Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers Page B

nowhere because there wasn’t anyplace for him to get to. He would just be riding around in a circle until he got to the same place he started from.
    Me, I would go home, and everybody would look at me and ask me what I wanted.
    “What you want?”
    “I don’t know,” I would answer. “What you got?”
    “Don’t worry about it because you ain’t getting what I got,” they would say. “And I’m watching you too.”
    That was the truth. My father didn’t have nothing. Willis didn’t have nothing. Mom was just checking out the world to see what she could snatch off. The hurting part was that if you checked everything out, peeped what was going down, everybody knew the same thing. They knew that me and Toon and King Kong didn’t have no place to go in this world and maybe we would try to slip out to dying when they wasn’t looking. They knew that, so they put us in these cells where you couldn’t even kill yourself.

CHAPTER 22
    Another morning, another cold breakfast. I dreamed about Toon. In my dream he was in the visiting room and his parents were sitting there shaking their heads and sucking their teeth and looking at each other like they were so ashamed of Toon. If they really ever got into Toon’s head, they would never find their way out. They would be lost for freaking ever and be scared out of their minds because they would know what the real world looked like.
    Sometimes, when I see Toon, I think he looks like how I would look if I could see inside myself. Little and stupid looking and scared, knowing I was going to get beat up every day. When I think about Toon, I want to cry. I’m glad I’m in detention. In detentionyou are all by yourself and nobody can see how bad you feel. Sometimes I think that people in the outside world know how bad you feel. They know it, but then they pass it off by just giving you a label, like criminal or felon .
    If you’re out in the world feeling bad enough to take dope to lighten it up a little, or if you’re so mad at the world you’re ready to break somebody up or chalk them out, then they just switch your ass from who you think you are to what they got on your rap sheet, and they don’t have to feel sorry for you no more because you’re not human.
    Another day went by, maybe two. It didn’t matter.
    One day there was a shadow on the floor. I thought it might have been a bird in the window. I got up quick and looked, but it was gone. A shadow that might have been a bird.
    When Mr. Pugh banged on my door, I jumped. I got up and went across the room and put my chest against the wall and my hands behind my back like I was supposed to.
    “Mr. Pugh, what meal is this?”
    “Shut up!”
    “How many days have I been in here?”
    “Shut up!”
    The door slammed and I turned around and went to the tray. A container of apple juice, string beans, corn, chicken wings, applesauce, bread, and a cup of ice cream. I ate it. Then I sat down on the floor and watched as the room grew darker. The light from the rectangular window made an image on the floor that went halfway across and just touched the opposite wall.
    Later, Mr. Cintron came to the door.
    “Next week you go back to Evergreen,” he said through the grating. “It’s not for you, because you don’t deserve it. I’m letting you go back because I want the program to at least look like it’s working.”
    I didn’t answer him.
    “Anderson! You all right in there?”
    “I’m all right,” I said.
    I can do this .
    I thought of school and what the teacher had said about sundials. All you needed was a fixed object and a shadow and you could figure out the time. But where did the first time come from? I didn’t have any markers or I could have made marks on the floor and then figured the time as the sun moved through thewindow. The window was the fixed object and the shadow was wherever the light wasn’t shining. The first thing I had to do was to cop the time from whoever brought me a meal. Then I would mark