They came so quickly the tires squealed on the pavement. “What’s the matter?” said her father, half out of the car. “What’s going on?” said her mother, looking Macey up and down for damage.

Macey felt the way she had once described Austin: either ten years older or ten years younger. “Wait till we’re home, okay?”

Oh, Aus! she thought. My own history, one I can’t save on a back porch, will start with a person who’s leaving me.

She trudged into her house and, for the third time that night, dealt her pack of snapshots. What power the snapshots possessed! Mom gasped and stepped back from them.

Macey was too tired to stand anymore, and she did not want hugs from these parents who had withheld so much truth, so she sat in a wooden chair with arms. “You change the subject every time I ask, Mom. Now I have my grandparents’ version. I have Austin’s grandparents’ version. What’s yours?”

Her mother sank onto the rim of a matching chair, staring down at the pictures. “It was a huge fire. Higher than the highest trees. It was so much more yellow and orange than you would expect, and so ferocious. Howling and groaning. It was the noise that woke people. House by house, we poured out onto the street. It was shocking that a building with such great beams could be eaten as easily as a cupcake. Mr. Sibley had gotten out safely. He was standing in pajamas, barefoot, near the road. Nobody went near him. Nobody spoke to him. I didn’t, either. I didn’t even think of it. He belonged there, in the dark at the side of the road. I didn’t go inside to get him a coat or socks and shoes, and the next day in school I didn’t go up to him and tell him how sorry I was.”

Dad came quickly to his wife’s defense. “You were a little kid,” he protested. “You were thirteen.”

“Thirteen is old enough to help a neighbor.”

Thirteen was a terrible year; a year that traveled in packs, was brutally mean to anybody not part of the pack. And those neighbors lined up—what were they but a pack?

Jackals.

Would I have taken shoes to Mr. Sibley? Macey wondered. Or stayed with the pack?

“And while the fire was raging,” said her mother, “my parents were laughing with Austin’s grandparents. They were best friends, remember. They did everything together. And my father said … ‘So, Henry, let’s celebrate. Got any marshmallows?’ And my mother went into the kitchen to get marshmallows, and when the fire died down a little, we all went over to toast a marshmallow to the removal of the Negro.”

Macey looked down at her lap. Well, she had what she wanted. She knew the true colors of her family.