Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers Page A

smiling at us,” he said.
    I got up and went to another table because I really didn’t want to fight the sucker. Play got up with me, and we sat with some white dudes from the Special Attention wing. Those were dudes who were all messed up and were in the special watch-these-guys-because-they-might-hurt-themselves area in the back of the classrooms. One guy we sat with didn’t look up from his tray. The other guy put his hands, palm down, over his plate like we were going to take his food.
    Toon needed to be with these guys.
    When we finished eating and Pugh lined us up to go back to our wing, King Kong came over and got behind me.
    “Me and you got some business to take care of,” he growled at me.
    I thought back on what Mr. Cintron had said. All these dudes in here had run stupid until they found the front door of some courthouse, and half of them were still running on empty.
    “You think you can kick his ass?” Play asked me later.
    “I don’t know if I can kick his ass,” I said. “But if the deal got to go down, I can sure make it a war he didn’t want to be in.”
    Lights-out and I was lying in the dark thinking that King Kong was going to get both of us screwed up. I wondered if he knew it too.

CHAPTER 11
    So what happened is that Mr. Pugh brought me a candy bar and talked to me decent on the way to Evergreen. I don’t like people giving me nothing, but I took it and said I would eat it later.
    “So, you looking forward to going home?” he asked.
    “Yeah.”
    I wasn’t sure. I knew I didn’t want to be in Progress anymore, but I wasn’t sure what home was going to mean. Just the way King Kong was messing with me, I knew the streets were waiting to mess with me. All my homies hanging out and dealing whatever they had were waiting, all the suckers leaning against the rail on the corner and looking to see who was weakwere waiting, and all the gangbangers with nothing to do but cook up some mad were waiting. Yeah, home.
    The papers Mom had left were about some program that New York City was running. They said that anybody who was accepted for the program would be eligible for help in getting affordable housing and more money on their Family Cards. I knew it was all good on paper, but in real life it didn’t go nowhere. In a way all the programs were alike. If everything worked out perfectly, you should be doing okay. But the deal was that you were going back into the same hole you had slid down before. It was like Toon. His people talking about how he had messed up and how embarrassed they were and him sitting with his head down thinking that the best thing going for him was to get out and go back to the same family. I could see him wanting to stay at Progress.

CHAPTER 12
    It was raining when I got to Evergreen. I had gone to class from 8 to 8:30 and King Kong had sat behind me. He kept bumping the back of my chair. I felt like turning around and lighting him up, but I knew all I had to do was get into one more fight and my game would be over.
    I was cleaning up some soup in the hallway that had been spilled by one of the residents when a real dark sister came over to me.
    “What you doing, cute boy?” she asked.
    “Who are you?” I asked.
    “Nancy Opara from Nigeria,” she said. “I’m an exchange student and I work once in a while here for extra credit.”
    “You don’t get paid?”
    “I get extra credit from Saint Elizabeth’s,” she said. “Simi told me about you. She said you were nice.”
    “I’m okay,” I said.
    “I think I’m going to recommend you for mayor of New York City,” she said. “The city needs a nice young mayor.”
    “I think that job would be too hard for me,” I said.
    “All you got to do is to hire a lot of smart people to work under you,” she said. “You don’t have to know anything yourself.”
    She was kidding around with me and I liked it. At Progress nobody kidded around with you. Even when you were talking to your friends it could change in a