At-Risk Read Online Free PDF

them! Don’t say nothing about them! Don’t say—” He was tired of hearing about it, tired of being vigilant night and day. Each time his grandfather talked about it, it did something to him. Made it so he could barely breathe. Made it so that he felt that he was the boy in the coffin, in the suit, with no smile. As though he was the one dead, dying, and already buried. Buried alive.
    He started to cry. A boy his age. Sixteen years old and crying, buthe couldn’t help it. He told his grandfather that they weren’t even really aiming for Kiki and Stephen. That the boys who shot them didn’t even know them. That it had nothing to do with them. Revenge he could understand. Revenge was cold. Calculated. Methodical. Logical. Everybody got even. But the bullets that had killed them weren’t even meant for Kiki and Stephen. This thing that happened was accidental, careless. Murder. He thought his friends deserved better. Someone should have at least known who they were.
    It had only gotten worse after they died. They had been used as examples. All of the young boys older than six but younger than fourteen, dressed in borrowed brown, black, and navy suits, had been led up to the caskets by relatives and been forced to look at the boys. Kiki and Stephen had become an example of what could happen to them and all other black boys that didn’t stay out of the streets. The accidental part of the shooting only made the adults feel that much more justified. The adults whispered that bullets didn’t have anyone’s names written on them, the phrase he’d heard on nights after a shooting when his whole block turned off their lights and pulled their shades and closed their windows to repel the stray bullets. Because it was a funeral and the dead boys’ mothers were present, the adults kept the other words under their tongues.
Serves them right
, they wanted to say. Jason knew that they all believed it was just desserts just because of the people Kiki and Stephen knew and hung out with.
Sooner or later something like this was bound to happen
, they wanted to say. He knew the adults felt the same way about him. They kept their distance when he walked down the block. No one ever gave him a five dollar bill and asked him to run to the store for them. No one ever asked him to help carry a shopping cart up the fourteen steps of the stoop to their front door. To them he was the same as Kiki and Stephen, and Kiki and Stephen were the same as the boys who had shot them. So they didn’t speak to him. Instead, they watched him and waited for him to die.
    He told his grandfather about the shooting. Jason had never seen a boy die before. When it happened, it wasn’t at all like in the movies that he and his boys sneaked into all summer long. The gun going off hadn’t had the loud clap sound it has in the movies. At first Jason had mistaken the sound of the gunshots for firecrackers going off. Then the popping sounds started folks on the other end of the block to running. When the girls and the children scattered and hid he saw that Kiki and Stephen had fallen. Then the popping had stopped. Then he had run himself.
    â€œGet yourself together,” his grandfather said when he was done.
    Sympathy would have shamed him, but the command released the tightness in Jason’s chest, made it so he could breathe. He stopped crying, but he didn’t wipe his eyes. He stood and waited to see what the old man would do.
    â€œYou can sleep in here tonight if you want,” he said. “Get in.”
    Jason kicked his boots off and got into his grandfather’s bed, just as he was, dressed in his baggy jeans and basketball jersey.
    â€œYou ought to take better care of your shoes.”
    The light went off. Jason heard the roll of the wheelchair as it settled on the other side of the bed and then the shuffle of a dead foot and the creak and heave of a body settling into bed. He rolled onto his