Dope Sick by Walter Dean Myers Page B

tell Lauryn.”
    â€œSometimes you don’t have to tell people,” Kelly said. “They already understand where you coming from.”
    â€œNo, she don’t know how scared I get sometimes. You know I’m up in here and I’m scared because the police are looking for me,” I said. “But sometimes I’m just scared to walk down the street. I ain’t afraid of being shot or anything, I’m just afraid. You understand that?”
    â€œI understand you feeling it,” Kelly said. “You see what you doing to yourself, you figure you gotto be afraid of something.”
    â€œI think my moms is scared too. When I was thirteen things really got bad for us. She started hitting the bottle hard. At first she would go out and get her a bottle of rum and bring it home. I didn’t like that because we didn’t have money for anything. We’d get some money on our family card and she would cash part of it in for money to buy liquor. That’s a street hustle.
    â€œThen she started hanging out half the night. One time I was home and a neighbor came to the door and said my moms was downstairs in the hallway. She said she looked sick. I rushed downstairs and she wasn’t sick, just drunk. When she wasn’t drinking, she was depressed. Sometimes she said she had pains in her stomach, but I think mostly she was depressed. If I got up late at night to go to the bathroom, I would find her sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. I’d ask her what she was thinking about and she’d say, ‘Nothing.’ When I started messing up in school and they asked me what was wrong, I said the same thing. ‘Nothing.’”

9
    â€œ SO YOU WANT TO CHANGE what happened to you in school?” Kelly asked.
    â€œIt wasn’t real enough to change,” I said. “School is like a dream that’s going on, and it’s good and everything, but it ain’t going on about you. That’s the way it was for me, anyway. I was supposed to be filling my head up with what they were teaching, but it didn’t go down that way.”
    â€œNobody gave you the right information?”
    â€œThey give me the right information, or it was right as far as I was concerned, but I wasn’t hopping around passing out high fives or nothing,”I said. “It was like I was knowing two different things. One was like school is smoking and your trip to the big time, but the other thing was that hey, it didn’t do nothing for people I knew. Can you get my school on the television?”
    â€œIs it strong enough in your mind?” Kelly asked.
    â€œIt got to be strong in my mind to get it on television? You never said that before.”
    â€œIs it strong enough?”
    â€œI think so,” I said. “Check it out.”
    Kelly started with his remote again and had me thinking about how strong school was on my mind. I was wondering if he really meant that it had to be strong or if he was just messing with me.
    I watched as the television focused on the hallway in the first floor of Carver High. Then I saw me sitting in the office, but I was younger. I leaned forward and took a look at myself. My face was rounder on the bottom. I had on my light brown sweater and my fly Nikes and I was looking good.
    â€œHow old are you again, Jeremy?” All the kidsat Carver High knew that when Mr. Lyons took off his jacket, he was serious. He had his jacket off as I sat in his office.
    â€œThirteen,” I said.
    â€œJeremy, why don’t you look over your test scores and tell me what you think about them.” He pushed a long sheet of paper in front of me.
    Why didn’t he just go ahead and tell me I messed up? That’s what the meeting was all about. He knew what the scores were like. Why did we have to go through all the gaming?
    â€œYou were doing fairly well in math before,” he said. “I think you were at grade level, weren’t