Free I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher Page A

night. I had started to see that there was another way to live, and I wanted to bring that way of living to my own family.
    While I had hated foster care, I also knew, even then, that it was doing something good for me. There were rules that kept me off the streets. There were regular checkups to make sure I was going to school. Despite my sadness, I had started to see what was missing from my life.
    I stayed at St. Joseph’s for about two weeks and adjusted to the new routine. We weren’t in school; instead, we would have to talk about our feelings with adults (who I realize now probably were psychiatrists and counselors). Then when we weren’t in those evaluations, we could watch television.
    A funny side note from my stay there: I think that’s where I got my love for movies. I am a huge fan of films, and I think it first started when I got to choose whatever videos I wanted to watch from St. Joseph’s collection. I’d never had videos before, and definitely not dozens of them to choose from to watch on my own. It might not sound like much, but it is actually empowering to get to make your own decision about what movie to watch, and for a kid who felt like all decision making had been taken away, that was a big deal. I slept in a little hospital room, with my own TV with a VCR on the bottom. It felt so grown-up, so exciting to return to my own room with a video I’d picked out from the movie shelf.
    As much as I loved the access to movies, though, I found myself getting bored and a little irritated with life there. I didn’t understand why I was there, why I had to have endless discussions about how I was feeling and do the silly little exercises I had to do. The plan, I found out later, was to keep me for a full month and then make recommendations for my future care based on what they learned from observing me. However, I decided that two weeks was long enough. I was tired of the inaction. I wanted something to happen, to feel like some kind of progress was happening in my life.
    So I started studying my surroundings again, the way I like to do, and I noticed that all of the adults seemed to be coming and going from the double doors at each end of the hallway. One afternoon, while no one was watching, I wandered down there and studied the door. Even though there were those computerized locks on the doors, it seemed to me they weren’t quite shutting right. So I folded up a sheet of paper and worked it past the heavy bolt—and the door opened right up! I looked around, and no one else seemed to have noticed anything; there were no alarms going off or people running to see where the security breach had happened. Breathing heavily, I made myself walk slowly and calmly back to my room so I could come up with a plan.
    I knew if I ran off then, they’d miss me within just an hour or two, since we were getting ready for dinner and then bedtime, when they did room check. Instead, I figured I would wait until the morning and slip out then. Not only would I be able to make my way home in daylight, which would be a lot easier, but I also figured that they wouldn’t notice as quickly that I was missing. If I wasn’t in my room, whoever was looking for me would assume I was off talking to a counselor or taking another test.
    So that night I remember very clearly taking that little folded piece of paper, kissing it good night, and putting it under my pillow before falling asleep with a huge grin on my face.
    The next morning, I crept past the nurses’ station, ducking down so they wouldn’t notice me passing by, and tried my lucky paper again. Sure enough, as soon as I slid it past the blot the door popped open and I slipped out the door, into the stairwell, and then headed for the first exit I could find. I was free, and I was heading home.
     
     
    AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED, I was done with the DCS. As much as I knew the meals and the structure were good, overall the experience was bad. I was almost eleven years old and