Free We Were Here by Matt de la Pena

about stuff. Like my rowdy school cafeteria at lunchtime and me and Diego’s secret fishing spot along the levee and riding Diego’s dirt bike to the store for moms and my grandma’s old arthritis hands patting down tortillas on the griddle in Fresno. I thought about the day Gramps had us out there in the fields from sunup to sundown, bent over picking berries. How after less than an hour I was so mad tiredI didn’t think I could do it even ten more minutes. But somehow I made it through the rest of the day. All these random things, they just kept flashing through my mind, and I let ’em. But after a while this idea popped in my head: I bet when people get old there’s only a couple actual moments they could look back on and say, Yo, that moment changed my life forever. And most of them probably aren’t even the person’s choice. Somebody gets hit by a car or gets fired from a job or wins the lottery or their pops gets blown to pieces by a grenade in some stupid war. But tonight was the opposite kind of moment. I was making a conscious choice. The second I broke out of the group home and started for Mexico, my life would be changed forever. And it would be because I wanted it changed. I knew I could never come back after this. They’d most likely throw me in real prison. And I heard some pretty bad things about that. Shit like you don’t even wanna know, man.
    Right in the middle of all my thinking I heard two loud snaps in the hall.
    I jumped out of bed and scooped my bag. I turned to Rondell ready to make shit happen, but you wouldn’t believe what I found: his crazy ass was actually asleep. No lie, dude was out cold, snoring and twitching, drooling on his damn mattress, probably dreaming about chillin’ with one of the disciples.
    I stood there for a sec trying to think what kind of fool could fall asleep right before he broke out of a damn group home and went on the run.
    Only Rondell, man.
    I reached down and shook him awake. “Come on, Rondell! Get up, man! We gotta go!”
    But I’ll give the guy this, he didn’t need no transition time. He whipped off his covers, slid out his own bag and waspulling open the window over his bed before I could even get the screwdriver out from between my mattresses. He went right to work on the bars. We’d already unscrewed most of the bolts securing them to the house, so all he had to do was get the last two. When he did I helped boost his big ass through the window and watched him fall into the bushes outside. A couple neighborhood dogs started barking. I dropped both our bags out after him.
    I paused for a sec at the window, and Rondell looked back up at me. “Ain’t you comin’?” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I just gotta do somethin’ real quick. Go round the other side like we talked about. I’ll meet you guys there.”
    Rondell nodded and took off with both our bags.
    I replaced the bars on the window, redid the two bolts and closed the window back up. Then I snuck out of our room and down the hall toward the office with Jaden’s keys.
    About - the Keys:
    For the week since I told Mong me and Rondell would go with him, I’d been studying Jaden with his keys. Like I knew he had eleven keys on his key ring, and that he wore the key ring on his side belt loop. I knew the five keys with yellow rubber at the top were Lighthouse keys. I knew the two I had to get, ’cause one was the longest and one was the shortest, and that he didn’t use either one after dinner, when the night watch came on. And I knew the only time he took off his key ring was when he played one of us in foosball.
    That’s why after dinner tonight I went up to him in front of all the other guys in the living room and said: “Yo, Jaden. I bet you couldn’t get with me on no foosball.”
    He looked up at me shocked ’cause I’d never asked to play a game with nobody in the house, much less a counselor.And then he got this grin on his face that I knew meant he thought I was finally