Free Just Another Hero by Sharon M. Draper

Saturday night, man. Heaven came knockin’ at eleven p.m. Heaven at eleven. Why you think I stayed up there so long?” He let the lie sink in as the guys high-fived one another.
    Kofi shook his head, amazed at what the group would swallow.
    â€œYou ever get busted for that?”
    â€œNaw, man. I’m Eddie Mahoney—slick like ice and twice as nice.”
    His admirers laughed raucously.
    â€œSo it wasn’t like the jails on TV?” another sophomore asked. A couple of boys punched him in the shoulder for asking a stupid question. But Eddie was cool.
    â€œYou’re thinkin’ about places like Attica where they gotgangs and solitary confinement and killers and rapists and stuff, dude.”
    The kid nodded, looking fascinated.
    â€œThe place they put me was more like one of those vacation villages. We had three meals a day—better than my mama can cook. Steak on Tuesday. Fried chicken on Wednesday. Apple pie and ice cream every night. And a movie every Saturday. With popcorn.”
    Kofi rolled his eyes. Eddie had left out the barbed-wire fences, the police dogs, the body searches, the locked doors of the cells, and the total lack of privacy. Kofi had spent a weekend at one of those detention centers a couple of years ago, when he’d been picked up for a DUI and no one could locate his parents. It was not a hotel. Each cell had bare floors, thin, moldy mattresses and blankets, and a toilet in the corner of the cell that had no seat and always stank. The prison-issue orange jumpsuits, worn and ugly and thin, never fit right, and the food tasted like slop. He had sworn to never again do anything stupid enough to land him back in a place like that.
    â€œFor real?” Ryan was asking.
    â€œYeah, dude. We had a game room with a ping-pong table, a pinball machine, and get this—a huge big-screen TV with all the latest video games. Stacks of DVDs. Headphones and iPods to listen to at night. All the latest tunes downloaded.”
    Kofi now laughed out loud, but nobody paid any attention to him.
    Eddie was on a roll. “During the day we went to school just like you do, except we moved at a faster pace. I’mahead in most of my classes here, so I got nothing to do but check out the honeys and plan my next move.”
    â€œAnd what’s that?” Ryan wanted to know. Kofi caught his breath.
    â€œI got plans, little man. I got some unfinished business around here.”
    â€œLike what?”
    To Kofi’s dismay, Eddie’s answer was drowned out by the bell. As the group split up, Kofi put the top back on his water bottle and followed him.
    But before Kofi got even halfway down the hall, the sound of Jack Krasinski’s crashing cymbals filled the air. Very few kids even looked up. Girls continued their giggled conversations, guys bopped to the music coming from the ear buds attached to their MP3 players, and even teachers just shook their heads wearily. No one told him to stop. Until Kofi.
    â€œHey, Jack. Can you chill with those things a little? I had a category two kind of headache hurricane, and you just upped it to a category five!”
    Jack was sturdy and muscular—Kofi guessed from carrying his heavy bass drum in the marching band. He wore his black hair long and shaggy, the ends matted and uncombed. He was one of the few seniors who sported a full beard. Kofi thought he looked a little like the guy from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
    â€œMy bad. My bad,” said Jack as he lowered the two golden disks. “I was just freein’ the noise, and colorin’ the world a little, you feel me?”
    â€œYeah, I feel you,” Kofi answered. “The whole world feels you, dude.”
    â€œThe explosion of two cymbals is a splash of color in a dark gray world,” Jack told him. “Little kids use crayons. I use sound.”
    â€œDeep,” Kofi said, “but noisy.”
    â€œI’m an artiste,” said Jack,