Lockdown Read Online Free

said.
    I saw Cobo go over past Toon and take one of his franks. I think Pugh saw it too, but he didn’t say nothing.
    Dinner is forty-five minutes, the same as the other meals. You could eat it in ten minutes but they give you forty-five anyway. Five minutes before the dinner period was over, the visitors got up and left. Mr. Pugh told us we had to wait until they were out of the building.
    “Take five!” he said. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em!”
    He knew none of us had any cigarettes, or at least we weren’t supposed to have them, and he would report us if we did get some. We waited for twenty minutes past the end of dinner period before Mr. Cintron came back.
    “That was a facility reform committee,” he said. “They’ve got some good ideas, but they’ll never come about.”
    “What kind of ideas?” Mr. Pugh asked.
    “To put each young person with an individual tutor,” Mr. Cintron said. “They figure it’d be more cost efficient than just warehousing these kids over and over. I’m supposed to fly up to Albany tonight and plead the case tomorrow, but I know the legislature won’t spend the money for it. They’re not smart enough. I’ll be back by the afternoon with the bad news.”
    “Instead of that, you could get them individual tutors to kick their butts,” Mr. Pugh said. He was laughing. If the legislature was made up of people like him…
    When we left we saw the girls waiting in the hallway to come into the mess hall. They were pissedbecause they had been standing outside the whole time.
    “We ate everything,” Leon said. “That’s what took us so long.”
    We got ten minutes of free time before they put us back on lockdown, and I knew that Toon would be safe for the night. But we wouldn’t be on lockdown once Mr. Cintron got back. I told Play that I was thinking about telling Mr. Cintron.
    “You can’t be no snitch, man,” he said. “You can’t be no snitch.”
    I knew no one wanted me to be a snitch. Even the guards didn’t respect anyone who passed along information. All we had were each other and sometimes you needed some homies, even if they were just temporary, to get by. Play was cool with me, but I knew if he thought he couldn’t trust me then he’d have to walk away from me if anything went down.
    I thought about writing Icy a letter, but I didn’t want to write nothing stupid or just something about the joint. When I was first sentenced, she and Willis were in the court and the judge let me say good-bye to them.
    “Progress doesn’t sound too bad,” Icy had said.
    She was crying because she knew I was sad. Willis was telling me to be strong, and I was saying something—I don’t even remember what—and looking around him to see if Mom was going to show. She didn’t. On the way to Progress I imagined her waking up off a bad high and wondering what day I would be sentenced. No way she was going to say it was her fault she didn’t show.
    “Somebody must have given me the wrong date,” she’d say with her proper way of talking.
    I wouldn’t write anything about Progress. The name sounded good and we were supposed to believe we were somehow actually moving in some direction, but it wasn’t nothing but a juvy jail. From the way Mr. Cintron talked, it would get a lot worse if more kids were assigned to it.
    I tried to sleep without thinking about Toon. What was happening was just happening. That’s the way life was. Shit just came together, and if it rolled in your direction you got messed up.
    What I knew, though, was that Cobo never did want no Toon in the 3-5-7. He was just the kind of gangsta fool who always went around looking for somebody to mess with. Luther was like that too.
    Sometimes I think that’s how he hooked up with Moms. She was weak enough to take him in and he was mean enough not to care about nothing except himself.
    A month before I got arrested, he had met me on the corner of 145 th Street, near where the bus depot was. He told me he didn’t