Description: DISCHARGE DAY I get my belongings from the desk in the discharge office. They give me the ratty clothes I was wearing the day they brought me in, all in plastic bags, one for each garment, even one for my underwear, all of them then placed into another, bigger plastic bag. Then they put me in the bathroom, tell me to get dressed. You gotta be shitting me. I tell the guard who brought me into the bathroom to wait hold on just a sec. While he watches impassively arms crossed I dump the big plastic bag full of little bags onto the tiled bathroom floor. I take each garment out of its nice labeled little bag. Okay, Junior, I get it. No, just hold on. I hold the little torn pair of pants up. They would come up to my smucking knee. They''d be smucking shorts on me. I hold up the little brown T-shirt with holes all over it. I can''t believe it used to fit me. It looks like it was designed for a smucking doll. Seeing how small I was when I came in here makes me realize how long I''ve been in and it makes me want to bawl but smuck that shit I fight it off. Junior. No, no, Jorge, just wait. I want to show you something. I take off my tie, unbutton my shirt and take that off, undo my belt, take off my shoes, my pants, my entire juvy uniform, until I am buck naked, and as the guard watches I pick up the little tiny skivvies and step into them and pull them up, yanking them over my thighs, tearing them, pulling them high as they go, as close to a proper fit as I can get. Tuck my nutsack into it but it keeps popping out. The back giving me a massive wedgie. Then trying to pull that smucking kid-sized shirt over my head and pull my smucking arms through that shit. I look smucking beyond ridiculous, which is the point. But I keep going, the shirt halfway down my belly. I go for the little kid pants and get one leg into them and am trying to get the other one in when Jorge comes over and restrains me, shouting, Okay, okay, that''s enough! What, I''m just doing what you told me to. We''ll get you some clothes that fit, okay? Smuck, why do you always have to make such a big deal out of everything? I just look at him and smile. Good luck, he says. It won''t be the same without you. Even at this young age I am seeing in myself a particular ability. No one else seems to have it like I have it. It is the ability to draw people to me. To look to me as a leader. Guards such as Jorge, other kids, administration--everyone. It is in my self-containment. The confidence with which I move and act. It puts people at ease around me. I feel dread for a brief moment as I go out into the blue sky through the open gates, clutching my things (they make me take them with me even though I tell them I don''t want them, to throw them away), toward the bus waiting for me, wearing clothes an employee in the cafeteria had in his smucking trunk for some reason. I feel like a fool. The shirt is down to my knees and the pants come up to my shins and they both smell like the inside of an old duffel bag. Though I don''t let it show I am smucking scared shitless. There''s always fear when your life is changing. There''s an urge to resist the change, even if it''s something like getting out of juvy. It''s easier and less scary to run back inside the gates. Which I do. I run back to the smucking gates. Lucky for me they are already closed. Hey! I yell up at some guards standing around a couple hundred yards away out by the loading docks, smoking Tobacco Companies, shooting the shit on their break. Let me back in! Hey! They don''t see me. I try for a little while longer before giving up and heading for the bus. The driver is an old smuck who looks like he is about to die any second. I hope he can at least make it back to Centreville before doing so. He gives me a look like I must be crazy for trying to run back to juvy but I give him a pretty good glare back and say, What the smuck are you looking at? Do you really want to know? he says. What? You heard me. Sit down. What the smuck does that mean? He doesn''t answer. Answer me you smucking old man. You smucking bus driver. He doesn''t and I stand there for a few more minutes staring him down just praying for him to look over and say one smucking thing to me so I can pop him in the nose and go back. As I walk down the aisle to a seat all the way in the back I take one last look out the window at the facility where I''ve spent the last five years. I remember that first day. They had me in a bus not different from this one with a couple other kids in it. I remember how big and dark the building looked, like a big evil castle on a mountain with storm clouds swirling around it and lightning shooting across the sky, thunder crackling. I remember how they pulled up in front to take us inside. But the guards stopped them and