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you were with—I saw
you just before that man was robbed. The constable thought I was
your accomplice. That’s why I’m in here.”
    He smiled at me. “Then you’re in good
company aren’t you, Mr. West?”
    I wanted to hit him, or strangle him. I
couldn’t make up my mind. Tom reached over and patted me on the
shoulder like he was consoling his best friend.
    “Don’t worry about the drop. It’s all over
quickly, ain’t it?” he said.
    “The drop?”
    “You know—” He bugged his eyes and stuck his
tongue out the side of his mouth. His hand pulled an imaginary
noose above his cocked head. “—A hanging.”
    Instantly, images of the young boy I’d seen
hanged in the square came back to me. I couldn’t end up that way…it
couldn’t be! I rushed to the prison bars calling for help, for a
policeman, anyone who might listen to my pleading. No one came. No
one cared.
    Tom stood behind me. “Hey, Brody, it’s no
big deal. Happens to the best of us eventually.”
    I sobbed with my face pressed against the
rusty bars. How could this have happened? My mother had died
several years ago, leaving only my father to look after me. Now he
was dead too. I wondered if I had been cursed at my birth. Why me?
What had I done to deserve all of this?
    For a moment I wanted to blame God for it
all. Then my father’s preaching came back to me. He’d told me about
a man named Job who had been righteous before the Lord. All of his
family and belongings had been taken from him in one day. He had
been afflicted with sore boils all over his body, yet in all these
things he would not blame God foolishly.
    I sniffed and dried my tears with my sleeve.
I still wanted to cry, but I wouldn’t. The stranger in the alley
had told me I had a work to do, to walk by faith. I decided right
then and there that this was as good a time as any to begin.
    I turned from the bars. Now that my eyes had
become more accustomed to the darkness, I found my cell shared by
Tom, his two accomplices and an old man snoring in the corner with
vomit on his shirt. I hadn’t been the only one shedding tears. The
other boys with Tom looked scared to death.
    I walked right up to him and looked again at
his ears.
    “What are you looking at?” he asked, meeting
my gaze.
    “Your ears…why are they pointed?”
    Faster than I could react, Tom pinned me to
the bars of the cell door. My head clanged against the metal in
nearly the same spot where the policeman had hit me earlier. I
almost passed out again.
    Tom stared menacingly into my face with his
forearm pinning me where I stood. I tried to speak, but he shoved
his arm up against my throat.
    “My ears look strange to you?” He hissed the
question at me so low that only I could hear it. I nodded, still
unable to speak and unsure why he’d gotten so angry. I assumed he
must be sensitive about his birth defect.
    “What’s the matter, Tom?” one of the other
boys asked.
    He ignored the question.
    “What color are my eyes?” he whispered.
    I had no idea what this question had to do
with his being insulted about his ears. Still, Tom released some of
the pressure so I could answer. I looked into his eyes. They
sparkled even without the light from the window striking them.
“Blue changing to bright green and back again.”
    Shock appeared on his face. He lowered his
arm slowly. I still wondered what exactly I’d done wrong and what
these questions meant to him. He backed away from me looking quite
perplexed. He muttered something under his breath I couldn’t quite
make out. It almost sounded like some foreign language, but he
didn’t seem to be talking to me, so I held my tongue.
    One of the other boys asked again what the
problem was. Tom didn’t act as though he even heard him. Both boys
looked at me and then at Tom. He sat down in the opposite corner
from the sleeping old man at the rear of the cell.
    I had no clue why he had reacted this way. I
decided not to raise any more questions and sat down with