Walter Myers - Lockdown

"Very good," Miss Rossetti said. "What I particularly like is that none of your answers are egocentric. They all consider other people. How about you, Mr. Anderson?"

"I don't know," I said. "You know, you talking about what we would do and what we would say and whatnot, but if I said I would run around the park and jump up and dance and that would make my moms happy, what would you say? You would say that you can't do that because you locked up in here. If I said I would go over to Riverside Park and play two-on-two basketball against those white boys that come over to the park on weekends-they can play some ball-you would say that I can't do that because I'm in jail."

"That's right, but there are things-"

"Yo, let me run it, Miss Rossetti. Okay?"

"Go ahead."

"Okay, what I'm saying is that this isn't my world you're talking about. I can dig what you're saying about going with somebody else's feelings and what they're thinking instead of just dealing with what's on your mind. But I know there's a curtain that divides your world from mine."

"Because you're black, you mean?"

"You sure jumped on that in a heartbeat," Kat said.

"Kat, I'm trying to figure out where Mr. Anderson is going, that's all," Miss Rossetti said.

"It ain't just about black and white," I said. "I got this friend of mine who's white. So, he was in a war and he got captured. Nothing he could do except what they told him. Then the war was over and his family didn't do nothing for him. Then he got old and ended up in a nursing home."

"How old is your friend?" Miss Rossetti asked.

"About seventy-six, maybe seventy-seven," I said.

"He wasn't in no war because you can't be in a war if you that old," King Kong said.

"The guy he's talking about wasn't always that old," Leon said. "My grandfather was in a war back in the day when they was fighting the Vietnams. There's always a war going on."

"Mr. Anderson?"

"Yeah, well, him getting caught up in a war meant that he couldn't do what he thought was right," I said. "And then he came out the war and he wasn't getting on too tough, and then he got old and, like, feeble. At first he told me he was kicking it big-time, being a hero to his family and getting presents and visits and stuff all the time, but then, when the hammer fell, I found out that he was just scraping by."

"He was fronting and grunting," Kat said.

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean he didn't have his head together," I said. "I think he had his head together but it didn't make any difference. He couldn't make anybody else happy, and he couldn't make himself happy."

"Why did you become his friend?" Toon asked.

"That doesn't make any difference," I said.

"It makes a difference to me," Toon said.

"That's because you and Toon sweet on each other," King Kong said.

"Me and your mama sweet on each other, too," I said. "But the ASPCA don't like me messing with her."

"That's enough!" Miss Rossetti's voice rose to the ceiling.

Mr. Pugh had been sitting across from us playing solitaire on the computer, but soon as he heard Miss Rossetti's voice, he jumped up and started toward us. King Kong stood and took a step toward me but then turned and looked at Mr. Pugh and sat down again.

Yeah. Both of us knew he didn't want any more of me.

Miss Rossetti held her hand up to keep Mr. Pugh back and things got real quiet.

Mr. Pugh had about four different faces. He had his normal face which was like maybe he was lost. He had a smiling face, which was like maybe he was lost but he didn't care. He had his mad face, which looked like he wanted to kill you, and then he had this face that kind of darkened with his eyes darting around, like, "Hey, please give me a half of an excuse to turn your ass inside out." When he got that face on, I didn't even look at him, just down at the floor.

"Okay, so Mr. Anderson's friend was making up parts of his life," Miss Rossetti said as she sat back down. "Is that all bad?"

"If you got a police record it's not bad," Leon said. "Because the truth isn't going to help you in the real world."

"I don't recommend lying," Miss Rossetti started, "but I do understand your point. Mr. Anderson, can you think of anything that would make somebody else happy?"

"No, but I need to because I'm going to call my sister Sunday and I really would like to say something to her to make her happy. She hates me being in jail and I hate being here away from her. So I would like to think of something to say to her that would-but I can't tell her no lies."

"She's only nine, right?" Play asked.

"Yeah."

"Tell her you'll buy her a bracelet when you get out," he said. "Girls like jewelry and she'll like it because you bought it for her."

"Is she smart?" Kat asked.

"She's my sister, ain't she?" I said.

"Yo, bro, we're not in Harvard," Kat said. "This is jail."

Everybody cracked on that.

"Yeah, she's real smart," I said.

"I agree with Little Ears," Paola said. "She can even imagine the bracelet or look for a nice one in the stores."

"Little Ears?" Play was touching his ears.

"Maybe you could write a book about her life," Toon said. "I think she would like that very much."

"Yeah, that's good thinking," I said. "She'd like that."

Toon smiled.

The group thing ended and we went straight to dinner. I was hungry as anything but they had cabbage, some kind of chopped-up ham, and scrambled eggs. I ate the cabbage and the eggs and left the ham. For dessert they had the same old, same old ice cream, but this time they had potato chips instead of pound cake. Lame for days.

"When I get out of here, all I'm going to eat for the next five years is steak," Play said.

"How come you didn't say nothing when that girl called you Little Ears?" I asked him.

Play just grinned. "I think she's trying to get with me. I hope she makes it."

Saturday morning I got a call from the precinct. Detective Rhodes asked me if I had made my mind up yet.

"About what?"

"Do the math," he said. "Twenty years or three. Which do you want?"

"I got to think about it," I said.

"You got to think about it?" He sounded surprised. "We'll pick you up Monday. You got forty-eight hours to decide where you're going to spend the rest of your life. You'd better think hard, my man."

The phone clicked off.

My stomach began to cramp and I just wanted to puke. When Mr. Pugh took our group to breakfast, I joined the sick line. What I wished, what I really wished, was that I was getting the drugs that some of the kids at Progress got every day. Play told me that those drugs helped them get through the day. God knew I was needing something to get me through.

Saturday was forever long. Sadness was like sucking on me and taking the life out of my body. I felt so weak, I was having trouble standing up. There was no way I could make twenty calendars. I'd be thirty-five when I got out-if I got out. I'd probably meet some freak like King Kong or Cobo in jail and get killed. On the other hand, I didn't want to cop to a three bid, either. Any way I looked at the situation, it was foul.

My mind went back to the doctor's office. I didn't remember taking anything but the prescription pads. It was a storefront office with the entrance on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. There was one of those decals from a security service in the window plus a gate that came down over the door. In the alley, which you could get through from a building on 147th Street, there was a back door that just had one lock on it. There was a decal on that, too. Earlier I had gone past the place with Freddy and sat outside while he went in. When Freddy came out, he showed me the prescription pad with the numbers printed on it.

"That's his official New York State number," he said. "He put the pad back in his upper right-hand drawer."