REAL ESTATE REPORT

playing the violin and viola, Ari expressed himself.

“In Mexico, I didn’t have TV or Xbox or toys. I did have a pen and paper. So when I was alone, I would draw. Art and music takes me out of all the things that have happened. A lot of things that normally matter don’t matter when I am drawing. Rent is due, we don’t have any money — maybe it doesn’t make sense, but art helps. When I couldn’t communicate well with people, because of my English, I could draw or play the instrument.”

Orchestra and high school Advanced Placement classes helped Ari “get out of his comfort zone,” he says, and build confidence. And art contests — such as that of the national PTA School of Excellence program, which he won his sophomore and senior years — as well as teachers and other students, began validating Ari’s artistic abilities.

Serious creative endeavors, however, are expensive. Ari says his mother went to great pains to buy him supplies.

“We could never afford to put me on a soccer team, send me on school trips or anything big like that, but she always tried to support my art, as soon as she saw how serious I was, she worked extra to buy sketch pads, pens, that kind of thing.”

Art teacher Tina Walker helped Ari procure more-advanced art tools and pushed him toward excellence, he says. “The best thing she taught me and the rest of the class was: ‘You might think you are good at art, but you are not. But if you work hard at it, you can be.’ I needed that, because by that point a lot of people were telling me how good I was. Now I feel like I always need to challenge myself to break new ground with my art.”

Though Ari was settling in socially and academically, the troubles at home continued. His freshman year, Mom told him she had breast cancer. “She had had it for a long time by the time she told me, and once she explained it, so many things made sense,” he says.

Then Ari’s little brother had a cancer scare. “Eventually we learned it was something less serious, but we had to pay for a whole bunch of tests and scans and medical bills,” he says.

Even while taking all AP courses, playing in the orchestra and winning art contests,

Ari worked as a waiter to help pay the family’s bills. He also volunteers at Dallas Society of Visual Communications, which allows him free admittance to seminars and workshops, and he is a fund-raiser for MusAid, a nonprofit that helps supply musical instruments to underdeveloped countries. Recently, his mother gained steady employment, and he was able to quit working to focus on exams, and the family even moved into a townhome, where Ari and his brother share a bedroom. It’s the first time he’s ever had his own bed; he’s always slept on a couch.

His GPA is 94.3. And he credits teachers such as Bob Williams (for just finding time to talk to him) and David Wood (whom he thanks for his mastering of English and literature) for his success in the face of challenge.

Wood recalls an essay that Ari wrote for his class. “He not only revealed his considerable compositional skills, but also both his aesthetic sensibilities and how his artist’s soul infuses his responses to life’s vagaries.” Ari’s essay was about his brother’s illness, Wood says, and what most impressed the teacher was Ari’s “keenly analytical and artistic sensibility to do what the best artist’s do: change our perceptions of our human experience.”

Ari was accepted to Savannah College of Art and Design and received more than $11,000 in scholarship money, but he is unable to afford the remaining costs, he says. He expects to have full United States citizenship by the end of the summer, but he now is in the states legally under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) law. He is ineligible for financial aid until he is a citizen. Instead, he says, he plans to attend the University of North Texas and study graphic design.

While he has never experienced direct prejudice as a result of his ethnicity or socioeconomic status, he says, he has noticed that people seem to expect more out of wealthier, American-born kids.

“The biggest form of discrimination is that people naturally have low expectations of you. I feel like I have to work extra hard to change the perception.”

Graduation, he says, will be bittersweet.

“I kind of feel like I just found a home here,” he says with a grin. “Now I have to go be the new guy again.”

Introductions begin with a struggle and awkward laughter. It is the norm, she says. Her name — Kerutheha Nirmalanandha — is difficult to pronounce, even after she has repeated it for you multiple times. Like most other challenges in her life, she meets the situation with a gleaming smile and a joke.

“You should see what standardized tests are like for me,” she says. “Everyone else has finished, and I am still filling out the name section.”

When she was born in Sri Lanka, Kerutheha was practically asphyxiated by the umbilical cord; the incident caused permanent damage in the form of cerebral palsy. The first hint of a temper rises as she talks about it. Looking down at her frail left arm resting in her lap, she says, “This — this was a doctor’s fault.”

“The cord that attaches the baby, it got tied around my neck. The doctor told my parents I was dead. There was then a chief doctor that came and gave me oxygen and revived me,” she says. “Everyone was happy, but … ” Kerutheha says the doctor gave her an injection in her arm that left the limb completely immobile.

Today she has no use of her left arm, her whole left side is feeble, and her heartbeat and lungs are labored, so she cannot participate in strenuous activity.

In lieu of physical activity, she fantasized about someday working as a scientist at NASA, she says. “I was obsessed. I cut out every article I found about the space program, astronauts, missions. People said, ‘How are you going to even get to NASA — it is in the United States, and you are here?’ I did not care. I dreamed about it.”

Her family moved to New Jersey when she was 12. What was it like moving from Sri Lanka to Jersey? She shakes her head, closes her eyes and finally says, “not good.” At first, she explains, she was very excited about moving to America — land of opportunity, and NASA, where doctors might even be able to treat some of her more severe cerebral palsy symptoms.

“But when I got there — oh my, I was so scared. I cried and cried and screamed! It was bad. Every day was like a nightmare. There were drug dealers on the street when I walked home. Every day I thought, ‘I am dead.’”

She says the worst of the problems had nothing to do with other people, though. She