the Other Wes Moore (2010)

the Other Wes Moore (2010) by Wes Moore Page B

Book: the Other Wes Moore (2010) by Wes Moore Read Free Book Online
Authors: Wes Moore
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and never knew what was in them. Maybe he could say they were planted, that this was part of a larger conspiracy against him. But who would bother conspiring against him? When he reached the boxes and picked them up, he was struck by how light they were. He opened one of them and saw that it was empty. Had she thrown his drugs out? His anxiety about getting caught flipped to anger. He threw the boxes across the room. He tried to calculate how much weight he had lost, and how much money he now owed the connects who supplied him with the drugs.
    "Damn!" he shouted. "Ma! Where are you? Do you know what you just did!"
    "I'm in my room," Mary responded.
    Wes stepped quickly to his mother's room, gaining anger with every creaky floorboard. When he walked into the room, Mary was calmly folding laundry on her bed. She didn't stop when he busted in. Wes was senseless with anger, but Mary just coolly looked at him, eyes opened in an expression of exaggerated innocence.
    "Ma, do you have any idea about what you just did? Where are the drugs?"
    "I flushed them down the toilet."
    "That was over four thousand dollars in drugs! I have to pay someone back for that!" Wes had completely forgotten about his conspiracy argument. The only thing on his mind was trying to figure out how on earth he was going to come up with four thousand dollars--and fast.
    Mary was not the least bit concerned about her son's new dilemma. "Not only did you lie to me but you were selling drugs and keeping them in my house! Putting all of us in danger because of your stupidity. I don't want to hear your sob story about how much money you owe. You will stop selling that stuff. I will be checking your room, and I don't want to ever see it in here again. Now get out of my room."
    Wes was stunned. He went back to his room and desperately tried to devise a plan. He owed money but had no drugs to sell--he had to figure out how to make that money back quickly. The only way to do that was to go see his connects and hit the street again. He'd realized very early in the game that the drug market was a simple supply-and-demand equation. The demand was bottomless. Your money was determined by how hard you worked, and how feared you were. He focused. He knew the streets would get him that money back, and more. But next time, he'd be smarter about where he kept the stash and how often he moved it around.
    Wes left the house and began to walk toward his girlfriend's place a few blocks over. She was older, about seventeen. Wes complained to her about his mother's abuse of his privacy. His girlfriend sympathized. Before she realized what she was doing, she'd agreed to make her home his new headquarters.
    As Mary heard the door slam behind Wes, she sat back down on her bed. She pressed her fingers against her temples and began to massage them. She closed her eyes; her mind raced: Who is to blame for this? Tony, the neighborhood, the school system, Wes's friends? She put them all on trial in her mind. She was furious at Wes for what he'd done and knew that this probably would not be the end of it. Tony, who was about to become a father--making Mary a thirty-six-year-bold grandmother--had been right.

Leave the smack and the crack for the wack
Or the vial and the nine; keep a smile like that
    My eyes were closed, and my hands moved along with the beat, as if I were onstage laying down the tracks on a DJ set. I was in a zone, concert mode, even if I was only in the front seat of my mother's blue Honda Civic. I recited a verse from the Chubb Rock song as it blared out of the car's speakers.
    The road lost my mother's full attention momentarily as she stared down at me. She looked incredulous.
    After a series of unsatisfactory report cards, my mother had begun to think that what many of my teachers were telling her was correct: I might have a learning disability. My teachers broke it down for her more than once: "Wes is a nice boy, but he has real problems retaining information." She

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