Courage by Barbara Binns

Author:Barbara Binns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Eighteen

THAT NIGHT, I LIE IN the darkness, staring at the stars out the window. Moonlight shines through our bedroom window. Funny, I can see much more of the world from on top. We both went to bed at ten. It’s amazing that my older brother, who could stay up as long as he wants, goes to bed at the same time I have to.

“Are you asleep?” Lamont’s voice rises up in the darkness.

“No.”

“Too scared of me to sleep?”

I don’t answer. It’s not so bad having him below me, not like I thought it would be. It doesn’t feel half as strange up here now as it did the first few days.

“I had trouble sleeping in my cell,” he says, a strange quiver in his voice. “It was crazy there. People snoring, yelling, or screaming in the middle of the night.”

“I don’t snore, do I?” I ask, suddenly anxious.

He snorts. The sound is friendly, like old times. “No Short—I mean, T. You’re quiet. My first cellmate snored like a sawmill. I almost went crazy trying to sleep with all his noise. Then I got a new guy. He was sneaky quiet.” Lamont stops talking, but I hear his ragged breathing grow faster.

“So you had no trouble sleeping around him,” I say after a little bit.

“No trouble at all.” His words are clipped. I wonder if his jaw muscle is twitching again because that doesn’t sound real.

Then he says, “Quiet can be dangerous on the inside. Prison is its own lonely world. If I hadn’t had enemies, I wouldn’t have had anyone. I had a lot of thinking time. I had a plan for my life. I couldn’t let anything take me from that. Sometimes you have to fight hard and prove you’re the . . .”

“The worst of the worst,” I supply when the silence grows too long.

“Yeah, that too.”

“I bet you ruled,” I say. He would never lower his eyes just because a cop rolled by.

“Guess again,” he says. “There will always be someone trying to knock you down. We all want to be the best, and we’ll tear our opponents down to avoid second place. You get on that diving board because you want to be number one, right? You have to know there is only one first place.”

“I won’t tear someone else down to get it.” When I first wanted to be a diver, I did think about doing anything to become the top guy, the hero. There’s more now. I want to impress Mung. I want my friends to feel awed and see Mom cheer for me. And my dad. I sometimes dream Dad’s spirit looks down at me from heaven and feels proud. No one will be proud of me if I have to tear someone else down to reach the top. I won’t even be proud of me.

“Then we are different, little brother, because I need to feel strong and powerful.”

I lean over the side of the bed. In the dim moonlight shining through the curtains, the outline of my brother’s body glimmers.

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