“Well, I can play that game too!” Allen shouted. “I won’t pay!”

They took him down to Mr. Dunn’s office, and the administrator asked what the trouble was on his last day there.

“They want to charge me for a plastic cup they took away from me. I didn’t have anything to do with that thing coming up missing.”

“You’ve got to pay the thirty cents,” Dunn said.

“I’ll be damned if I will.”

“You can’t leave here until you do.”

“I can camp right here,” Allen said, sitting down. “I’m not paying for something I didn’t do. It’s the principle of the thing.”

Dunn finally let him go, and as he walked to the holding cell where he was to be picked up by his mother, Marlene and Kathy, Arthur asked, “Did you have to do that?”

“Like I said to Dunn, its the principle.”

Bob Reinert came up to see him off, and so did Dr. Steinberg, who slipped him some money as final payment for one of his paintings.

Allen was eager to get out the door, impatient as Billy’s mother talked to Dr. Steinberg. “Come on,” Allen said to Dorothy. “Lets go.”

“Just a minute, Billy,” she said. “I'm talking.”

He stood there fretting, watching her talk on and on.

“Can we go?”

“All right, just relax a minute.”

He paced back and forth, grumbling as his mother kept talking. Finally, he shouted, “Mother, I’m leaving. If you wanna stay, you can.”

“Oh well, good-by, Dr. Steinberg. I want to thank you for all you’ve done for my Billy.”

He headed toward the door and she followed him. The steel door whooshed behind them, and Allen realized that on the way in he had never heard that second door close.

By the time Kathy brought the car around, Allen was still angry. When a man is getting out of prison, he thought, what you do is just open the door and let him run. You don’t keep him inside by standing around gossiping. It was bad enough when the law kept you in the place, but when your gabby mother was doing it, that was too much. He sulked in the car.

“Pull over to the bank in Lebanon,” he said finally. “I’d better cash my prison check here. No sense cashing it in Lancaster, having them all know I just got out of jail.”

He went inside, endorsed the paycheck and put it on the counter. When the teller handed him the fifty dollars, he put the bills in his wallet along with the money Dr. Steinberg had given him. Still angry, and now getting angry that he was angry, Allen just didn’t want to deal with it …

Tommy looked around and wondered what in the world he was doing inside a bank. Was he coming in or going out? He opened his wallet, saw close to two hundred dollars and shoved it back into his pocket. He figured he was going out. Glancing through the big window, he saw his mom and Marlene waiting in the car, Kathy behind the wheel, and he realized what day this had to be. He checked the calendar on the teller s counter. This was the day they set him free.