Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers Page B

minute. You said the wrong thing and somebody would get mad and swing at you, or they were having a bad day and you didn’t know it, or their medication wasn’t working. You could never tell.
    When I was collecting the garbage, the seniors looked at me careful but they didn’t say nothing. I figured in a couple of weeks they would start thinking of me as somebody who worked for Evergreen. That’s what I wanted to do, to fit in and be nobody special.
    After I collected the garbage, I went in andcleaned up Mr. Hooft’s room. He wasn’t there when I first started cleaning, but then he came in. He was slow getting up on his bed and I thought maybe he wasn’t feeling good.
    “Good morning, sir,” I said.
    He didn’t answer.
    His room was clean to start with and I finished pretty quick. “You need me to do anything else?” I asked.
    “What are you thinking?” he asked.
    “I’m thinking you might want me to do something else and I can get it done,” I said.
    “You don’t like me?”
    “I guess you okay,” I said. In my head I was thinking, No, I don’t like you.
    He picked up his paper and started reading it, and I sat down on the chair in the corner. He looked over at me and asked me again what I was thinking.
    “Why you got to know what I’m thinking?” I asked.
    “You could be thinking of stealing something from me,” he said. “You see that soap dish in my locker? It’s solid silver. Go ahead, look at it.”
    I looked in his locker, saw something shiny, andpicked it up. It was a soap dish, like he said, with a little scene on the top part. Some kind of birds under a tree.
    “It’s nice,” I said, putting the dish back into his locker.
    “So you’re thinking of stealing it?”
    “Mr. Hooft, I didn’t even know you had the dish,” I said. “I was thinking of this guy who wants to pick a fight with me. He keeps messing with me, but I know I need to maintain my cool so I don’t get into trouble. I can control myself, so it’s okay. I don’t think about stealing or nothing like that, because that won’t get me anywhere.”
    “He wants to fight you in jail?”
    “Yeah.”
    “That happened to me once,” he said. “You want to hear how it happened?”
    “It ain’t the same because you weren’t in jail,” I said. “I’m in jail, and whatever you do against the rules gets you into trouble. It don’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong. You fight, you’re in trouble.”
    “You don’t know nothing!” Mr. Hooft said. “When I was a boy, nine years old, my family lived in Java. You don’t know where that is because yourpeople don’t know anything, but it’s in Asia. Maybe two thousand miles from Japan—”
    “How you know my people don’t know anything?” I asked.
    “Why are you interrupting me?” Mr. Hooft asked.
    “Why you can’t speak to me like I’m a man, same as you are?” I asked. “I’m not putting your people down.”
    “The nurse said I don’t have to take nothing from you!” He was turning red. “One word from me and you are out of here!”
    “Yeah, that’s all good, but you don’t need to be insulting me.”
    “I can’t bother with you,” Mr. Hooft said. “I have to change my bandage.”
    He had a bandage on the outside of his right leg up near his hip. He gave me a mean look and got up on the bed, took the tray of bandages from the white cabinet next to his bed, and lay on one side with his back toward me.
    I sat down and watched him pull the old bandage off. It might have hurt him, but he didn’t say nothing. Then he just lay there for a while, breathing heavy.
    His butt was hanging out but he really didn’thave a butt, just a crack with a little flesh on it. Seeing his naked skin, I didn’t think he even looked real. More like a bad drawing or something. I had never seen many butts and I didn’t like seeing his.
    What I thought I should do was just walk out of the room and come back when he was finished. Instead of that I watched as he