Free Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers Page A

something. I put my elbow in his chest a couple of times and told him to back off. He knocked Toon down a couple of times even when Toon didn’t have the ball. He wouldn’t mess with Play and he tried to goof on Mr. Pugh, but Mr. Pugh was so busy with whatever he thought he was doing he didn’t even dig it.
    When it went wrong I didn’t even notice it right away. All I know was that King Kong gave Toon an elbow to the back of his head and I automatically did what we did in the hood when some big jokey fool started hitting people on the court. I stomped down on the top of his foot near the ankle.
    He grabbed at his leg, then he jumped up and came toward me. I thought he was going to chest me up but he didn’t. The sucker lit me up! He was throwing a lot of punches but he really wasn’t hitting all that hard.
    Mr. Pugh grabbed him around the waist and pulled him off me. I put my hand on my mouth and saw my lip or something was bleeding.
    “Calm down! Calm down!” Mr. Pugh was yelling. “This is only a freaking basketball game! Calm down!”
    I looked over at King Kong, and he was breathinghard and running me up and down with his eyes like he was ready to kill me.
    “Are you calm now?” Mr. Pugh had both arms around King Kong and was yelling into his ear.
    “Yeah, yeah!” King Kong said.
    It wasn’t really me, but it was somebody in my skin taking a step forward and hammering that fool in his temple with the side of my fist.
    Sucker’s arms went up into the air and he flopped down on the ground.
    “Everybody here is on report! Everybody here is on report!” Mr. Pugh was screaming.
    Okay, so what happened was that Miss Dodson was only there for the day and we were supposed to have group. Mr. Pugh and Mr. Wilson wanted us all back in our cells and locked in, and they were going to figure out if anybody had to go to detention. But Miss Rossetti came up with the idea that this was a perfect opportunity to teach us something in group.
    The story was that everything was up to Mr. Pugh and Mr. Wilson. I figured Mr. Pugh didn’t care one way or the other and would follow whatever Mr. Wilson wanted to do. If Mr. Wilson was mad, then me and King Kong would probably be written upand both of us on our way to 23-7. If I went to 23-7, then Mr. Cintron would definitely tear me up. If Miss Rossetti could get Mr. Wilson over his mad, I had a shot.
    We were lined up and taken to the dorm hall, where we had to stand at attention with our hands in the “perp” position, behind our backs as if we were cuffed, for fifteen minutes. Then Mr. Wilson came and got me and King Kong and took us into one of the 23-7 rooms.
    “What you guys need to learn?” he asked. “That these steel bars will keep your dumb butts calm if you can’t control your dumb-ass minds? That’s what you need to learn? Or if the steel bars don’t slow you morons down, you know what will? That little chalk mark they put around your body in the street. What’s your pleasure, girls?”
    “He started it,” King Kong said.
    “I didn’t mean to start nothing,” I said. “I was just having fun.”
    Mr. Wilson leaned close enough to me so I could actually smell him and spoke softly into my ear. “Your life ain’t about fun,” he said. “It’s about holding enough of your ass together to walk freeagain. You understand that?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “If either of you so much as cross your eyes in group, I’m going to nail you to a wall just like they do those bear skins,” Mr. Wilson said. “We’re trying to give you a chance to make something of your ugly selves because that’s our job, and we’d like to turn you around so you don’t mess up our lives with your bullshit. But don’t think for a minute that it’s personal, because it’s not. Any of you mess up, we’ll nail you, send you to the next lockup, and move on with our lives and the routine here like you never even existed. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Anderson?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Do I