ask him. Then she would make him a plate of beans and rice, burritos or tamales, something to hold him until dinner.

He had been thinking of his father, too. Thinking of the afternoons when the two of them would work on the car for hours.

"Sometimes we would not talk at all," Jonathan said with a laugh. "But he taught me a lot about cars and how to fix things around the house."

Maybe he should move to Texas, Jonathan thought.

Sitting in his shiny blue robe, Gerson thought about what lay behind him and before him.

He had left his mother, sick with cancer and unable to care for him. He had crossed the border, lived with his father, lived on his own. He had learned English, and here he was, finally, graduating from high school.

As he waited for the moment when they could walk across the stage, he realized that all that would really matter now was his legal status.

School administrators always look the other way when it comes to a student's immigration status. Every child in their district has a right to an education.

Gerson was beginning to realize that as soon as he received his diploma, all of those protections would evaporate.

"From here on, there are so many uncertainties," he said. "But it's a great feeling. We are done."

Gerson had once promised his mother that he would return to Mexico City the day after he graduated. But that week, he told her he was going to stay.

He did not want to leave Phoenix. It was where he grew up and made his own life. His friends and his girlfriend were here.

His mother, disappointed, told him that he could stay only if he was with family. His father, after being deported, had returned to the United States, and Gerson could move in with him again.

So Gerson knew what lay before him. He would leave the trailer.

He would work and save money -- enough, maybe, to take a couple of classes at a time at a community college. Then, if things changed, he might be able to transfer to a four-year school. He was hoping for the Dream Act, federal legislation that might create a path to citizenship for young students.

He was beginning to think he might make it in Arizona.

"Yes," he would say. Then: "Maybe."

Toward the end of the graduation ceremony, Ben Miranda, a governing-board member in the Phoenix Union High School District, took the stage. He repeated a theme the students had heard before: All students need a supportive family.

"I want you to look around and find your family and acknowledge them!" he shouted into the microphone, and the building erupted with cheers.

The students pointed to their parents. There was clapping and stomping and shouting back and forth.

Gerson tried again not to cry. But this time, he did.

One by one, their names would be read. The students would cross the stage, shake the principal's hand, walk down a small flight of stairs and pose in front of an American flag for their official portrait.

Then, in a North High School tradition, they would shake the hand of every teacher at the school, all of whom were up along the bleachers.

When Gerson reached Mrs. Garcia, she gave him a long hug. They both were crying.

He knew how much she had done to help him. He wanted her to know that he would try to do the same someday.

Gerson whispered into her ear: "Le prometo, maestra, que voy a ser como usted cuando sea grande."

"I promise you, teacher, I will be like you when I grow up."

Chapter Six

The week after graduation, Gerson moved into a two-bedroom apartment near Bethany Home Road and 27th Avenue with his father and his father's new girlfriend.

He bought a car, taking out a loan in the woman's name because she was an American citizen.

He got to see Alexis regularly.

And he was living with his father. But they were not close.

"It's weird. I don't really see him as my dad. I don't think he sees me as his son," Gerson said. "I didn't try to make him proud of me. I don't call him Dad, and he doesn't call me mijo."

After just a few weeks of full-time work, he had come to realize the reality of living as an illegal immigrant.

He worked from 8 to 4:30 as a janitor, then he cleaned two floors of an office building from 5 to 7 in the evening. At 8 p.m. he had another office building near Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard.

Sometimes he saw Alexis during the week but usually now only on weekends. He also went to the trailer on the weekend to see Jonathan and Alejandro.

He was making double payments on his car, a 2005 Mitsubishi Lancer, and hoped to have it all paid off by the end of the summer.

But he was tired all the time. He missed the free breakfasts and lunches he enjoyed in high school. He had lost 18 pounds.

"This is not what I want to be doing the rest of my life," Gerson said. "This is not really the reason I wanted to stay. I clean bathrooms in buildings. It's not a life that I wanted."

He was 19 years old.

He used to be nervous about driving, worried about being pulled over.

After graduation, he said, he just drove, no longer worried about arrest or deportation.

"I would have been nervous if I was in school," he said. Being caught and deported "would have been terrible."

"But now it's not really that much of a loss."

Alejandro and Jordie made their plans.

On the last night of May, they would leave Phoenix with Jordie's brothers. They would start at 3 in the morning and drive straight through to Salt Lake City.

That evening, Alejandro went home to the trailer and packed all of his belongings.

He couldn't sleep. He was too excited. There would be work in Utah, something new. A chance to start over.

When his phone rang at 3 a.m., he thought it was funny that Jordie would need to call to say they were on the way. As if he could forget.

