Dope Sick by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t asking.
    â€œYou know, right after it got really warm, in May, I got called down to the office in school,” I started. “Mr. Trager, he’s like an assistant principal, started running down my school record. He’s all like, ‘You’re failing this and you’re failing that,’ and talking about how was I going to get on with my life and whatnot. I had heard all this before. I told Mr. Trager that he didn’t know what my life was going to be like because he wasn’t me. He didn’t have no crystal ball to look into the future.
    â€œTo me this was same old same old. Some teacher or some principal talking me down and shaking his head or some woman teacher pushing my grades across the desk and asking me what I thought about them. And what I was saying to myself was the same thing I was saying to the people at the school. You know, just the way you could be sitting on the stoop and some suckers come flying down the street on a drive-by and waste you, or a brick could fall off the roof and kill you, something good could happen, too. Maybe you could hit the lottery or come up with a really great rap CD and go flashing through the rest of your life.
    â€œPeople want to look at you and see your whole future laid out the way they know it, and I was saying that didn’t happen. People aren’t born with I’ M GREAT ! flashing on their foreheads. Anyway, when Mr. Trager gets down to the bottom line, he says to me that there wasn’t any way that I was going to graduate. He started talking about how it wasn’t the end of the world and that if I stayed in school another full year and worked hard, maybe I could graduate then.
    â€œYou know, that really messed with me. Because all the way up until then I was saying nobody could say this and that about what was going to happen, but now Mr. Trager was saying exactly what was going to go down. And when he said it—just laid it out like that—he was saying what I knew deep inside all the time.”
    â€œThat you weren’t going to graduate?” Kelly asked.
    â€œNo, more than that,” I said. “I knew my program wasn’t making it. You know, all these teachers be sitting in front of you talking like they’re schooling you about where you are and where you’re going, and you know better than they do. All you got to do is walk around and see what everybody who looks like you and lives around where you living is doing and see they just like you and they ain’t going nowhere. And when you looking at television or seeing people who getting it on big-time and you see what they got going for them and then look at your hand and see you ain’t got nothing, you know? That’s the thing people can’t see when they’re explaining to your butt what’sgoing on and how you messing up. They can’t see that you knew it long before they did.”
    â€œAnd so what did you do?” Kelly asked.
    â€œI said the hell with it,” I said. “If I’m going to be pushed off the sidewalk, I might as well step on off. You know what I mean? Stop pretending something good was waiting around the corner and be what everybody expected me to be, which was another throwaway dude. So when Rico told me he was going down to Houston to see his cousin and asked me if I wanted to go with him, I said I’d go.”
    â€œYou were down with Rico even before you and him got messed up with the cop thing?” Kelly asked.
    â€œNo, I didn’t dig Rico at all because I knew he was foul,” I said. “But if I was all mapped out to be foul, too, I might as well join the other side.”
    â€œBe somebody different?”
    â€œYeah. Because the old me was always hoping that things would work out while the new me was dealing with the truth. What threw it into gear waswhen he said he was going to Houston, which was the same week my class was graduating.
    â€œWhat I found