I Beat the Odds Read Online Free PDF Page A

doesn’t mean it has to end there.
    The odds are stacked against you, but you can’t let that be an excuse. You have too much promise to let the odds beat you. It can be done. I beat the odds, and so can you.

CHAPTER TWO
    Life at Home
    M y first memory—the furthest back I can reach to recall a time in my life—is of walking down the side of the highway with my brothers when I was about two years old. We were looking for shelter because the house was locked up again. I don’t remember any details beyond that. I don’t know how far we had to walk, where we ended up, or if we ever ended up finding a place to sleep that night. I just remember walking and I remember cars speeding by.
    I’ve asked Marcus about it (he’s my oldest brother and would have been about ten years old at the time), but he told me it happened pretty often that we’d get locked out, and he would load up the five of us boys and move us all somewhere safe. So really, it could have been any one of those times.
    In some ways, I guess that was kind of a symbol for what most of my childhood was like: I was trying to get somewhere better than where I was, while the rest of the world rushed by not noticing me trudging along in their direction but without any real guidance.
    That was how it was from as far back as I can remember: my brothers and I, fending for ourselves. Marcus was the oldest, then Andre, Deljuan, Rico, Carlos, and me. There was another baby at the time, my brother John, but my mother kept him with her wherever she went. Most of the time. But once my sister baby Denise came along, John would wander around with us, too, and my mother would carry her instead.
    Being the oldest, Marcus acted in a lot of ways like both a brother and a dad to us, looking out for everyone and trying to take care of us the best he could. He did his best to make sure we all had food, brushed our teeth, showed up at school—but there’s only so much a ten-year-old can do. All of us siblings loved one another a lot, but I don’t think I fully realized just how much fell on Marcus’s shoulders until I was much older. No matter how hard he tried, a kid can never be a replacement for a parent. Marcus didn’t ever try to discipline us, but I know if he had, we never would have listened. I think we could all feel the absence of a strong male figure in our lives, even though we never talked about it. That’s a hard place to be: growing up as a bunch of boys without anyone around to show you how to be a man.
    I never really knew my real father, even though I met him a few times, mostly between his prison terms. My mother’s brother, Gerald, had been his cellmate during one sentence, and when he was released, the man who would become my father stopped by the house to say hello to Gerald. That was how he ended up meeting my mother. They would have two children together, me and my sister Denise.
    As I was growing up, he was never around. Once he gave me a few dollars when he stopped by to visit my mother, and I thought that was pretty special. He seemed tall to me then, but looking back now I realize that was just because everything seems bigger when you’re a kid, since you’re so much closer to the ground. In reality, he wasn’t very tall at all. Physically, I seem to have taken after my mother instead of him. She is tall and pretty wide, too.
    But other than a couple of short visits when I was little, that was just about all the contact I ever had with my father. None of my brothers or sisters really knew their fathers, though, so as far as I could tell I was maybe one of the luckier ones since I had at least gotten to meet mine. It may not seem like much, but it was enough to shake me up years later in high school when I learned he’d been killed. He had never been a part of my life, but he had still been something I could call my own.
    I called him my father; I never called him dad. It takes more than a handful of visits and a few bucks to make a