Dope Sick by Walter Dean Myers

road—no car saying, Get on in, I’ll give you a lift . Maybe I don’twant to deal with that. You know, I ain’t the first guy like me I’ve seen. You see guys like me all the time in the ’hood. Nodding out and feeling the same way I feel. Going from day to day until it’s over and somebody making chalk marks around their bodies or they’re sitting in a cell someplace. What about that I need to know more than I know now?”
    â€œHow about the rap group?” Kelly asked. “You weren’t that bad.”
    â€œOmar, Victor, and Deon went on with it and I laid low,” I said. “There was going to be an assembly and they were supposed to do a presentation. It was like jive from the get-go and everybody knew it was going to be. Maurice hooked me up with a portable amplifier and a speaker and I had an idea I was going to let them do their thing on the stage and then I was going to come from the back and make a challenge. I figured I would blow the place up with my rhymes because they were tough and they weren’t pulling any punches.
    â€œI know this white boy named Ryan who hung out with the brothers, and he had his own ampand stuff. He was kind of lame, but he knew all the jams and he could lay down a beat with his mouth. You know, he would make sounds like he was scratching and then throw in some scat with it. If you just heard him and didn’t see him, you would think he was from Jamaica or someplace. Anyway, he was going to come down the side while I came down the middle aisle. We figured everybody would turn and check us out and then the guys onstage would have to deal with it.
    â€œOmar and them went on first, and they put out some garbage that was even worse than I thought it was going to be. They couldn’t even keep a beat. When they went through their first set, Miss Oglivie stood up and started talking about giving them a big hand. That’s when me and Ryan started up. Just like I thought, everybody got into what we were doing right away. They were showing us instant love, but Miss Oglivie stopped the whole show. ‘Everybody sit down! Everybody sit down!’ Then she told me and Ryan to leave the auditorium. That was it. A lot of people came over to me later and said we were on the money, but it didn’tmake no never-mind. Miss Oglivie threw away our thing.
    â€œWe got called down to the principal’s office and everything, but it didn’t matter. Nobody really cared about anything. They didn’t care about what me and Ryan did, they didn’t care about Omar and them. They were just talking about ordering sandwiches for a meeting.”
    There was the sound of a siren outside the window. I looked toward the window and then pointed at the screen. Kelly looked over at me and then clicked the remote, and we were looking at a different view of the street. Another black-and-white had pulled up. Its lights were flashing and the siren was going.
    â€œSomething’s up!” I said.
    â€œI don’t think so,” Kelly said. “They’re just sounding their siren to see who comes to the window.”
    I was almost at the window and stopped. “You ever run from the police?” I asked.
    â€œNo, but I’m not scared,” Kelly said. “I’m thinking straight. You scared and you’re hurting.”
    â€œYou ever been hurt?” I asked. “I mean, really hurt?”
    Kelly put his head down and glanced at me out the corner of his eye. “Yeah, I’ve been hurt.”
    â€œShot?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou ain’t been hurt unless you been shot,” I said.
    â€œYeah, you’re all world now, huh?” Kelly said. “You can go around bragging on being shot. But pain isn’t all that bad. People learn to deal with pain. People get cancer. People get shot up in wars and blown up a lot worse than you. They learn to deal with it.”
    I wanted to go back to the window.