Dope Sick by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online

would like to change the way Lauryn’s mother treated me. If she had treated me decent, things might have worked out.”
    â€œHow you gonna change what somebody else is thinking or what they do?” Kelly asked. “You talking about you didn’t have a job, but the bottom line is you’re the one that was—what you call it?—broke down?”
    â€œBroke sick,” I said. “Hey, get the television back on the street. You think they’re going to search all the houses?”
    â€œHow I know?” Kelly looked at me like he was mad or something.
    â€œYou sitting there acting like you know so much,” I said. “I should just kick your butt to see what you made of. You probably a punk.”
    Kelly giggled like a damn girl, and that got me mad. I told him not to be laughing at me. “I don’t like people playing me.”
    â€œYou want to get high?” Kelly asked.
    â€œWhat you got?”
    â€œNothing,” he said. “I just wanted to know if that was what you wanted. I know you get high when things don’t go your way.”
    â€œYou got a bathroom up in here?”
    â€œRight down that hallway, left side,” Kelly said.
    The hallway was kind of dark, but I found the bathroom. It was one of those old bathrooms with a light on the side of a cabinet over the sink. I turned it on and closed the door. I was flat-out tired and feeling five kinds of terrible. My stomach was getting queasy, and my arm, which had been hurting on and off, was hurting even worse.
    I just had to pee, but I was so tired I needed to sit down. When I went to undo my belt, I got a sharp pain in my arm. It made me want to cry. Not the pain, but just the way my whole thing was, like, falling apart. Some guys my age was away at college, or working or training in the army. Here I was in some tiny-butt bathroom trying to get my head together and rapping to some weird sucker that I didn’t know what he was, let alone who he was.
    Sitting on the little toilet with one arm shot up was stupid. I thought about what would happen if I heard the police running around outside. The Nine was still in my pocket, and I gripped it, but I couldn’t use my left arm at all and I had to let the Nine go to get my johnson inside the toilet seat. It was like the whole world was clowning me.
    When I finished peeing I got up, pulled my pants up, and noticed that my left wrist was swelling up. I thought maybe I was getting blood poisoning. If that happened, it didn’t matter what the cops were doing, because I was going to die anyway or have to give myself up.
    It come to me that maybe Kelly had a cell phone, and he could be calling the cops. Maybe he had even split. I started to run out, then just stood and leaned on the sink. It didn’t make a difference anymore. Nothing was making a difference.
    The cabinet over the sink had a mirror. One corner was messed up, as if maybe there had been a fire and it had got burned. I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair wasn’t combed, my skin looked ashy, I looked ugly. Black and ugly.
    I turned the light out and went back out toward the other room. Kelly was still sitting there, but I didn’t know what he had been doing when I was in the bathroom.
    â€œHey, Kelly, you got a cell phone up in here?”
    â€œYeah, you got somebody to call?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy don’t you call your boy Maurice?” Kelly said. “See if he got that job?”
    â€œHe’s asleep now,” I said. “Anyway, I know he didn’t get it.”
    â€œI think he got it,” Kelly said.
    He said it cold, like he knew what he was talking about. But it was more than that—it was like he was putting his mouth on me, saying I was definitely wrong for splitting from the line at Home Depot.
    â€œI couldn’t get that job,” I said. “I didn’t want Maurice to know it.”
    â€œWhy couldn’t you get it?”