He lived in the flinch.

With dawning realization . . .

I think back to my own actions, provoking Jaron just because I was upset. Something ugly twists in my belly. I find that I can’t meet Jaron’s eyes. I’m no better than them. At my bullying, Jaron had snapped. Determined not to take it anymore, he charged across the music room. I know the answer to the question before I ask.

“Jaron, who brought the gun to the park?”

“Thelonius, you don’t understand what it’s like. You all but run this place. Who’s going to mess with you?”

“You’d be surprised.” That was the lesson Marcel wanted to teach me. That anyone can be messed with. “Jaron, who brought the gun to the park?”

“Thelonius . . . don’t make me say it.”

“I have to hear the words.”

“I . . . I was so afraid. The more dangerous you seem, the more likely they are to leave you alone. With it, I had the power for a change.” Tears stream down the big boy’s face. His hand, which seem too small for his body, wipes away his tears. I hate seeing big people break down, but it has to be done. I have to know. Jaron fishes into his pocket. He holds out his fist and waits for me to open my palm to receive its contents. When I do, bullets rain into my hand.

“I didn’t even know how to load it,” Jaron whispers.

Judgment day has come.

Nehemiah passes me a note. Mrs. Horner’s in a particularly bad mood, probably because by the end of the day, Mrs. Fitzgerald is due to pronounce sentence on all of us, including her. So this class time has been designated a “silent working period.” It’s kind of like playing the quiet game except that the first person to talk gets sent to the principal’s office.

So what’s the plan?

Nehemiah writes in his barely legible scrawl.

We need to clear our name, but Jaron is one of us. Right?

We’re ride or die.

The only one who should go down for this is Kutter.

Not Marcel?!!?!!?

Nehemiah adds more exclamation points and question marks than necessary.

I’d love for her to go down for anything. Her breathing should be grounds for the Scream Room because she’s taking perfectly good air from someone else.

I hear that.

I’m working on something. But first things first: we have to get out of here.

Like any good prison story, sometimes there has to be a great escape. And sometimes the simplest route, right out the front door, is the easiest. Life is all about waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Or creating those opportunities with a nudge here and there.

Try as the system might, we don’t make good drones. Those “good” kids, the ones that fall immediately quiet when the teachers flick the lights off, the ones that line up perfectly when the teachers raise their hands and count backward, they’re always going to fit in. Nothing wrong with that. We just come at the world different because it comes at us different. It comes hard, we go hard. We don’t fit in with how the system wants to define us and sometimes we have to turn the system on itself for us to get by.