It was four years ago, on the twenty-first of April 2017, when everything went down. I remember waking up that morning and lying in bed before school, randomly scrolling through social media. A song started playing that I’d never heard before, “When Doves Cry.” There was something so haunting and strange about it. A tortured melody of discordant, aching sounds, a voice that sounded deep at times and then impossibly high. Tense. Jarring and yet beautiful too. I clicked on a link and watched, fascinated by the strange, sexual video. This glam-looking, androgynous man crawling across a purple-lit floor. His eyes looked like they held a secret, and when he looked straight into the camera, you got the feeling he would never tell anyone what that secret was . . . but he knew what yours were too.

I watched to the end of the video, and then read the words that floated onto the screen. He had died one year ago, Prince. A rock legend. I googled his name and news articles came up reporting on his tragic, untimely demise, and the one-year anniversary of his death. And then on the way home from school I walked past a record store and saw one of his albums in the window. And that’s when I got the hysterical call from my mother.

“Your brother has had an accident at school. . . . Needs emergency surgery . . . can’t get a hold of your dad. . . . Is he home? . . . Know where he is?”

No. I didn’t know where he was. He’d been working a lot recently, and was hardly home. A big development that his real estate company was working on, he’d said. I put the phone down in a state of shock. I’d called my grandmother and asked her to take me to the hospital. I’ll never forget walking into the hospital room; the atmosphere was like that song.

My brother was lying in the bed, his arm wrapped in a cast, fast asleep. A woman and a man in white coats were talking to my mother in hushed tones—my mother looked wide-eyed and afraid. There was a sense of urgency in the air like something was coming. A policeman and the school principal were standing outside the room.

“Why is there a policeman here?” I heard myself ask. My mom and the two doctors turned around. I read the titles on their white coats: surgeon, psychiatrist.

“Is he going to die?” I was suddenly hysterical. I didn’t know what to make of the strange tension in the room, the way the principal kept glancing at us through the glass as she talked to the police officer outside, and the way my mother was wringing her hands together tightly.

The surgeon stepped forward. “Your brother is going to be fine. It was a severe fracture but we’ve put it back together.”

“Why is the principal here? Why is she talking to a policeman? Why is a psychiatrist here?”