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showers, or as he went to sleep at night, the omni-present guards hovered, cajoled, prodded, encouraged, threatened, leered, and occasionally looked the other way. And that was when CJ Strong worried the most, when the guards looked the other way. It usually meant a fight with or a beating by other prisoners was about to occur. It also meant older male prisoners were seeking sex from younger male prisoners. He was terrified of that, the threat of that. In his time there, nothing happened. He had been approached by prisoners; guards had suggested that certain prisoners wanted to see him in the back of the library.
    Strong felt the only way he could survive at Auburn was to be like his name: Strong. Stronger. Strongest. He needed to have an iron will to move on, to avoid capitulation, which he learned from reading meant to cede, to yield, to give up or in. He would not. He worked out five days a week in the gym. At six-foot-one-inch tall, he was filling out at Auburn. A slim kid turned much more powerful man. Bench presses, curls, squats, push-ups, chin ups, repetitions, hundreds of reps. Till his arms ached, till they cramped. Thousands of sit-ups until he could pop himself up from a lying position without the use of his arms. In the prison yard, he looked forward to the karate taught him by a great black man, a black belt. The black belt took CJ and two Latino prisoners under tutelage and all progressed quickly with the prison yard sensei conferring brown belts, made in the prison shop, on the three after four months.
    Near-freedom came to CJ once a month when Louise Strong took the four-hour bus trip to visit her son. It was what CJ treasured the most. Louise Strong always had been a cheerful force in life and in his life. It had been just the two of them for seven years after his father was shot dead in the pool room in Stamford. They knew each other’s every feeling. And so it was that during the first two years of imprisonment, there were glorious days in the life of Curtis Strong and in the life of Louise Strong—in the lives and hearts that each adored.

 
    Chapter 11
     
    In the early autumn sun on a late September afternoon sitting on a grassy hill, the seven brothers and one girl, one Valerie McGuire, pondered their great questions from Mr. Conetta’s Great Questions class. In the girl’s case, she pondered the great question: “How much I love Eddie Wheelwright; let me count the ways.”
    The two young lovers had met as new lifeguards at Tod’s Point Beach in Old Greenwich over the summer. And while Parker Barnes and Sebastian Ball also lifeguarded at the Point with Eddie and Valerie and both vied for the freckled faced Miss McGuire’s young heart, it was the ramrod straight Wheelwright whom she fell for. Or tripped for, for on the very first day of lifeguard drills, when Valerie stumbled over a rock on a two-mile timed run with nine lifeguards through the woods, only Wheelwright stopped to help her up. In that valiant moment, a small spark ignited between the two, and by the summer’s end, the spark grew into an inferno of youthful passion.
    When Parker made no progress in his pursuit of Valerie, he simply conceded that Eddie had won the girl. Sebastian Ball was not as gracious. Even then, at seventeen going on eighteen, Sebastian competed with Eddie for girls. Over the prior winter, he had lost the hand of a debutante at Brunswick’s sister school, Greenwich Academy, to Wheelwright. Try as he did through the summer to budge Valerie from her loyalty to Wheelwright, she never wavered.
    “It’s not you, Sebastian. You’re fine, you’re handsome, you’re a leader among your friends, you’ve got all the right things going for you, including that Mercedes,” she told Ball on a walk around the Point. Well, she told him with an outstretched arm and the palm of her right hand pressed against his chest as he tried kissing her. “But I really care about Eddie, so please, let’s be friends. I know how much