A few months later — after a misunderstood clock and sudden fame interrupted his first month of high school — Ahmed wondered if his old teacher had noticed.
He grinned wide last week when a reporter told him that Kubiak had called.
Minutes later, the boy was on the phone with Kubiak, his bare feet dangling from an unmade bed. They spoke not of politics or religion, but of New York and Good Morning America. Of whether middle-school persecutors regretted it now.
“I told you one day I’m going to be — and you told me yourself — I’m going to be really big on the Internet one day,” Ahmed said.
But privately, Kubiak worried about fame’s effect on “an immature, fertile mind.”
At Sam Houston, he said, he’d often warn his students “to keep the adults out of it.”
“The adults have an agenda,” he would say. “The adults are using you.”
The day after Kubiak and Ahmed spoke, a public relations consultant walked into Ahmed’s house with plans for a national tour: Google and California, the United Nations and Dr. Oz.
The next time Kubiak tried to reach the boy, he had to leave a voice mail.
He phoned again the next day and didn’t hear back.
He’s begun to suspect the adults have Ahmed at last.
