Rikers High Read Online Free

my housing unit. Maybe they were screwing with me for not snitching or figured that after five months in the same place, I knew enough people to put a price on that kid’s head. But whatever the reason, I was getting moved.
    It was after nine o’clock when they brought me back to Mod-3 to pack up. Almost everyone was watching TV inside the dayroom, except for a few kids already asleep in their beds. No one from the house had been on the bus back to Rikers with me, so none of them knew what happened. They probably all thought I got released from court. Only there I was, walking into the house with bandages across my right cheek, about to pack all my shit into a plastic laundry bag.
    The COs wouldn’t let anyone out of the dayroom. They’re always worried that somebody will see you moving as their last chance to settle a score. But I didn’t have any real enemies, and I could see dudes pressed up against the big windows as I went through my bucket. They were pointing to their faces and looking at me, cutting themselves with a finger to see how it might feel.
    I knew some of them were watching to make sure that I only took stuff out of my own bucket. More than one guy had become a sneak thief while the rest of the house was bottled up somewhere.
    When I’d finished packing, I tied the plastic bag up in my blanket and threw it on top of my mattress. Then I pulled the mattress to the floor and started dragging it all behind me, like I’d seen other kids do when they moved out.
    Up at the Plexiglas bubble, one of the regular house COs gave my card over to an escort officer. I could see my picture stapled to the corner. Only it looked like a picture of somebody else now, somebody without stitches.
    I didn’t know where I was going and I wouldn’t ask.
    The escort officer led me out of Mod-3, and I headed down the main corridor, homeless.
    At the end of the corridor there was a woman CO at a desk next to an iron door. She looked old and tired, like a grandmother sitting behind a kitchen table.
    She stared at the bandages on my face and said, “Honey, why would you let that kind of trouble find you?”
    I dropped my eyes to the floor.
    She groaned as she got up, and I heard her turn one of the big metal keys on her ring in the door.
    Mom would warn me all the time about getting into trouble. Whenever I went out at night she’d tell me to stay home. Sometimes she’d almost beg me. But I was at home, sitting alone on the stoop outside my building, when I got arrested.
    This muscle-bound dude stepped to me, and I tried to front, acting tough. I was breathing easy when he only wanted to know where to cop some weed. I told him about the spot up the avenue and even felt good about it when he called me, “my man.”
    That undercover cop scored what he wanted, because a police cruiser rolled up my block about five minutes later. I almost couldn’t believe those cops were looking for me. But they weren’t fucking around.
    Mom saw the flashing lights through our living-room window.
    She stuck her head out and yelled, “Martin, get your ass upstairs now!”
    That’s when she saw them cuffing me. By the time she got outside, I was already in the squad car. The cops told her I was being charged with steering. She had no idea what that meant.
    I remember her screaming at them, “My son didn’t steal any car!”
    If she wasn’t crying so much, it might have even been funny.

CHAPTER
    7
    I stepped through the iron door and was surprised to suddenly be outside in the cool night air. The smell of the jail was gone. That funk that comes with the dirty laundry and rotting garbage was behind me now.
    It was tight between the buildings of the jail, and the cement path was lined with a tall fence covered in razor wire. The path led out to an open yard I’d never seen before, beneath the clouds and stars. There were rows of lights shining high up on the tops of