But Rasul was different. He was at least trying to do something with himself, trying to stay out of the game. He wasn’t in the streets; he was legit. He was nineteen, and looking for a way to get into computers. He was finishing a GED course. That first day, we just talked, for hours and hours—about everything from school, to the block, to memories I thought I had forgotten. That night, I didn’t bother to call home. As dusk descended long after I was supposed to be home from school, I knew panic had set in up at my apartment. I knew Aunt Jewel was scrambling to find the piece of paper where she had written down Nakesha’s information, but as scatterbrained as she was I knew she wouldn’t find it. Her imagination had gone wild, filled with all the fates that were quite possible for a fifteen-year-old girl walking alone on any street in America, let alone one on the South Side of Chi: some nigger had snatched me up after school, raped me, then thrown me through the window of some abandoned building on the South Side where the twenty-degree temperatures would ward off the telling scent of my rot; a group of boys had made fun of me and I had decided to talk back, so they took turns stomping on my head under the shadow of El tracks and left me there to be found by someone who could not have identified my smashed-in face even if they knew me; a pusher who had been jabbing at me every day after school finally convinced me to give it a try, and I had decided to follow him into a new world; a pimp had thought I was cute and given me a hundred-dollar bill to turn my first trick; or maybe the pusher and the pimp were one and the same, pointing a penis as tall as the Sears Tower and shooting heat into my arm to catapult my mind to the tower’s peak. Aunt Jewel would shove past Ma on her way out the door to the police, and they might have gotten into their first fistfight since they were teenagers. Ma was too callous to imagine the same things Jewel had, so callous that Jewel’s dead-on view of our world was one she had forced herself to forget. Shivana just fass don’t what to do what I say and she done called herself running away well she bet not bring her ass back … is all Ma would think, or say. She didn’t have a car; would she drive on past everybody at her stops and spend the day looking for me?