But the caller wasn't Jordie. It was his brother. They had decided not to take Alejandro.

There was not enough room in the car, he said.

Alejandro knew it was a lie.

"They have room for their things but not for a human being?" he asked. "How could this make sense?"

By June, the trailer was falling apart.

With Gerson gone, Alejandro and Jonathan sat quietly on the couch. Even in the Phoenix sunlight, the inside of the trailer was dark.

Blankets covered the windows, and the lights were turned off.

Behind in their electric bills, the two did not turn on the swamp cooler until late in the day. The air hung heavy and thick.

Food wrappers and pizza boxes and foam containers filled the kitchen table. Something rotted in the garbage.

Jonathan's family was still in Texas, and he was still washing dishes, with fewer hours each week.

He had hoped to go to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, but he checked online and found that the estimated cost of tuition, books, room and board was $39,792. It might as well have been $39 million.

Jonathan's mother wanted him to go to Texas. He was beginning to think she was right.

He could find work with his father, fixing and painting fences.

"Maybe that is best," he said, sitting on the couch.

After graduation, Jonathan kept thinking back to the speaker at Gerson's award ceremony in March.

Education was for anyone who wanted to pursue it.

So in late July, he went to Grand Canyon University and filled out an application.

Filling out the form proved difficult. His family was gone, and he wasn't sure how long he would even have the trailer. He listed Jane McNamara, his old teacher, as his contact person. He used North High School for his address.

He also kept thinking back to his old high school.

He remembered how his coach had told him that a good season his senior year could open doors at colleges.

But he did not have a good season. He lost matches he should have won.

When he thought about it, Jonathan would shrug. That was just the way things went.

No, Alejandro would say. The reason Jonathan wrestled poorly was obvious.

"The other guys, what did they have to worry about?" Alejandro asked. Plus, he said, Jonathan was never eating right.

"Jonathan had his mother last year; he didn't this year," he said. "It seems simple."

At the end of July, late on a Saturday night, an argument between Gerson's father and his father's girlfriend grew heated.

She told them both to get out. Then she picked up the phone and shouted that she was calling 911.

She was an American citizen. Gerson and his father were illegal immigrants.

Gerson didn't stick around to find out what she would tell the police.

He only had time to grab his backpack, some books, his phone, a T-shirt and his wallet.

He reached for his keys.

That car is mine, the woman said. You have to leave them.

The two men ran down the stairs and out the door. His father went one way, and Gerson another.

It was late and hot, and Gerson started walking south on 27th Avenue. As he walked, he pulled out his phone and called Jonathan.

She threw us out, he said. I had to leave the car. And I don't have anywhere to go.

"You know," Jonathan replied, "you can always stay here."

The trailer was 5 miles south, and the night was hot, humid. I'll come get you right now, Jonathan said. No, I'm just getting onto the bus, Gerson lied.

He wanted to walk. He wanted to think.

For hours he walked down 27th Avenue, past Mariscos Ensenada and Zozo's Smoke Shop.

He was angry mostly about the car. He had paid $2,500 toward it, and now that money was gone. He could have used it for classes.

His mother had been wrong. He should never have lived with his father.

If he was going to stay in this country, he needed to be in school. Otherwise, what was the point? He would apply to college, he thought, the same as Jonathan had done.

And if that didn't work, he would return to Mexico and his mother. He was finished with his father.

Traffic was busy as he walked past the Arizona Quick Divorce offices and Lefty's Auto Parts. Tired now, he cut over to 31st Avenue. The street was more narrow, quieter.

As he neared Van Buren, Gerson saw someone sitting on the bus-stop bench, waiting.

Jonathan. His friend was waiting for him.

They walked together from the bus stop to the trailer park. Finally, Gerson could see the lattice-work facade of the trailer. They climbed the single wooden step. The door swung silently closed behind them.

Inside, it felt like home.

In August, Mrs. McNamara was back in her classroom at North High School, preparing for a new year.

All summer long she had worried about the boys. They were out of school, and she had lost her connection to them, her chance to see them nearly every day and know they were all right.

She would stop by the trailer from time to time and give them food, but it never seemed like enough.

They no longer looked quite like the youthful boys from when they were learning to speak English in her class. Their faces were growing harder.

Now a new year was beginning, and she was in the classroom, making lesson plans for new students.

Near the end of the day, the ring of her cellphone broke the quiet of the room.

She thought it would be her husband or her son.

A voice asked for a Ms. Jane McNamara.

The man identified himself, but she didn't recognize the name.

Then he started talking.

Mrs. McNamara sat down.

She started frantically pulling things out of her purse. She needed to write this down. She was looking for a pen but couldn't find one.

