Dope Sick

by Walter Dean Myers

  “I don’t want the gun up in here,” Kelly said. “I didn’t have a gun when you got here and I don’t need one now.”

  “If the cops see me coming out with a gun in my hand…” I knew that’s all they needed and they would blow me away. “Kelly, give me some kind of break, okay? Look, you young and everything, but you got some smarts. I know this whole thing is my messed-up bag, not yours. But I really need some help.

  “You keep asking me what I want to take back, and the deeper I go, the more I see I can’t get no place comfortable, you know what I mean? I’m looking to find the place where my thing went wrong. Right now it look to me like, with Rico out there flapping his lips on me, that I’m gone, just gone. You shoot a cop in New York and nobody wants to hear nothing. They need to burn somebody, and they ain’t going to be caring too much who it is they burning. I ain’t got a chance and I don’t think I’ve ever had a chance. And what little piece of hope I got, you know, for a miracle or something, is gone if they catch me with the Nine. This is your turf, brother. Can you get rid of the gun for me? Please?”

  Kelly looked me up and down, then stood and came over to me. We were standing close for the first time, with him no more than a few inches away from me. I was spooked. It was like he was looking at me and through me at the same time. He put out his hand and I handed him the gun.

  Kelly turned and walked slowly over to the window. He stood for a while, and I thought I saw his shoulders heave as if he was taking a deep breath. I was thinking maybe he was relieved that I wasn’t holding the gun.

  He pulled the string on the shade and let it go flapping up to the top of the window. I blinked as daylight flooded the room. I saw Kelly open the window, and felt the cool air against my skin.

  Blam! Blam!

  He was shooting down into the street!

  14

  “WHAT YOU DOING? WHAT YOU doing?” I heard myself screaming. I took a step toward the window and stopped. My head was going crazy. I didn’t know what to do.

  Blam! Blam!

  He shot again.

  Kelly turned and went back to the chair. He picked up the remote and turned the television set on. It was the street. The cops were pointing up. I knew they had to be pointing toward the window. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

  On the screen the cops were ducking behind their cars. A close-up shot had one of them putting on his bulletproof vest.

  “Kelly!” I crouched down near the chair. “Use the remote, man. Use the remote! Take me back to when I was with Rico! Take the whole day back. Can you do that?”

  “That’s not going to make your life better,” Kelly said. He was standing with his head sideways, looking at the screen. “You said that already.”

  “I don’t know that, Kelly. Maybe it will. Maybe…I don’t know…” I was half talking and half crying. “I don’t know that—why you shoot out the window? Why you shoot…? Kelly, if you can take something back—Oh, man! Oh, man!

  “Kelly, check out the screen, they coming into the building! They coming in!”

  On the screen I could see the SWAT guys, all dressed in black, running in a line, their automatic weapons pointing up. They didn’t look like people—they looked like some kind of crazy animals with guns for arms. I felt like I was in a storm. My whole life was spinning around me. I was jerking my head from the screen toward the window.

  From out in the street came the sounds of sirens and people shouting. There was a bang, and then I smelled smoke.

  “Kelly! Please! What we going to do?” My voice was cracking, and I could hear myself start to stutter. Then I saw Kelly headed toward the door. He still had the gun in his hand. “Kelly, where you going? Where you going?”

  “Get some rest, Lil J,” he said. “I got to go.”

  “Yo, man, don’t leave me now. Please.”

  Kelly went out the door. I took a half step toward it and stopped. I wanted to run, but I was too scared. My legs weren’t working. I looked at the television. I saw the SWAT team was coming up the stairs, one flight at a time.

  I got down in the middle of the floor and spread my arms out so they would see I didn’t have no gun. I closed my eyes as tight as I could and tried not to move.

  Then I heard shots! I wanted to get up and go to the stairs and scream down that I’d give up, but I was too scared to move.

  “I give up! I give up!” I called out from the floor. “Oh, God, I give up!”

  There were more shots, and then nothing.

  A few seconds passed and then a few minutes. I heard sirens and the squealing of tires. The sound of a helicopter drew near and then faded away. I kept my head down, waiting.

  The television was still on, and I looked up at it. It was the street again. I saw the front of the building, and the SWAT team was coming out. Some of them had their helmets off. The camera switched to an ambulance. The camera must have been jerking as they took an overhead shot of somebody being put into the ambulance. I couldn’t see who it was from the floor, and I was too scared to stand up.

  I lay on the floor all day. The street noises changed to just passing traffic. At times my whole body shook, and other times it was still and I could hear my pulse pounding in my temples. When I could get up the courage, I lifted my head a little and looked at the screen, but I couldn’t really see anything too clear from where I was laying. The wind picked up and made the shades flap and I felt a few drops of rain on the back of my neck.

  I didn’t know what happened, what the shooting was about, who was being put into the ambulance. I thought about Kelly. Did they shoot him by mistake? Was he just crazy? I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I heard noises on the staircase. I thought I heard the wind rattling the windowpanes. I wasn’t sure what was real and what was in my mind. When I heard the sound of crying, of someone whimpering and alone in the room, I knew who it was. It was me.

  Night came, and the room grew dark except for the light from the television. Then the television went off and I was alone in the blackness of the room. Had someone turned off the electricity? Were they waiting for me to come out, to show them that I was still alive?

  Get some rest, Lil J, Kelly had said. I got to go.

  There was no resting. Every nerve in my body was tense. Every muscle was aching. Getting up off the floor was hard. My body felt weak and my hands were shaking again. My left arm was a little numb, but it didn’t seem too bad. My right knee was aching, and I thought I must have hurt it when I was getting down on the floor.

  I didn’t know what to do. Still. I didn’t know.

