“Well, you can stay here until it’s safe to go back out.” Mama put both hands flat on the floor and pushed herself up. You couldn’t call Mama fat, but she wasn’t ever scrawny. I always thought she was just the size a mama ought to be. I remember those nights riding home from sightseeing downtown, and how I would lie on her soft arm while the bus took us back to the building. When I needed a hug, I’d get lost in the pillow of Mama’s stomach.

From her standing position, she looked down at us and, using her slow, calm voice, said, “It’s okay to go to your rooms, but stay on the floor.” Then she walked down the hall. Meechie followed her, because he had to go in the same direction to get to his room. We joined the parade and filed into my room. “Stay on the floor,” Mama said again.

It was summer, so there’d be the popping of both fireworks and gunshots on most days. We knew the difference between the two. Both made me a little jumpy, though neither fazed Meechie.

In my room, Tonya grabbed a Barbie doll, which I’d dismissed years prior, and Stacia reached for my favorite picture, the one of me and Meechie standing back-to-back. This was the first time either of them had come into my apartment, and they were treating my room like a store full of interesting artifacts.

“Who your brother go with?” she asked.

I snatched the picture from her, rolling my eyes. “I don’t know. Nobody?”

She smiled, like she had a chance, then looked around the room, her eyes thirsty for information. When she landed on my journal, its pink-and-gold cover peeking out from under the bed skirt, I kicked it fully underneath the bed. She looked up at me for a moment, and though she didn’t say anything, I could tell that she wanted to ask me about it.

It’s possible she decided in that moment, she too wanted a place to keep all of her thoughts, a secret place where she could make sense of the feelings she wasn’t encouraged to express out loud.

Concluding her tour from the floor, Stacia asked, with a nasty look on her face, “You want to be a teacher or something?” I retraced her steps, glancing at the globe, the maps on my wall, and my bookcase full of thick novels, before I raised and dropped my shoulders.

“You don’t ever think about people in other places?”

“For what? We in the best place to be.”

Tonya looked up from Barbie, her face asking Stacia’s if she’d lost her mind. She dropped her head and mumbled something.

“Huh?” I said.

Then Tonya repeated herself and said, “I wanna go to Mississippi. Where my daddy at.”

The crinkles in Stacia’s forehead deepened, then she asked Tonya, “How you know Nook?”