She stood up and turned to the white board mounted on the wall. The board was long and spotless, still pristine before the start of the school year.

"Are you there?" the man asked.

She tried to speak but could not form words. She was crying now.

"Yes," she said finally. "I'm here."

She grabbed a marker and listened as the man began again.

She seized on the key words, scribbling them on the board.

"Are you OK?" the man asked her.

"Yes, I am fine," she said. "Please keep going."

Finally, he finished and asked if she needed anything else.

"No," she said. "This is more than I had hoped for."

The call ended. She took a step back, pressed the phone to her chest and stared at the words on the board before her.

GRAND CANYON

SCHOLARSHIP

PRACTICALLY HOMELESS

OUR MISSION

ROOM AND BOARD

JONATHAN AND GERSON

The caller was an executive director at Grand Canyon University.

Because the two young men were good students and had no income or home, they would qualify for a special scholarship.

They had been admitted.

Their tuition would be paid for.

Gerson and Jonathan would go to college.

By the end, all three were sleeping in the back room of the trailer, where there was a window air-conditioner. They ran a power cord to the neighbors next door and paid the family a little money each month.

The trailer had holes in the roof and bad plumbing.

So when they decided to tear it down, the decision was made without much sentimentality. They had learned to be practical.

A trailer in that condition could hardly be sold. Someone had offered them a couple hundred bucks for the whole thing.

The boys decided that wasn't enough. They wanted to squeeze every dollar out of it that they could.

They would have a yard sale, sell their extra things, their furniture, the refrigerator.

And then they would tear down the metal trailer and sell it for scrap.

Gerson and Jonathan had waited half the summer before even applying to school. Now, time was running short. They had only a few days before classes started.

As they began to pack their things, Gerson pulled out his cellphone and looked at the text message from Mrs. McNamara that he had saved. It was the message that told them they were going to college and that they could afford it.

He scrolled through the message and smiled.

"I will keep this forever," he said.

The three young men tried to distinguish the junk from the non-junk, but the lines were blurred.

They pulled all of their clothes out of their drawers, and Gerson was stunned: "I only have five T-shirts," he said.

Jonathan responded immediately: "Would you like some of mine?"

One item at a time, they dragged their dressers and mattresses out of the trailer park and down to 31st Avenue. They waited for hours in the sun, sold two dressers for $10 each.

The rest they left on a patch of dirt on 31st Avenue. Within an hour, all of it had been scavenged.

The next day, they began to tear the trailer down. Gerson started by swinging an old electric guitar into a wall. Jonathan grabbed a 20-pound barbell and started demolishing the porch. Alejandro pushed his way through a thin wall. It was almost fun.

As the sun rose higher, Alejandro started unscrewing the exterior sheeting. Gerson went up on the roof to tear off plywood boards that might have some resale value. Jonathan started sawing through metal pipe.

After two days of swinging, sawing and unscrewing, the trailer still stood.

Gerson and Alejandro thought the work was folly. Jonathan, however, would not stop. He would get everything he could from the trailer.

School started the next day, and he needed cash. He worked relentlessly.

Then they stacked all of the sheets of metal and all of the piping and the junction boxes into a borrowed truck and took it to a metal yard.

The man offered them $45.

The three young men were dumbfounded. They drove to another scrap yard and then a third. In the end, they took $165.

Just past 7, they drove back to what was left of the trailer.

Jonathan had kept a few things from the trailer because he thought his parents might want them.

Everything Gerson owned fit into three small kitchen garbage bags.

Alejandro's things fit into two large plastic bags. One was filled with books.

The sun set, leaving just an orange glow on the horizon. The three young men picked up their bags and walked away from the trailer without looking back.

Epilogue

Gerson enrolled as a freshman at Grand Canyon University. He lives in a dorm room and plans to major in biology and eventually go to medical school. He is still dating Alexis. He talks to his mother but infrequently. It is hard, he says, because he misses her. He says she remains his best friend. She always tells him she is well, but he cannot believe her without seeing her.

Jonathan also enrolled at Grand Canyon. He is Gerson's roommate. He studies forensic science and is on the wrestling team. Jane McNamara and other teachers are raising money to cover the two students' extra expenses. Jonathan speaks regularly to his mother and father in Texas. They still cannot believe his good fortune. Each time, his mother tells him that she is very proud of him. Sometimes, Jonathan says, his father does, too.

Alejandro spent his last night with Gerson and Jonathan on Sept. 20. He slept in their dorm room, and they stayed awake past 2. The next day, he went to a parking lot on 16th Street in Phoenix and boarded a van bound for Utah. Today, he works in a TV repair shop and lives with Jordie and his brothers in an apartment outside Salt Lake City.