I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher Read Free Book Online

from the house as they could while trying to stay out of sight. From the back door, I ran to my left toward an old body shop and tire store on the corner. It was a two-story building, and I don’t know how I got up there, but I have a very clear memory of lying flat on the floor to catch my breath, and how proud I was that even though I was one of the littlest brothers, I’d remembered my job and had been fast enough to get away. And then I realized what had happened. The plan to run had been between us boys. We’d never even figured in the girls because our mother had usually taken them with her because they were so little. We had left Denise and Tara in the house.
    There were a couple of windows facing our yard, so I crawled over to one to look out of it. I think there might have been some old curtains up that I kind of hid behind so that no one could see me. Sure enough, they were carrying my sisters out of the house, down the steps, and loading them into the car. They had caught John, too. All three of them were crying. They were scared and confused about what had just happened—why their big brothers were suddenly gone and who these strange people were who were taking them away from home.
    All of our planning hadn’t mattered. The grown-up world had won anyway. I could see Denise’s face clearly in the car window as they drove off and all of the pride I’d been feeling just a few seconds before was gone. As their big brother, I was supposed to protect them and I’d failed.
     
     
    AFTER THE SOCIAL WORKERS STOPPED looking for us and left, we went back to the house one at a time. It was probably a couple of days before we were all sleeping there again. It was getting into summer break, so there was even less structure to our lives now that school was out.
    I don’t remember when my mother finally returned, but not long after that we moved again. My memory is a little bit hazy here as to the exact timeline, but I’m pretty sure it was at this point that we lived at the Salvation Army shelter near the bus station for about a month before we moved to a little place in northeast Memphis. The shelter is closed now, but I have a very clear memory of staying there for several weeks. I think the people in the Salvation Army might have even been the ones who helped my mother find the new house and make arrangements to move us there. Whatever the case, we lived in that house for most of the time I was in second grade.
    During that time, John, Denise, and Tara were put into the foster care system. Rico was put into state custody, so he was kept in a more heavily controlled environment than just a foster home. He was always the one out on the streets more than the rest of us, so if someone was going to get picked up by the cops, it would be him. But we figured that they were going to get all of us sooner or later, and we were right.
    About a year after they got the little ones, the DCS people caught up with the rest of us at school. Carlos and I were at Coleman Elementary, an old brick and cement building that was two stories tall and probably felt old from the first day it was built. It was getting toward the end of the school year and everyone was excited for summer vacation to get started. One of the school secretaries came on over the loudspeaker in our classroom: “Would Michael Oher please collect his things and come to the front office?”
    I was excited. The only time anyone was called to the front office like that was when their mom had come to take them out of school for the rest of the day. That seemed like a pretty good deal to me. I was hoping that was the case, anyway—that my mother was doing well, maybe even cleaned up from drugs, and she was picking us up from school as a surprise. Deep down, though, I think I knew what was really going on. We were about to get evicted from our current house and my mother, it turned out, had checked herself into a drug treatment and rehabilitation program. She wasn’t