“OK, I’ll see you at three o’clock,” were the last words Taylor said before hanging up the phone. Aria had called him on the prepaid phone that Omkar had given her to ask if they could meet sometime, at the café on the street adjacent to the Super Sun Market. Having not heard from him in so long, Aria was excited to see him. She was walking to the church to kill the hours between now and then.

The line for the humanitarian lunch service was longer than usual. It snaked slowly down the sidewalk and there were several people that Aria had never seen there before. From a distance, she could tell that Imani’s typical blithe attitude had vanished. Instead of the smile Aria had learned to expect, a frown now blemished her face.

When the line had moved far enough to place Aria in front of her, Imani greeted her with a forlorn, “How you be?”

“I’m OK, how are you?” Aria asked.

“Oh, you know, I’m doin’,” Imani said, spooning a portion of egg salad into a paper bowl.

Aria was tempted to leave it at that and not risk the rejection of asking Imani what was wrong, only to be told that she didn’t want to talk about it. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

The question alone made Imani sigh and start to cry again. She wiped the mascara stains from her lower eyelids. “Life’s just so unfair sometimes, you know it? This boy I known for a long, long time just got shot and I don’t know whatta do with it.” She paused before continuing to speak. “Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do. He a good kid though, a really good kid. It just don’t make no sense at all why these things happen … no sense at all.”

It felt wrong to Aria, after Imani had said a thing like that, to simply take her bowl and walk away. Instead she rounded the table to stand beside her, so that Imani could continue serving the other people in the line. Imani didn’t know any details, just that the boy had been shot by police because he had pulled a gun on them. Instead, once the floodgates of her grief opened, Imani shared a torrent of details about him.

“Back when he was prob’ly ten or eleven, he foun’ out this man I been datin’ had left me for another woman. He made this comedy rap battle song about him and sang it in front of everybody at the center. We was laughin’ so damn hard I nearly peed my pants. You know. He had it in his mind to be a rapper.”