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me and shank me or something. Play gave me a wink but Diego just looked away.
    It was summer, and I knew school was out back in the world. My main dog, Kenneth, would be playing b-ball in the Fourth Street tournament. K-Man couldn’t play a lot of ball two years ago, but now he was getting real good. Two teams wanted him to play in the Fourth Street tournament. I wished he couldcome up and visit me. K-Man is real people.
    “Reese, out of line,” Mr. Pugh said.
    I stepped out of line, and he left-faced the crew and marched them off toward school. I was just standing there by myself but I knew better than to move. When Mr. Pugh gets mad at you, he can make your life two kinds of miserable.
    He came back and told me to follow him. “Put your left hand on my belt and don’t take it off!”
    I put my left hand on his belt. And he started walking toward the staircase. We went to the stairwell and down the stairs real slow. Sometimes Mr. Pugh would stop and flinch like he was going to do something. I just held on to the belt. He was letting me know that any moment he could stop and punch me in the face. I was knowing it.
    We went to Mr. Cintron’s office. Miss Rice, his secretary, looked old. Mr. Wilson said she had been working at Progress for over fourteen years.
    Mr. Cintron came out of the office and he told Mr. Pugh to bring me in.
    “You want him handcuffed to the chair?” Mr. Pugh asked.
    “Yes,” Mr. Cintron said.
    He went around to the other side of the desk while Mr. Pugh cuffed me to the chair and left. Mr. Cintron shuffled through some papers and shook his head like he was disgusted.
    What I was thinking was that if I went upstate and they were going to kill me, then it would be better if they did it right away. I didn’t want to have to walk around looking over my shoulder all the time.
    “We picked you!” Mr. Cintron said, looking up at me. “We selected you for the work program because you had a high IQ, you hadn’t done anything violent, you had a decent reading score, and you sounded like you really wanted a break. So everybody on the board is going to be looking at the ‘model’ for this work project and making a judgment. And you’re here getting into fights. You really know how to screw things up, don’t you?”
    “Sir, I’ll break my back to make it up,” I said. “I’ll do anything you say. I’ll work hard, I won’t get into any more fights. If somebody wants to beat me up, I’ll just let them. I swear it, sir.”
    “Hey, you’ve already proven that your word doesn’t mean shit,” Mr. Cintron said. “So why are you giving me that bull now?”
    “I’m giving you the only thing I know, sir,” I said.“I’m not a snitch, sir, but they were talking about offing Toon. I just didn’t want that to happen, sir.”
    “Reese, well, maybe we were wrong about your IQ,” Mr. Cintron said. “You’re in here with boys who can steal, who can shoot each other, who can kill. That’s the kind of life you chose, and that’s the life you got. And you’re one of them. So when you start running down some bull about you couldn’t let this happen or you couldn’t let that happen, it doesn’t mean a thing to me. You stole because you didn’t want something to happen. Deepak—the boy you call Toon—is in here because he wouldn’t behave himself. Tell me where I’m wrong, Reese. Tell me where I’m wrong.”
    “You’re not wrong, sir,” I said. “I was wrong, but…”
    “But what?”
    “I was just wrong.”
    “So, I have a number of options,” Mr. Cintron said. “The first is to write up a report on the fight and give you a nice label. How about ‘Aggressive and violent. Cannot control temper’? Then I can send in the report and have you transferred to an upstate facility. You ever been to one of the longterm facilities? In New York they usually put themin nice areas upstate. It’s pretty up there this time of year. You can fight up there to your heart’s content. They have