“Hi, Kara. When’d you get back?”

She shrugged. “A while ago. How you doing, Patrick?”

“Fine.”

Kara pivoted back and forth on her heel and rolled her eyes off to the side, her grin playing softly up the left side of her face, and she was instantly familiar again.

She’d been a sunny kid, but a loner. You’d see her in the playground scribbling or drawing in a notepad while the other kids played kickball. As she grew older and took her place on the corner overlooking the Blake Yard, her group filling the place my group had abandoned ten years earlier, you’d notice her sitting off to herself against a fence or porch post, drinking a wine cooler and looking out at the streets as if they seemed suddenly foreign to her. She wasn’t ostracized or labeled weird because she was beautiful, more beautiful by half than the next most beautiful girl, and pure beauty is valued in this neighborhood like no other commodity because it seems more accidental than even a cash windfall.

Everyone knew, from the time she could walk, that she’d never stay in the neighborhood. It could never hold the beautiful ones and the leaving was entrenched in her eyes like flaws in the irises. When you spoke to her, some part of her—whether it was her head, her arms, her twitching legs—was incapable of remaining still, as if it were already moving past you and the boundaries of the neighborhood into that place she saw beyond.

As rare as she would have seemed to her circle of friends, a version of Kara came along every five years or so. In my days on the corner, it was Angie. And as far as I know, she’s the only one who thwarted the strangely defeated neighborhood logic and stuck around.

Before Angie there was Eileen Mack, who hopped an Amtrak in her graduation gown and was next seen a few years later on Starsky and Hutch. In twenty-six minutes, she met Starsky, slept with him, gained Hutch’s approval (though it was touch-and-go there for a while), and accepted Starsky’s stumbling marriage proposal. By the next commercial break, she was dead, and Starsky went on a rampage and found her killer and blew him away with a fierce, righteous look on his face, and the episode ended with him standing over her grave in the rain and we were left knowing he’d never get over her.

By the next episode, he had a new girlfriend and Eileen was never mentioned or seen again by Starsky or Hutch or anyone in the neighborhood.

Kara’d gone to New York after a year at U/Mass and that’s the last I’d heard of her, too. Angie and I had actually seen her board the bus as we came out of Tom English’s one afternoon. It was the middle of summer, and Kara stood across the avenue at the bus stop. Her natural hair color was a wispy, wheaty blonde, and it blew in her eyes as she adjusted the strap on her bright sundress. She waved and we waved back and she lifted her suitcase as the bus pulled in and scooped her up and took her away.