The Combination
by Taylor Miller
Last year's hottest sneakers squeak to a halt as Tyree starts to fiddle with his school-issued lock, only to find that the security system had already been compromised and his Algebra I book has taken a leave of absence. This was the third time he’d been jacked for a textbook and by now he knew exactly who’d done it. The same person who stole the school’s maintenance guy’s master key set orchestrated these locker abductions then sold the textbooks back to the poor kids. They’d go for half of the price that the school would charge for the replacements but still more than enough to be wasting on books that they barely studied anyway.
Except Tyree wanted to study, and even though it wasn’t as often as he should have, he did. He wasn’t at the top of his class, and as another black boy with a tainted school record, he didn’t get any concern from teachers when he didn’t show up for a test or he failed a quiz. There was only one person who he trusted at school and it was the only woman on the planet that he respected next to his mother. He briefly struggles to make the decision to go to Algebra empty-handed and face Mr. Clark’s condescending leer or find the miserable jerk who was responsible for his missing text and make him pay for all of the anguish and resentment that he was feeling.