Heat: Africa Kine Restaurant, Harlem, NY

It may not have been life hanging in the balance, but it was a whole, glistening, deep orange habanero pepper. Ocasio dangled it above his lips and looked at me.

Moments like these are when my deeper instincts – to hover, to protect, to be every ounce the Jewish mother that I am – do battle with everything I’ve learned from many years of mothering and mentoring teenage boys. If this were my 8-year-old son in front of me, I would tell him to put the pepper down and cut a small piece to taste. If that failed (which it wouldn’t), I would reach across the table and snatch it from his little fingers.

But the guy across the table wasn't an elementary-school kid. Nor was he my son. Ocasio was a 17-year-old high-school senior. We were on a trip to New York where he’d spent the day visiting Columbia University and gazing somewhat slack-jawed at the vastness of the city, a world so different from the narrow, dimly lit streets of his Albany neighborhood.

I’d met him two years ago when I gave a talk on journalism to a group of kids at the local YMCA.

Any questions?

A hand shot up from the far end of the conference table.

I turned my attention to the young man with the thick ponytail and the confident voice.

What about the way the media covers black people, young black men in particular? How come their deaths don’t seem to matter? he asked.

Gulp. I did my best to answer. Again, the hand shot up.

He wanted to talk about truth and perception. About race and class. About writing and what makes a good story.

Who was this kid?

His name was Ocasio Willson. When he heard that I was considering working with some high-school students over the summer, he called me every few days to ask if I’d firmed up my plans. I hadn’t, but after his fourth phone call, I decided maybe I should.

When he showed up in the newsroom, I asked him if he wanted to be a journalist. No, he said, shooting straight, as I learned was his way.

What did he want?

The law, he said. The law and then politics.

OK then.

I looked at Ocasio now, sitting across the table from me in his trademark cuff links, button-up shirt and fancy-schmancy, Italian-looking shoes. He hadn’t cleaned up for Columbia; this was how he arrived at school every day. His junior year, he’d decided he would dress for the world he wanted, even if he’d never been there and had no idea what it looked like.

He waved the pepper back and forth, teasing. I settled on a warning.

That’s a habanero, I said. It’s one of the hottest peppers in the world.

I love spicy food, he replied.

He told me a funny story about popping whole jalapenos in his mouth.

Yes, but these aren’t jalapenos. There’s no comparison. This is a whole other level of heat. Eating an entire pepper at once could really hurt you.

He made some reassuring noises and opened his lips.

I really don’t think you should do it, I said. But I didn’t move to stop him.

That first summer when Ocasio apprenticed with me at the paper, I didn’t know quite what to make of him. He showed up every week for no money and no school credit. He asked good questions and he loved to debate. But although he did the assignments I gave him, the quality of his work didn’t match the quality of his mind.

By the end of the summer I was worried. It was my turn to shoot straight. I told him that he was smart, smarter than most people I’d met. But smarts would only get you so far. He had to learn to work.

In the world he lived in, he’d been able to coast on his charm and his quick mind. But there was a whole other world out there that was full of smart people who had been sweating it out at the best schools for years. If he wanted to play on a bigger stage, he’d have to learn to marry his smarts with discipline.

This is where I’d lost kids before, but Ocasio dug in. For the next two years, he took the hardest course load Albany High had to offer and pulled his grades up. He spent the summer between junior and senior year at Harvard studying the Harlem Renaissance.

Now it was time to look at colleges, and his dream list was full of schools he hadn’t heard of two years ago: Columbia, American, Northeastern, Harvard. We’d walked the Columbia campus that day, marveling at the sculptures and peeking into the buildings. A foreign land. A promise of a different life.

Ocasio slipped the pepper into his mouth and started to chew.

I watched his face. For a moment he seemed OK. And then it hit. His cheeks and lips started to flush. His hand flew to his mouth and his eyes teared up. He tried to maintain his composure, but soon he was tipping out of the booth in pain. His lips started to swell. Were we in a full-blown medical emergency? What had I done?

The waitress came over, worried and fretting. The minutes ticked by and he only looked worse. He downed water. Nothing. He couldn’t speak. Finally, he excused himself to the bathroom where he spent the next 10 minutes running his tongue under the faucet and pulling himself together. When he came back to the table he was still in pain and couldn’t finish his meal – the only time I’d ever seen him leave a scrap of food on the table. He looked spent, all the excitement of the morning gone.

After lunch, we walked the city. Hulking buildings, quiet patches of green, screeching cars and an ever-changing cast of New Yorkers. This was what he wanted. This big, tough-tussle, competitive world. At one point we passed a van with dark, tinted windows. One of the panes of black glass slid open just enough for an arm to poke out and a hand with long blue-painted fingernails to reach for him.

Was he ready for this?

I thought of the 10th-grader I’d met that first summer with his droopy pants and weak verbs. He’d stepped it up, taught himself to write, held his own in the honors classes. But this world, this was different. He was going from jalapenos to habaneros. And there would be no one to make his decisions for him. He was going to have to figure out his own way to manage the heat. Lunch seemed as good a place as any to start.