Free If I Grow Up by Todd Strasser

else was fanning her with a newspaper while Mrs. Blake dabbed a wet cloth against her forehead.
    â€œDeShawn!” My sister’s anxious voice called from the stairwell. “Anyone seen DeShawn?”
    â€œIn the lobby,” I yelled back.
    Nia came to the top of the stairs with her hands on her big belly and consternation on her face. “Gramma wants you upstairs right now !”
    I could feel people’s eyes on me, and wished she didn’t sound so bossy. Nia came down the stairs, grabbed me by the arm, and squeezed hard. Suddenly I knew it wasn’t just Gramma who wanted me out of harm’s way.
    Meanwhile Marcus lifted Laqueta in his arms. Her head rolled back. “We’ll take my car.”
    Someone held the door open, and he went through sideways careful not to let his sister bang into the door frame. LaRue, Mrs. Blake, and Terrell followed. Marcus was a gang leader and drug dealer, almost surely a murderer, and as brutal and hard as anyone I’d ever met. But he was the only hero we knew.
    JUMPED IN
    A few days later I walked home from school with a black cloud over my head. It was Friday and Tanisha wanted us to go to the movies with friends that night, but I had no money and no way to get any. I couldn’t decide which was worse: telling Tanisha we couldn’t go, or going and letting her pay.
    â€œHey,” someone said.
    I looked up. Marcus’s black Mercedes was rolling slowly along the curb beside me. He steered with one hand and leaned his elbow out the open window. “What’s wrong?”
    â€œWho said anything’s wrong?” I said.
    â€œLooks like you got the weight of the world on your shoulders,” he said, pulling the car to the curb. “I been drivin’ alongside you for almost a whole block, and you ain’t looked up once. You got a problem, maybe I can help.”
    That reminded me of something. “Laqueta okay?”
    â€œYeah, she’s back home now.” He gazed at me with steady eyes. “You gonna tell me what’s botherin’ you?”
    â€œI can take care of it,” I said.
    If a muscle in Marcus’s face moved, I didn’t see it. “Come over here. What grade you in?”
    â€œSeventh.”
    â€œHow you doin’?”
    â€œOkay. I may even go to Hewlett Academy over in Beech Hill.” That very day, Mr. Brand had given me a red folder filled with a dozen pages of words he wanted me to learn for the magnet school entrance exam.
    â€œYou gotta take some kind of a test to get in?” Marcus asked.
    â€œYeah. Vocabulary, math, a lot of stuff.”
    â€œAnd suppose you get in,” he said. “Then what?”
    â€œI don’t know. Get a better education, I guess.”
    Marcus rubbed his chin across his forearm. “So how come you’re mopin’ along like your dog just got run over?”
    Suddenly I knew I was going to tell him. It was the kind of thing you wanted to talk about with a guy who had experience. “My girl wants to go on a date tonight, and I’m a little short.”
    â€œThat’s messed up,” he said, nodding slowly. “How bad do you want to go?”
    â€œI don’t care,” I said. “But my girl wants to go so bad, she says she’ll even pay.”
    â€œNo way.” Marcus shook his head, and I knew he understood. His arm disappeared from the open window. When it reappeared, a bill was folded between his fingers. “Fifty do you?”
    I hesitated. “What you want in return?”
    â€œNothing.”
    Â 
    That night Tanisha and I went to the movies with her friends. It was the first time we’d been alone in the dark—the first time I’d been alone in the dark with any girl—and when the movie was over, my life had changed. I was on my way to becoming a man.
    Afterward I walked home. Subwoofers boomed from the slow-moving rides cruising the streets, and styled-up folks waited in