Walter Myers - Lockdown

"One of the problems of going back into the world is that it's the same world you were dealing with when you got into trouble," I said. "So it's going to be just as hard to deal with as it was then, but if you round up some homeboys on your side, it'll be easier."

"Or a brother," Toon said.

"Or a brother," I said, standing. "And I can't have my brother hurting himself. You know what I mean?"

Toon put his head down and his hands in his lap. I sat on the bed next to him and put my arm around him for a minute.

I was worried that Toon wasn't going to be all right. I thought he was going to go home with his parents and have them yell at him and go on about how he wasn't as good as his brother. That was crap.

"Be strong, man," I said as I left Toon's room. Mr. Wilson locked the door behind me, and I turned away from the window because I didn't want to see Toon sitting on his bed alone.

I was pretty sure my hearing was locked. Mr. Cintron told me he would be on the panel, and I knew he was in my corner. All I needed was to keep my mind correct and focused on what I needed to let them know.

Mr. Pugh was with me and talking stupid stuff about how it had been when he was a kid. I couldn't even imagine a bigheaded, bald dude like him being a kid.

"We didn't have none of the stuff you kids got now," he said. "We didn't have cell phones, iPods, nothing like that. My big brother got a computer in 1982. It had sixty-four K memory. I got a goldfish with more memory than that now."

"I didn't know you had a brother," I said. "What's he doing now?"

"Nothing." Mr. Pugh gave me his "shut up" look and I shut up.

The clock on the administration office wall said twenty past one when the two people on the panel and Mr. Cintron came back from lunch. I had been sitting in the office from five minutes to one and was getting a little nervous. They walked by me and it was a quarter to two before they called me in.

They had turned the table so that the long side was facing the door, and I sat in the middle across from Mr. Cintron, an older black dude with silver-white hair, and a really thin white woman who kept messing with the papers in front of her.

Mr. Pugh had come in with me and he sat in the corner.

"Maurice, as you know, I'm Frank Cintron," Mr. Cintron said. "This is Miss Carla Evans and Mr. Alan Shaw."

"How do you do?" I said.

They both nodded.

"Panel, this is Maurice Anderson," Mr. Cintron said, looking at me. "He was arrested for stealing prescription pads from a neighborhood physician and selling the pads to a known drug dealer. He pled guilty and was sentenced to a total of thirty-eight months which, under the good time standard, makes him eligible for release after thirty months, two weeks-"

"That would be eighty percent of his sentence?" the black guy asked.

"Yes. He's served twenty-six months, twenty-two at Progress, and his petition today is for an early release, which would reduce his effective time served by four months."

"Mr. Anderson, can you tell us in your own words why you deserve to be rewarded with an early release?" the white woman asked.

"I don't intend to get into any more trouble," I said. "I made a mistake but I've learned my lesson and I plan to do the right thing and avoid the kinds of people I was dealing with before."

"What lesson did you learn?" the black guy asked.

"Crime doesn't pay," I said.

"If it did pay, would you commit more crimes?"

"No, ma'am."

"So what are you going to be doing that's different than what you were supposed to be doing before you came to Progress?" Miss Evans asked.

"Work hard in school and maybe get a part-time job after school," I said.

"Why didn't you do that before?" the black guy asked.

"I didn't know I was supposed to have a strategy to deal with my situation," I said. "I was just, like, drifting from day to day. Now I know I need a plan to take care of business."

"And what's your plan?" the woman asked.

"Just keep to myself," I said. I felt like I was floating and she was looking at me funny.

"So you're promising to do better, but isn't the truth of the matter that you want to get out and so naturally you would make the kinds of promises that would get you out?" the woman asked. "What would be the difference if we were here the day after you were arrested? Wouldn't you have promised not to do it again if we let you go?"

"Yeah."

"What have you learned here at Progress that might help you turn your life around?" Mr. Cintron asked.

Mr. Cintron was opening the door for me and I was going blank. I looked at him and couldn't think straight, but I knew I had to say something.

"You know, everybody's got to survive," I said. "And if you don't think about how you're going to make it, then you just go with whatever is around you. I know I have to invent something, look around and figure out some way to survive that's not going to get me killed or get me back in the jail system. I think I can find something, because in my heart I know what I want and what I don't want. I don't want to spend the rest of my life being locked up or ducking and hiding."

"And you didn't know that before you started stealing-what was it?" The black guy started going through the file.

"Prescription pads," I said.

"You didn't know that then?"

"I knew I didn't want to be locked up," I said. "I knew that part of it, but what I didn't know was that you needed a strategy for your life. In here, I see people working their shows and trying to get over the best way they can. One guy I work with at Evergreen-"

"Maurice is part of our work program," Mr. Cintron said.

"He was a prisoner in a Japanese war camp and he was telling me how he survived," I said. "How he figured out how to live through the war and stuff. You know, some people didn't make it, and-"

"What is your plan to 'make it'?" the black man asked.

"I don't have a big plan," I said. "I'm fifteen and I got to go to school, but I'll do my best in school and I'll just live at home and do what I can to stay out of trouble. I know that I might not become great or anything like that, but if something bad does happen to me, I don't want to be the one to make it happen."

"Are you sorry for the crime you committed?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Because you made yourself part of the problem in your community," she said. "Didn't you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"And what's different now, Mr. Anderson?" she asked.

"What I want to do is to help my little sister go to college," I said. "I think if I keep my mind on that, just focus in on it, I can keep myself straight."

"You were living at home with your parents?" the black guy asked.

"Fairly dysfunctional situation," Mr. Cintron said. "Mother has a history of drug abuse."

"You saw that abuse at home and you still got involved with illegal drugs?" the black guy asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Has anyone in your family been to college?" Mr. Cintron asked.

"No, sir, that's one of the reasons I want to help Icy go to college."

"Icy?" The black guy took off his glasses. "Your sister's name is Icy?"

"It's really Isis, like the Egyptian goddess," I said. "But we call her Icy."

I was told to wait outside, and Mr. Pugh went with me.

"You did real good," he said. "You don't look that smart, but you had some good things to say. You see Mr. Cintron nodding his head? He's going to vote for you."

"I hope so."

I wasn't sure. I had come up with some answers, but they didn't seem all that good to me. It was like they were asking me stuff that only had one right answer, and then when I gave them that right answer they were saying it was the same old stuff. I wanted them to know that I knew it was the same old stuff too. I was going back to the same old block, the same old family, the same old neighborhood. Everybody on the block who was messing with drugs or selling drugs had seen what I had seen. And a lot of them were going to be getting abused, too.