I picked it up and saw that it wasn’t a novel. It was a journal. I thought back to that fateful day that we met Tonya, and Stacia ended up in my bedroom. I wondered if seeing my journal might have encouraged her to keep one for herself.

It was pretty beat up, like Bibles people spend a lot of time with. I flipped through it and saw that the first entries were from 1999. They covered the day of the raid through a little over the first year after we’d all left Robert Taylor. My eyes scanned the entry from July 30, and I saw some of the same details that she told me in the car, but then, a few pages later, there was a part about Tonya:

I kept going up the stairs and that’s when I saw somebody small, crumpled in the corner. It was Tonya. Her face all bloody and body slumped to the side. I jump back and have to catch myself on the banister, cause I’m falling backward. I got confused, cause we beat her up and slashed her face bad, but somebody had shot her in the chest, and all this blood was on the walls and the ground.

I dropped the book like suddenly it’d grown too hot to hold. Tonya had been killed, not sent to foster care. A woman next to me picked it up and handed it to me. I flinched and grabbed it from her, wiping away tears as I stumbled out of the store.

On the drive back to Mama’s apartment, where I’d have to break the news to her, my vision began to look weird, and squiggly lines appeared and danced, while the air began to curl in the back of my throat.

Thirty
The Happiest Place

After Thanksgiving, I returned to my life in California, thinking that run-in with Stacia could be stuffed back down where I kept a ton of thoughts about Robert Taylor, but the experience in the store and that book I’d brought home with me had changed my life.

One night I burst into tears replaying the images that Stacia wrote about in her journal about how she and her sisters and new friends had jumped on Tonya, brutally beating her and cutting her face. Mama had called and reported Rochelle too late. I went through that entire journal, reading and rereading the part about Tonya’s attack.

A rage for Stacia bubbled in me, even as I studied divinity and tried to get closer to God. I remembered how she stomped out that woman Tootie with a mob of people and didn’t seem to feel the tiniest remorse about it; afterward, she never even acknowledged what she’d done.