the Other Wes Moore (2010) by Wes Moore Page A

felony. And what was military school anyway? A bunch of countrified folks yelling and screaming, waving flags and chewing tobacco, forcing confused kids to crawl through mud, preparing them to get killed in a war? My mother wouldn't even let me have toy guns in the house. It was absurd.
    "We'll see what happens," Justin said with a smirk.
    "Yeah, we'll see," I replied.
    The cloudless evening sky had gone dark. Justin ran up the metal staircase to the train entrance. The streetlights blinking on were a silent siren. Time was up. Justin laced up his sneakers and boarded the train, preparing for his run home.

    Wes walked through his new neighborhood, the fourth he could remember living in so far in his short life. He'd called this place home for only the last four months. Despite its being only ten miles from his old home, the thick old-growth trees that lined streets with names like Biscayne Bay, March Point Park, and Whispering Woods were evidence of how far removed he was from the Baltimore City row houses he'd been accustomed to. They now lived in Baltimore County, which sits on the northern, eastern, and western borders of Baltimore City, a horseshoe that fits around its more well-known neighbor. Baltimore City residents increasingly bled into it, exchanging the city for the county's spacious neighborhoods, quality schools, and higher per capita income. Mary Moore was part of that flight.
    Dundee Village, where Wes's new home was located, was a collection of connected, whitewashed homes. The houses were modest but well cared for--flowerpots were filled with geraniums or black-eyed Susans, and floral wreaths hung from each wooden door.
    He hadn't lived there long, but the closeness of the homes allowed Wes to get to know the neighbors and their idiosyncrasies well. He stared thirty yards across the road and saw Mrs. Evers, a middle-aged black woman, standing in front of her house talking with Joyce, an older white woman from Brooklyn, Maryland, who worked at the Royal Farms up the street. Aside from the carbon-copy houses, there was nothing uniform about this working-class neighborhood; it was filled with people of all shapes, colors, and backgrounds. The only thing most of them had in common was that they came from somewhere else, and for most of them, Dundee was a better place to be.
    Back in Baltimore, a new young mayor had just taken over. He ran on a platform of improving the school system, fighting illiteracy, and trying to find innovative solutions to the metastasizing drug trade that was poisoning life in major areas of the city. Mayor Kurt Schmoke was himself a proud product of Baltimore City who went from the city's public schools to Yale University, Oxford, Harvard Law School, and then, improbably, back to his beloved and deeply troubled city. He served as Baltimore's state's attorney for four years and at age thirty-eight was elected the first African-American mayor of Baltimore City, which at the time was over 60 percent black.
    A few months into his administration, Mayor Schmoke was lambasted for saying, "I started to think, maybe we ought to consider this drug problem a public health problem rather than a criminal justice problem." Most people heard this as a cry for drug legalization in Baltimore. But Schmoke was desperate. He knew that unless someone figured out some way of controlling it, the drug trade--and the epidemics of violent crime and untreated addiction it left in its wake--would stifle any hope for progress in the city.
    Change couldn't come fast enough for Mary. Tony was now full-time in the streets, splitting his time between his father's and girlfriend's apartments in the Murphy Homes Projects. He was a veteran of the drug game at eighteen. He'd graduated from foot soldier and now had other people working for him. School was a distant memory; Tony hadn't seen the inside of a classroom on a regular basis since eighth grade.
    Two incidents were decisive in Mary's decision to move. First, Tony got