The Chilling Truth Short Story

Words: 508
Pages: 3

Two kids, both with the same name, were raised in a high-poverty, drug and crime area. They both began to struggle in school at about the same time. They both got in trouble with the law due to small crimes at about the same time. However, their lives took dramatically different paths. In the beginning author Wes says “The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.” (xi). Many things took an impact on their lives. They were both fatherless, but the father of author Wes couldn't be there because he had died. The other Wes Moore dad chose not to be there. “Your father wasn't there because he couldn't be. My father wasn't there because he chose not to be,”(3) said the other Wes. The closest …show more content…
All he wanted was Wes to stay out of the streets. He wanted him to be different, but he got involved in dealing with drugs, and couldn't seem to get out of it. He thought it was easier this way. It was fast money, which he needed to support his two baby mommas and four kids he now had, In addition his mother. Both of them had mothers that wanted the best for them. Author Wes mother took more things into control. She worked her tail off to send Wes to private school, because she knew how bad the public schools were. She moved around to try and find a good place for her own kids to grow up in. When Wes appeared to be getting worse, she sacrificed a lot to put him in military school which would keep him away from the bad environment he was in. “That's when I started to understand that I was in a different environment. Not simply because I was in the middle of Pennsylvania instead of the Bronx or Baltimore. It was a different psychological environment, where my normal expectations were inverted, where leadership was honored and class clowns were ostracized." (96) said author Wes. Before he didn't really care for succeeding, because he never really saw a chance for