Though our future looked promising, and I was excited about moving into a new place, I was still thinking about the past and hoping I’d wake up and discover it was just a nightmare. I prayed for this impossible thing. When it didn’t happen, like a mad person, I’d walk around the house, and even school, whispering my friend’s names: Precious. Stacia. Tonya. It was my attempt to keep their hearts beating.

Twenty-Three
Away

Only a few weeks into the school year, I started having a recurring nightmare. All those sad stories we were dumping into a pile because Ms. Pierce thought it would help us—this processing—caused my subconscious to drum up something terrible that took years to exorcise.

In the nightmare, I’m watching everyone all tangled up in a knot, one nasty ball of hurt. They’re right in the middle of the playground. Some of their bodies aren’t even whole, but I can still identify who the parts belong to, even with these fragments of arms and chests and faces. I see Precious from midback to the top of her head. She’s in a church dress, turned away from me, but I know her apple-shaped head, and how she wore her hair as a five-year-old, with the part going down the middle and two ropy braids with ribbons around the bottom of each one.

Mama Pearl’s thick, stubby fingers grip her beat-up leather bag like someone would try to snatch it, which is how she actually carries her purse. Police sirens woop-woop in the distance, not a full wail at first, just that two-note warning. They’re the reason that the knot of people are trying to snatch away from each other. The more they yank and writhe, the tighter the knot gets, so they scream and cry and push their hips forward, but they continue to be a glob of body parts on the playground floor, which is all glittered up with glass from broken bottles.

The glass pieces cut the people who’re lower on the knot; their blood is sticky, so some of the glass clings to them. The people who are high up in the air don’t fare any better; some of them get shot by pistols, because the people at the top have guns in their bleeding hands; arms stretch out, pulling the triggers over and over.

Every time a gun goes off, Precious screams my name, and someone else lower on the knot repeats, “Come on, let me get it, you know I’m good for it,” a crackhead’s mantra. Their voices tangle up, and then, up in a stairwell from a higher floor, Woody and Earl begin harmonizing an old Commodores song, adding to the noise. They sing the same five words from the chorus of “Zoom”:

I’d like to fly away.