Free 145th Street by Walter Dean Myers

He went to the police and the police told him they couldn’t do anything until something happened.”
    “They’re into cutting people,” Peaches said. “That’s serious.”
    “Yo, Peaches, I didn’t know you were sweating Monkeyman,” Fee said.
    “Lighten up, lame,” Peaches came back with her quick mouth. “Monkeyman had the heart to help me when I needed some help. If you don’t have the heart to help him that’s cool, but don’t try to finesse it off like it’s no big thing.”
    “He needs a gun,” Fee said. “That’s the only thing they respect.”
    Just blow the word and I was ready to split. From a scrap in the street the jam was jumping to nines. On the way home I tried thinking about what Monkeyman could do. If the Tigros came on him and just beat him up it would be cool. I mean, that was sick but it was better than being cut or shot. And the thing was that a lot of kids were talking about being down with gangs and trying to make themselves large by going to wack city and offing somebody. That was the danger big-time. To me it was like some moron jumping off a big building and styling for the camera on the way down. They would be throwing away their life, and taking somebody else’s life for some moment they imagined would happen. This craziness filled my nightmares. And it might have been sad but the truth was that I was glad it was Monkeyman on the line, and not me.
    Two weeks passed from the time that Monkeyman had stopped the girl from cutting Peaches and it looked as if things might blow over without anyone getting hurt. Then a guy called Clean entered the picture.
    Ralph J. Bunche is the best school in the ’hood but every so often we get in a guy who doesn’t fit. That’s what Clean was. He wasn’t a big dude, more small and wiry. He wore his pants low in hip-hop style with about four inches of his shorts showing. You’re not allowed to style down in the school but he kept at it and the hallway teachers got on his case. He told everyone he was from L.A. and used to run with the Crips, but Fee peeped his school record and the dude was really from some place in California called Lompoc.
    Clean hooked up with some folks who told him about the Tigros posse. Check this out, to get into the Tigros you either had to slash a saint in public, meaning cut somebody who wasn’t involved in nothing, just walking down the street, or make something that was foul righteous. According to the Tigros posse, since Monkeyman had messed with them and that was foul, getting even with him was making it righteous.
    It got around in the cafeteria that Clean was going to do up Monkeyman. Peaches was still trying to settle things peacefully.
    “Let’s just go up to the dude and see if we can talk a hole in his ego or whatever else it takes,” she said. “Because I got to be watching Monkeyman’s back the same way he turned out for me.”
    A few other kids said they were willing to try to talk to Clean. But the truth is that some dudes you can talk to and some you can’t. In the first place Clean was not into brain surgery. I mean, his favorite sentence was “Huh?” Clean was in a class called ZIP. ZIP was supposed to stand for Zoned for Individual Progress, but all the kids called it the Underground Railroad because it was the last stop you made before you dropped out of high school.
    Okay, besides Clean not being a brainiac he was also like nine shades of serious wack. He was the kind of kid who made you wonder what his mama had been smoking when he was in the womb. But, hey, give it a shot, right?
    We found him on the street, and Peaches took the first shot at Clean. “So,” she said, “there’s no use in us, as young black brothers and sisters, getting into the same violence thing that’s killing us off and messing up our dreams. If we can’t respect each other, how are we going to expect people to respect us?”
    “He messed with the Tigros so he got to be messed up!” Clean