What They Found by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online Page A

about boys sometime?” she had asked me.
    I thought about them all the time. I just froze when they came near me. Occasionally I told myself that when Mr. Right came along things would be different. That’s the reason I couldn’t decide if I wanted Mama to know that I was
almost
having a date with Burn. Almost because when he had asked me out I had said no, but then I told him I was doing volunteer work on the weekend and we could always use some new volunteers.
    “What you doing?” he asked, the dark eyes merely slits in his chiseled brown face.
    “We’re taking a boatload of handicapped children up the Hudson to Bear Mountain,” I said, feeling myself look away from his gaze. “It’s just a turnaround cruise. We pick them up in the morning and bring them aboard. Most of the day we play games with them or just let them watch the passing scenery, whatever they want. They have lunch on the boat and then we bring them back. It’s a nice outing.”
    “Yeah, I’ll come,” he had said.
    So in my mind it wasn’t exactly a date.
    “It may not be exactly a date, but it’s Burn!” Mama was sitting in one of the chairs with her feet up and shoes off. “The man’s a thug! What you doing with a thug?”
    “We’re not going out, Mama,” I said. “We’re going to Bear Mountain. Then I’m coming home and he’s going wherever he’s going.”
    “Noee, you haven’t dealt with anybody like Burn before,” Mama said. “And don’t tell me what they haven’t proven. That man is dangerous.”
    I had known Burn back in the day when he was Leon Robinson, a snotty-nosed kid everybody felt sorry for. His mother was caught up in the crack blitz of the eighties and he had to pretty much raise himself the best he could. There were stories about how the man his mother lived with had beat him, and how he had once lived in an empty apartment for days without anything to eat. Then, slowly, he had grown from a kid everybody pushed around into someone that everyone feared. He had been in gang fights and shoot-outs that made even the white newspapers, and had spent at least a year and a half in a juvenile detention facility. Now, at twenty-two, he was four years older than me but looked like he could have been in his thirties.
    He had come into the shop a week earlier, with a sleek-looking white girl hanging on his arm. She was wearing a white jacket with a white blouse and a little black string tie, white silk pants that came down to mid-thigh, and a black lace skirt over the pants that came down to her knees. It was unusual but on her smallish figure it was looking good. She was built nicely and the only jewelry she wore were matching black onyx pinky rings and three diamond studs in each ear that looked fabulous. They made her blue-green eyes even morestriking. She wore her dark hair up and wanted the back of her neck trimmed.
    “I was going to try to do it myself using a mirror,” she said, her Southern accent coming through strongly, “but I figured I’d probably just mess it up.”
    I trimmed her hair. She said her name was Sue Ellen and chatted about a letter from her father in Alabama. He was warning her about the dangers of New York, she said, as if Alabama weren’t just as dangerous.
    All the while Leon—now Burn—sat watching us. He had grown into a good-looking man, a little over six feet tall, and muscled. But the way he watched us, nothing moving except his eyes, he reminded me of a snake, and the whole world was potential prey. It was as if anything you said might set him off and he’d lash out. He wore a gold suit and a gold and black shirt open at the collar. He saw me looking at him in the mirror and smiled. I was embarrassed that he’d caught me checking him out and dropped my eyes to my work.
    When I finished trimming her hair Sue Ellen paid me and gave me a twenty-dollar tip, which was more than the trim.
    Abeni went to the window and gave a running account as they were leaving.
    “He’s got a