  I pushed the door open. Darkness. The place stunk. It smelled musty, and it was hard to breathe as I eased down the stairs, feeling my way along the walls.

  I heard something scurry on the steps below me. Another rat. Me and the rat making our way down the stairs. Me more scared than the rat.

  The first floor. The front door was half off its hinges. There was something across the door. At first I couldn’t see what it was, and then, when a car swept by, I saw it was yellow police tape. I crawled to the door and looked out. The street was mostly empty. Two men were sitting on a stoop down the block. I didn’t see any police cars.

  I was on the street, walking slow, trying not to run. I saw myself reflected in the window of a bodega, and I was covered with dust. I brushed myself off as I walked. When I got to my ’hood, I stopped on a corner and looked around for the police. Nothing. I circled the block, looking for strange vans, white guys sitting in cars, anything that might be a trap. I didn’t see anything.

  Lenox Avenue was busy even though it was late. A woman was selling sausage sandwiches on the street. Two men had rigged up a television by hooking the plug into the base of a streetlamp. They were watching the news. As I stood and watched it, I realized I was cold. I was going to move on when I saw the front of the building I had been in.

  After a tense standoff that lasted for hours, and a shootout in which a number of shots were fired at the police, a SWAT team too
k down a teenager identified by neighborhood street people only as Kelly, the second man in the shooting of undercover police officer Anthony Gaffione. It is not known whether Kelly is the suspect’s real name or only his street tag.

  The young man came out of the building brandishing what police believed to be a gun but which actually turned out to be a television remote control. Police believe that he chose to be killed by police rather than face a lengthy prison term.

  Gaffione, who is expected to fully recover from his injuries, was apprised of the capture as he was being released from the hospital today and has identified the teenager as the second man in the drug bust gone wrong.

  The PBA credits the capture to good police work and the determination not to ever let potential cop killers loose on the streets.

  Then the television image switched to the one I had seen before, of someone being put into the back of an ambulance. My mouth was dry. I was confused and tired as I stumbled toward my house.

  I knew that Kelly was way too smart to just run out in the street pointing a remote at a SWAT team. He was way too cool to just throw away his life. Kelly was special, something else. I knew it and he knew it.

  I realized that when he came out the building, he must have been thinking about me, about what would come into my head as I tried to figure it all out. The fear was still in me and pushing against the insides of my skin so hard, I imagined I wouldn’t look like me anymore. I would look like something different—not even somebody different. Something different.

  I was also thinking that I would see Kelly again. One day he would just show up and look at me the way he did and ask me what was going on in my life. I didn’t know what was going on now, but I knew Kelly wouldn’t want to hear that shit. He just wouldn’t.

  “Lil J, you been cleaning sewers in them clothes?” Thelma Mosley was sitting on the stoop, drinking beer.

  “No,” I said. “Just doing some work.”

  I went upstairs, and Mama was in the kitchen, sleeping with her head on the table. There were pills on the table, and I went over to her to see if she was all right. She was breathing shallow, but she looked okay.

  “Mama.” I shook her shoulder. “Why don’t you get up and go to bed?”

  She mumbled something about “In a minute.”

  I went to my bedroom and took off my dirty clothes. I didn’t want to be in my underwear in case the cops came, so I put on some clean pants and a fresh shirt before I lay across the bed.

  The night played out in my mind over and over again. Sometimes I thought it had happened one way, and then I couldn’t be sure. I remembered Kelly asking me if the image of me on the landing, ready to kill myself, was the future I was headed toward or the past creeping up on me as I stayed in one place.

  I was afraid of the future, as I had always been. Now I was afraid to stay still, afraid of what was coming after me.

  I wanted to sleep, but I wasn’t sure enough of what had went down to close my eyes. I got up and walked into the living room. Then I was asking myself if anything that I thought had happened had been real. I had heard about dudes using drugs and getting their brains messed up. Was my brain messed up? I remembered, or thought I remembered, tapping the Baggies with Rico and putting two bags in my pocket. I went back to my bedroom and went through the pockets of my dirty clothes. The Baggies were still there. Or they might have been there from the day before. I took them into the bathroom and dropped them into the toilet, flushed it, and watched as they swirled around in the water and finally disappeared.

  I stood in the bathroom awhile, trying to pull myself together. Then I thought about my arm. I took my shirt off again and looked at it. It was sore and swollen. I folded some toilet tissue into a square and poured peroxide on it and wiped the dried blood from around the wound. The library was open over the weekend, and I thought about going there and looking up something on the internet about treating wounds.

  I went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, and turned on the television. I looked for the news again. The first two channels just had commercials.

  On the next channel there it was, the image of me, sitting on the landing to the roof. This was Kelly talking to me. I knew that the same way I knew I would see him again one day. On the screen I wasn’t moving, just sitting there, my eyes closed, my face twisted, like something real bad was going to happen to me. Or maybe was going to catch up with me. I didn’t know which. I reached for the remote.

  About the Author

  Walter Dean Myers is the renowned author of GAME; STREET LOVE; AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY DEAD BROTHER, a National Book Award Finalist; SHOOTER; MONSTER, the first winner of the Michael L. Printz Award; THE DREAM BEARER; HANDBOOK FOR BOYS: A NOVEL; BAD BOY: A MEMOIR; and the Newbery Honor Books SCORPIONS and SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS. Walter was selected by the American Library Association to deliver the prestigious 2009 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. He lives with his family in Jersey City, New Jersey.

  You can visit Walter Dean Myers online at www.walterdeanmyers.net.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Jacket art © Max Ferguson/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Jennifer Heuer

  Copyright

  DOPE SICK. Copyright © 2009 by Walter Dean Myers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub © Edition JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061974977

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