I watched her until she was out of sight, then I started thinking about Stacia, who at thirteen was pregnant. I wondered if this would be her life. I wondered who Stacia would eventually become.

I made new friends at school that year, and I started getting involved in school clubs like Student Association and after-school programs that taught me about computers. When it was time to choose a high school, I wanted to go to the same school as Precious, but her parents had been preparing to send her to a college prep school since the day that she was born. All my mama’s energy had been focused on keeping her two kids safe, so I hadn’t been prepared to go to Whitney Young like Precious. Though I did get into a great performing arts school on the other side of the city, where I learned to play the trumpet and joined the marching band.

Throughout high school, Precious and I would live very different lives during the week, but we’d be reunited for prayer meeting and church on most weekends. Band sometimes took me away from church because we had parades on Saturdays.

For years, this was our life, building two different friend groups that never crossed paths, but still talking on the phone and going to the mall sometimes.

I tried to bring up Robert Taylor to Precious, and talk about Tonya, but she had stuffed our childhood deep down somewhere and wouldn’t access those memories for nothing. On the surface, you couldn’t see that I was still haunted by the loss of my childhood friend, my imagination running crazy because I didn’t have any real details about what happened to her. I wondered about Rochelle, if she ever got clean and was reunited with her daughter.

By the end of high school, we both decided to follow the Seventh-day Adventist educational path, which landed us at Oakwood in Huntsville, Alabama, which is a historically Black college and university, full of teachers like Ms. Pierce—tough educators who held you accountable for your academics and your behavior outside of class. I majored in religion, to get on the track to become a youth pastor.

Robert Taylor had prepped me for a life of living in close proximity to masses of people, but the list of how the Robert Taylor Homes was so drastically different from college life was too long to make. Most obvious was how the campus felt like one big park; it invited you to sit on the grass or perch on a bench. My childhood home warned you to keep moving, that it was unsafe to stand still for too long. I would spend my first year on campus comparing both institutions, sometimes overwhelmed with emotion that I made it out of the projects, and that my trauma was manageable. I knew that this was not everyone’s story.