pointed at me and only me and made them take me and only me around to the back door. Only me. No one else. It was humiliating. I remember not understanding why I had to go in through the back door. It made me feel like I was trash. I cried that night and every night after because of it. I had to cry with my face stuffed into my pillow so no one would know. I never forgot that feeling. Anyway, when I look at juvy now from the bus as it pulls away to take me home it''s changed. It isn''t scary at all. It looks like a dinky-ass elementary school. Am I surprised no one is here to pick me up? Not my family, not my mother? Smuck no. They stopped coming to visit years ago. My mother never came to visit. Not smucking once. I tell myself I don''t give a smuck. I tell myself this is how things will be from now on: me and only me. So get used to it. I am fifteen years old and there''s nothing you can tell me. I don''t give a smuck about you, Centreville, history, or the war. All that matters to me, all that exists as far as I am concerned, is Junior Alvarez and the happiness of Junior Alvarez. I get off the bus in front of the Visa Union Mill Road Metro station and look around at my neighborhood. Five years away and nothing''s changed. It''s creepy but that''s the thing you can always count on when it comes to Centreville. You can come here a thousand years from now and it will be the same as when you smucking left it. People will recognize you, think they know you. Well, today when I get off the bus, my first day home it is the same smucking deal as I breathe in that fresh Centreville air-- Aaaaah! There is one small difference though, I notice right away: all broads. It''s all smucking broads. There are old broads, young broads, fat broads, skinny broads, pretty broads, ugly broads. No men. The broads eye me like I have just fallen from the smucking sky. You can see something in their eyes. The war has been going on too smucking long. These women are lonely, the world is going batshit all around them, and I am chum in their shark tank. My mother is out there somewhere. I don''t know where, the old house most likely. Unit 27A of the Visa Housing Project at New Braddock and Centrewood. That smucking place. The thought of it makes me ill. But I also want to go there. I need a roof and a bed, right? That would be the easy choice, the comfortable route. Go with what you know. But smuck that shit. I would rather smucking die than do anything comfortable or easy. That''s a decision I made on that long bus ride. There are billions of people in the world and most of them live and die without anybody really giving a smuck. They live nice safe lives out in quiet clean towns and get up for work and mow their lawn and have a job and all that shit and then they smucking die and the story''s over. Sure, their friends and family grieve at the funeral. Their kids miss them at holidays and graduations. But there''s no real smucking mark left as a result of their having been here. The world doesn''t miss them. Someone else moves into their house, someone else takes over their job, someone else starts smucking their wife. Things just pretty much go on the same. That''s not going to be me. I''m going to live my life with balls and make sure the world never forgets my name and that things are never the same after I croak. My mother and brother want nothing to do with me. They are not interested in anything that I am about. Part of me is angry that they never visited me in juvy. Part of me is glad they didn''t come though because I didn''t want them to get tainted by me. I''m dirty. You don''t have to tell me I am no good. Some people just are no good and I am no good. Sometimes I wish I were good. Like Guillermo. I envy my brother Guillermo. Top of his class at Visa Lithiite Junior High School. He got a scholarship there and will get one to Visa Lithiite High too and will go to college and be something. He won''t die without having left a mark. Neither will I. He''ll do it his way. I''ll do it mine. What choice does any of us have? I hope, as the bus pulls away and I stand there with my little plastic bag with nothing in it but some little kid clothes--all my worldly possessions on the face of this earth--that my mother is dead. No smucking joke. I know it''s sick to hope your own mother is dead but I hope my own mother is dead. I hope she smucking died while I was in juvy and no one thought to tell me. And that''s why she never came to visit me. I am a real smucked-up kid. I realize this. You think I give a smuck? I am free on the streets of Centreville again. I am calm. Life is good. I am fifteen and it''s the 3340s and the world is smucked and I am without a goddamn care in the world. Everybody has respect

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