Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers

doing. Or he comes around with a little cup for you to pee in. Then the job is gone because everybody knows where you’ve been.”
    “Okay, a lot of what you’re saying is true,” Miss Williams said. “On the other hand, if you show up with no high school diploma, and no GED, how does that help?”
    “At least you won’t be disappointed when they turn you down,” Leon said.
    Some of the guys laughed. I looked over at Toon. He wasn’t laughing.
    Miss Williams kept on talking but it wasn’t coming through. What all the guys knew was that there was a world on the outside and we didn’t belong in it.Maybe we could get over once in a while, but we really didn’t fit in.
    When the session was over, Miss Williams handed out a form that listed all of the papers we were supposed to have once we got out. That was cool, because whenever you go someplace, you have to start all over again or they turn you down for something because you don’t have the right papers.
    The right papers didn’t mean anything. You were still yourself in your own black skin and you couldn’t sound like some white dude or some la-dee-da black dude who was heavy into what was going down with education or being middle class.
    My moms had left the papers for me to sign, but when I took them to Mr. Cintron and he was telling me how cool the family program was, I saw that she could get some money from it and figured that’s all she really wanted. That’s what I thought. And Icy had given me the 411 on Willis going into the army. The enlistment bonus. If he got that, Mom would try to con him out of it. That’s what she was about.
    I wondered if she had been different at one time. Maybe she even thought about being the first woman president. And then, maybe, things juststarted happening that turned her around. I felt for her, but I wished she was stronger, someone that me and Willis and especially Icy could depend on.
    After group skills we went to the B wing to get our teeth checked. While we were waiting, we sat with some new guys and one girl. The orientation flick was on television. The new kids were looking at the TV screen, but out of the corners of their eyes they were checking us out. I saw Diego trying to look hard.
    Diego, in my mind, was a punk. But his head was so messed up that he was a dangerous punk. Every morning between breakfast and school he was on the med line. I had seen a lot of the guys do that, but I couldn’t figure out how they knew who needed the pills. The nurse gave them one or two pills in a small cup, and another cup filled with water. They took the pills and then drank the water. Then she made them stick their tongues out and move them around so she could make sure they swallowed the pills.

CHAPTER 10
    The dentist was white with dark hair and big eyes and this sincere look on his face. He asked me how often I brushed my teeth and I told him once a day.
    “Why not twice a day?” he asked.
    “I don’t know, man,” I said.
    “It only takes an extra two minutes a day,” he said.
    “Okay, I’ll try it,” I said.
    He thanked me and told me it would be worth it. I had never seen anybody get into teeth before. But two minutes a day made sense.
    At dinner one of the newbies sat across from me and Play. He was my height but wide and ugly. Sucker looked like King Kong with a nappy ’fro and a jumpsuit.
    “Where y’all from?” he asked.
    I didn’t say nothing and Play didn’t say nothing. The newbie started puffing up like he was mad and asked us again where we were from. We still didn’t say nothing, mostly just because he was a newbie, and he picked up his knife from the table and held it in his fist. That cracked me up a little because it was just a plastic-ass knife.
    “I just came in from your mama’s house,” Play said. “She told me to tell you hello.”
    The guy looked at us like he was ready to go off. Then he said that he was from the Duncan Avenue projects in Jersey City.
    “We kill a guy just for