Breaking Plans
THE DAY I UNDERSTOOD why we hid the Bacardi bottles at the bottom of the recycling bin, I stopped fighting my Aunt Jenny. She urged me forward—her hopes like soft fingertips against the small of my back—into enrichment courses I loathed, into summer school classes I resented, into anything that would take me from here to somewhere else.
It worked. Even in kindergarten, I remembered thinking: someday I will leave. Life—or at least, my life—started after high school. I had plans, and no one was going to change that.
But today, after last bell, someone did.
When I saw Simon Lansky standing outside the detention room, my heart sped up. Sure, detention was my only extracurricular, but it was never his. Here was a kid who would only get a wrist slap for robbing a bank. He was
