IMPROVING

Tony was sixteen years old, six-foot-five, had scars in his wrists and eyes that were bruised and glittering. He’d come from Blue Jay. Peers from Blue Jay arrived at Hope in hospital scrubs and handcuffs, a heavy-duty ziplock bag full of pill bottles duct-taped to their file. Someone there had knocked his teeth out, the two front ones, and when you looked at him Tony had a way of grinning—a way of showing off that gap—that reminded you, always, that something about him was missing.

ORIENTATION

On day fifty-eight Mr. Watts took us out into the community for a softball game and Chollie dropped a fly ball. Really, he didn’t even drop it—it fell out of the sky and hit him in the face. He stood out in right field alone, the inning not over. Watts called out to him, “Too deep! You’re too deep, Chollie!”

Chollie kept backing up, turned, stuck his cleat into the chain-link fence and hopped over it.

“No!” peers gasped.

PROGRESS

He worked in his bunk at night with a penlight in his teeth, hand-painting the blank orthopedic canvases a shade of vermilion he called Flamethrower. The trim was Snow White and on the side of each shoe he crafted a bold, star-speckled Deep Space Black Nike swoosh. As long as you were a few feet away, they looked like a pair of thick-soled Jordans that hadn’t come out yet. They were smoove.

LEARNING

“How do I look?” Jon Alan asked the group.

He was fifteen years old and had that country name, but he wasn’t country. He was city trailer park, from one of those places hidden back behind a railyard or right off the interstate, the last thing you saw when you left town if you noticed it at all. He’d retucked his shirt seven times. On the left sleeve it said LEARNING PHASE and on the right HOPE HOUSE.

“You look like a delinquent,” Karvel told him.

GRADUATION

The day Karvel walked in the door we knew he was going to run the place. He had come in whistling, his head already shaved. During intake he told a joke about JTOs, figured out which shower had the hottest water, got his own towel, a new bar of soap, then stripped down naked and left us staring at the word Heartless inked in cursive across the broad shoulders in his back. It was a beautiful tattoo.

LEARNING

Damico had hurt an old man. We stayed in his face letting him know we weren’t no old man. You raised a peer’s expectations—you stepped up to him nose to nose—to find out who he was, to let him know who he wasn’t. We didn’t know Damico was a dad.

IMPROVING

Finally we realized what Bobby’s dad was going to do to him. He was going to take that little house Bobby had made, and before any of us could stop him, he was going to bash it into the side of Bobby’s skull. We could hear the crack in our minds. We could see the skittering painted shards, the spurt and spray of blood—Bobby laid out, destroyed. But that’s not what happened, not exactly. In fact, Bobby’s dad did something else, something in its own way awful and obliterating.

GRADUATION

It all changed one weekend not long after Karvel left. Watts took us camping and Chollie caught a catfish. Jaquan mentioned in passing that if he had a little bit of Old Bay, maybe a lemon, some salt, couple of other ingredients, he could grill a catfish over a fire. This was a peer we hadn’t ever imagined anywhere but out on the street. How did he even know what a catfish was?

Watts sent Cook and Coburn to get him what he needed. Jaquan cut the fish into filets and seasoned it, and every peer in the group got a taste, staff too. While Watts chewed, tears seemed to fill his eyes.

PROGRESS

Peer we called Peanut had a head like a little nut. He was a gangly, scrawny, unfed-looking peer with baffled, magnified eyes floating inside a pair of glasses thick as telescopes. At night he peed the bed. The night-shift JTOs were supposed to wake him every two hours and take him to the bathroom, but they’d forget. We took turns wrestling him out of his bunk. We’d carry him down the hall to the bathroom in our arms, light as a child, snickering at himself in a dream.

ORIENTATION

We got another new peer in, a fat kid with copper hair. He was twelve years old, a temporary waiting on a placement somewhere else. The group was on him the second he walked in the door.

“Who do you think you are? Wipe that look off your face.”

Mr. Isaiah shaved his head and we got him out of his clothes into a shower. The water was ice cold, his body lumpy and freckled.

“He’s got tits,” Chollie said. “This little peer’s got tits.”

Mr. Isaiah wouldn’t let us call him Tits. We named him Freckles instead.

ORIENTATION

I was the one they called AWOL. I was a runner. When you ran, you started over. You lost your phase, your cigarettes. The group would meet me at the door with a yellow shirt—back to Orientation. Come morning it was out to the woodpile to bust wood, or else I was down in the kitchen on KP again, all day long peers wanting to know why I kept messing over myself.

“Nine more months you got now. What is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You ain’t ever getting out of here,” they’d tell me. “You ain’t ever going home.”