Character Analysis
Fourteen-year-old Reese Anderson is our narrator, and as the book begins, he's nearing the end of his stay in a juvenile jail where he's been incarcerated for almost two years.
He's not just the book's central figure, though; he's also its only well developed character. The other characters come to life through his eyes—Reese is very perceptive, so they don't seem flat—but it's almost as if these people are just making cameo appearances in his story. They're stone statues that only come to life during their interactions with Reese.
We don't get a lot of details about Reese's life before jail, probably because he feels like it wasn't much of a life. His family situation is pretty dire: His mom is a drug addict, his father is abusive, and his brother Willis seems to be on his way to becoming a career criminal. "My father didn't have nothing," Reese reflects at one point. "Willis didn't have nothing. Mom was just checking out the world to see what she could snatch off" (21.16). Well that sounds like a bummer.
Part of what led Reese to commit the crime that landed him in jail was the sense that he—like his family members—didn't have anything, either. He worries it'll just be more of the same after his release: "If you didn't have nothing going on, then it was going to be hard just to squeeze yourself from one day to the next" (17.10). He hates jail, but he also worries about what's waiting for him once he's released.
Reese's Superpower
We know Reese has a high IQ; that's one of the reason he was chosen for the work program. But he also seems smart because of his natural powers of observation. He has a real knack for psychology, so he always has something insightful to say about whoever or whatever he's describing.
For instance, when he's in solitary confinement, he notices the room has been designed so that suicide is impossible. And when two cops keep him waiting before questioning, he's onto their game: "It seemed like a long time, and I was beginning to feel like I had to go to the bathroom," he says; "I knew they wanted to make me feel uncomfortable" (23.68). Keen observer, no?
Reese is African American, and one thing he particularly notices is race, particularly who's what race and how this affects their social interactions. Whenever he describes another character, race is one of the first things he mentions (e.g., a receptionist who "was small, Spanishy looking" (1.9)). This is in sharp contrast to Mr. Pugh, who is white, and refers to Toon (an Indian American) as Puerto Rican.
At Evergreen, the eldercare facility where Reese works, "it looked like all the help at Evergreen were colored and the residents were all white" (7.13). Reese seems aware of systemic racism and how it affects things like job opportunities. People like him "couldn't sound like some white dude or la-dee-da black dude" (9.2) and get hired, he observes at one point. Race, then, is another way the odds are stacked against our main man.
Life of Crime
With so little working in his favor, Reese's dreams for the future are modest. Mainly, he longs to fit in. Observing a delivery guy joking with the receptionist at Evergreen, he says, "I thought I would like to do that, have a regular job and kid around with people I met" (1.63). But sometimes even that feels impossible. In the real world, it's hard to avoid a life of crime when your mom is spending the family's food money on drugs.
Plus, while he's a model inmate in every other respect, Reese keeps getting into fistfights. During these fights, Reese almost feels as though he's outside of his own body. "I don't remember a lot more but I know I kept swinging" (5.21), he says of one fight. And of another, he says, "It wasn't really me, but it was somebody in my skin taking a step forward and hammering that fool in his temple" (15.28). Ouch.
The longer Reese spends in jail, the more he feels like he is losing touch with his own humanity. "I was […] someone I wasn't recognizing anymore" (21.8), he says, later adding, "In a way it was like Reese was dead and it was me, whoever I was, whatever I was, grieving over him" (29.55). Clearly, Reese feels no control over his life.
For Reese, life is just something that happens to him; he has no agency. When his lights start turning off an hour early at night, he's not sure why. When two cops accuse him of a murder he didn't commit, he has very little information about what's going on (24.5). In solitary confinement, he doesn't even know what day it is.
The Great Escape
What Reese comes to realize through his talks with Mr. Hooft is that he needs a plan—a vision—for his life. At his hearing for early release, Reese shares what he's learned with the committee:
"I know I have to invent something, look around and figure out some way to survive that's not going to get me killed or back in the jail system." (33.43)
The thing that Reese looks around and finds is his little sister, Icy, who he wants to help put through college. "She's my heart, really" (2.39), he tells Mr. Cintron. When it comes to finding purpose for himself, Reese zeroes in on Icy, saying, "I'm going to work on keeping myself correct so I can take care of her" (34.9). Since they come from the same family, we're confident Icy could use a little TLC from her brother.
In the epilogue, we see that, one year into his life on the outside, Reese's plan seems to be working pretty well. "What I could do was keep my mind on Icy and college for her," he tells us. "It wasn't all I wanted in the world, but it was something to live for and I was cool with it" (35.2). Has he officially made it? Nope, but he's doing way better than many of the other people he was incarcerated with and many of the other folks in his neighborhood. Good on you, Reese.
Reese's Timeline