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For Antwan, however, her anger momentarily softens. After making some phone calls, McNamara finds a spot for the youngster in Choice, an acclaimed program that enlists college graduates to keep track of wayward kids and ensure that help is available to them. Sometimes volunteers visit offenders a dozen times a day to keep them on the straight and narrow. McNamara passes the news on to Fishkin.
Antwan finds out his fate later that day. "You don't want to be arrested again, do you?" state's attorney McNamara asks the youngster at his court appearance. He shakes his head no. She tells him that a Choice worker will be his big brother. "What's your job going to be?" she inquires. Replies Antwan: "Obey my mom or my Choice worker."
By this time, everyone in the courtroom realizes that this may be the most elusive quarry, a kid who can be saved. The tone in the courtroom changes. Master Bradley Bailey, presiding over the case, asks Antwan if he likes to read. The boy says yes. So Bailey writes something on a slip of paper and hands it to him. "Can you read that?"
"D . . . aaa . . . vid Fish . . . kin," Antwan responds. Directs Bailey: "You concentrate on doing that -- reading -- and leave all the other stuff out on the street." He remands Antwan to his mother's custody. In 60 days he must return to court to demonstrate how he's doing.
The outlook for the two teenage drug dealers who were arrested with Antwan -- Daryl Williams and Donnell Curtis -- is not as hopeful. Locked up overnight, they also appear in court before Master Bailey. Daryl's aunt sits in the courtroom, her eyes surrounded by dark circles and her face a tight constriction of lines. A drug addict on the nod, she slumps drowsily against the bench, a handkerchief over her mouth and nose. Donnell's mother sits alert and angry in the back row. Both youngsters wear a hard, empty-eyed look of fury.
McNamara argues for locking the boys up until their full-dress court hearing in thirty days. Assistant public defender Robin Ullman requests community detention, which would allow the accused to stay at home until then. Bailey decides to lock them up. "What's that mean?" asks Williams, a tall, powerfully built kid. "It means you stay in Charles Hickey School until the trial," says Bailey.
"What?" shoots back Williams. "I didn't have nothin' to do with that little boy." Ullman, prim and bespectacled, jumps up and orders her client to be quiet. But he won't shut up. "Fed up, man," he curses as a courthouse jailer leads him back toward a holding cell. His loud protests echo down the hall.
Williams has good reason to fear Hickey School, a grim correctional facility. The accused dealer told the arresting cops he was only 15, but at Hickey a counselor recognizes him as someone else entirely. "Tyrone, are you back? I thought you were too old for us now." Daryl is really Tyrone Roberts, age 19. He's headed for adult court.