Free Cyntoia by Cyntoia Brown-Long

Author:Cyntoia Brown-Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

15 PROVING MY WORTH

Now that I was back from max, I knew I needed a good influence. From my little group in alternative school to Trina to Kut, I had a long track record of allowing people who didn’t deserve my trust to lead me down a path to destruction.

I decided this time it would be different. After stepping back from my friendship with Shana, I sat back, watching for people who lived the kind of life I wanted for myself. That’s when two law library clerks caught my eye.

Erika and Tabitha lived a few doors down from me. While everyone else was running around, acting like an idiot, they were always sitting at a table studying or talking about Masterpiece Theatre or some other PBS show. They were nothing like me, and everything I wanted to be. These chicks probably wouldn’t want me around, I thought glumly. We’d never really talked, but I’m sure they’d heard I was the girl always cussing somebody out or getting in fights. Not the kind of girl they’d want to welcome at their study table. And yet, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I wanted to be around them, but I wasn’t sure how.

I also knew they were taking college courses through a private Christian college called Lipscomb University. I’d heard about the Lipscomb Initiative for Education, or LIFE program, about a month after coming to TPW, when I heard Dr. Richard Goode speaking about it in the prison’s visitation area. He told us they were offering their high-dollar education to inmates for free. Everybody who was accepted would study side-by-side with students from the outside. I watched him speak, my mind drifting back to that seventh-grade trip to take the ACT. Mommy always thought I would make something of myself. She thought I’d go to college and get a degree. I’d never had that dream for myself, but as I heard Dr. Goode speak, I thought Lipscomb was exactly the kind of program my attorney, Rich, would have told me to take. Back then, I didn’t care much about earning a degree. I just wanted to do whatever I could to get out of prison. Maybe a degree would help, I thought.

I applied right away but wasn’t accepted with the first bunch of students. I had to have been at the prison for at least a year before I was eligible. At the time, I just shrugged my shoulders. I was looking at nothing but time ahead of me. There would always be another chance to apply. But I remembered Erika and Tabitha were selected for that first class. You could just tell there was something different about them, the way they went around studying and taking their classes so seriously. It was like they had a new sense of purpose.

One day, when I saw them studying in the library, I made up my mind to approach them. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Homework,” Erika said.

“We’re taking criminal procedure at Lipscomb,” Tabitha added.

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