From the Desk of Zoe Washington(20)

I walked up and down the shelves, staring at book titles until my eyes blurred. There were a bunch of books on serial killers—not at all what I was looking for. I started to worry I wouldn’t find what I needed and was about to give up. But finally, at the end of the row, one book’s title caught my eye. It was called The Wrongfully Convicted. The cover had a grid of square photos, like an online photo album, but each picture showed a different person’s face looking at the camera. They were all men, and most of them were Black. Like Marcus. I slipped it off the shelf and carried it to a nearby empty table.

I sat down and cracked open the book, reading through the table of contents. Then I skimmed the introduction, which was written by some lawyer guy. He worked for an organization called the Innocence Project, which he explained helped innocent people get out of prison.

Did this mean Marcus could be telling the truth? If that kind of organization existed, then innocent people must go to prison. I couldn’t believe it.

The rest of the chapters were about different cases, so I turned to the first one and started to read.

It described how one man went to prison for armed robbery, but more than one person said they saw him somewhere else, not at the crime scene. He didn’t actually commit the crime. Still, in the end, the jury didn’t believe his side of the story. He was sentenced to prison for twenty years. He had to leave his family, a wife and two kids.

He had an alibi like Marcus. But he still went to prison.

I read on. Years later, the man wrote a letter to the Innocence Project, and they agreed to help him. They got DNA evidence from the crime scene tested again, and the results showed it didn’t belong to this guy. He really was innocent. The Innocence Project got him out of prison.

“Wow,” I said out loud before remembering I was in the quietest room ever. I flipped through the rest of the book, where there were at least a dozen other stories like that one, of people who had spent years in prison until the Innocence Project took on their cases and helped them get out. Now they were all free.

There was a page in the book with graphs and numbers. It showed how many people the Innocence Project helped get out of prison, which was in the hundreds. I couldn’t believe that many innocent people were convicted. I stared at another chart that showed the different races of the people the Innocence Project helped. Most of them were Black.

Of course. I knew about the Black Lives Matter movement, how Black people all over the country were getting shot by police for no good reason. If those police officers weren’t going to jail, then it made sense that the whole prison system was messed up. I never thought about whether prisons had the wrong people before. I assumed that if you committed a crime, you got the punishment you deserved, and innocent people would always be proven innocent. Apparently not.

I opened my journal and wrote down the name of the book. I couldn’t take it home; I didn’t want one more thing to hide from my parents. But I had to be able to look it up again later. Underneath the book’s title, I wrote down “the Innocence Project.” I needed to research them more.

I was about to get up to use a computer when somebody sat down at the table across from me. It must have been one of the other grown-ups on the floor, and I kept my head down as I figured out how to explain what I was doing there. But when I looked up, it wasn’t a grown-up staring at me.

It was Trevor.





Chapter Fourteen


“Whatcha reading?” Trevor asked, smiling.

“Shhh! What are you doing here?” I looked past Trevor, but thankfully, he wasn’t with either of his parents.

“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” he said. “Simon dropped me off at the library so I could return my book and get another one. When I walked in, I saw you come up the stairs. I thought it was weird, since the kids’ books and cookbooks are downstairs.”

“So you followed me.” Why did he keep butting his head where it didn’t belong?

“No,” Trevor said. “I went down to the kids’ floor first, and got my book.” He held up the book he’d chosen—Ghost, by Jason Reynolds. “And then I came up here to find you. Are you hiding from someone?”

“Who would I be hiding from?” I asked, as if it was the most ridiculous question ever. I closed The Wrongfully Convicted, ready to get up and away from Trevor.

He shrugged. “I dunno. It’s weird that you’re up here.” Then he caught a glimpse of the book on the table. As he stared at it, his face twisted in confusion. I could almost see the wheels in his brain turning. “Wait, does this have something to do with your dad in prison?”

“Um . . .” I stalled. I didn’t want to talk to Trevor. I wasn’t sure I could trust him. But I was dying to talk about what I’d just learned. And he did already know about Marcus . . .

“Does it?” Trevor asked again.

Just like that, the story started spilling out of me. I told Trevor about everything between Marcus’s first letter arriving on my birthday up until the letter where Marcus said he was innocent. It was like my brain short-circuited and I forgot who I was talking to, that I was still mad at Trevor. I was so caught up in how excited I was to have found information that showed Marcus could be telling the truth.

“Wow.” Trevor looked at me in awe. “I can’t believe you’ve been writing to your birth dad in prison. In secret.”