She grabbed me and Tonya into a hug, then said, “One day, you girls will get to live in a better place.”

I moved my face from her chest and asked, “So we Lease Compliant?”

A new tension entered the room, and Mama snapped, “Where did you hear that term?”

“Downstairs” was all that I said before asking, “Are we?”

“You let me worry about that,” she said, trying to walk away, stumbling a little. She couldn’t leave my room fast enough. Those two words had spooked the whole block, even Mama.

Three
Lease Compliant

In April of 1999, the Chicago Housing Authority started tearing down the buildings on our block. A year before that, near the end of our fifth-grade school year—before Stacia and Tonya were around—Precious and I sat in class and listened to Ms. Pierce read an article from the Chicago Tribune about how they’d started knocking down the buildings in the Hole, at the very end of the State Street Corridor, one of the most notorious blocks of Robert Taylor high-rises.

Sitting directly across from my building like its reflection, 4946 had been empty for months. Black boards replaced curtains, and the porch lights stopped blinking on every night. Then, the day came when the CHA began the slow, agonizing process of knocking it down.

On that April afternoon, at 3:30 on the dot, Precious, Stacia, and I burst out of the front doors of John Farren Elementary like the building had caught fire, spilling onto 51st and State. Each afternoon we performed this dramatic exit. If we landed on the sidewalk and had the light, we could break all the way across the street and down the block to the building, but on this day, we got stuck at the curb.

Precious stood poised, as if it were picture day, prepared for a photographer’s shots, but Stacia jumped up and down screaming, “They fighting! They fighting!” because she could see a mob of people down by the buildings.

Her announcement hyped everybody up. Kids started pushing against the crossing guards, some of them no bigger than us, because they were just kids too. When the light turned green, me and Stacia threw our bodies hard against the wind. Since the very beginning of our friendship, we hadn’t stopped racing, determined to prove that we were faster and stronger than the other. Precious tried her best, but she ran way behind us, even though she ate the healthiest foods and went to bed early like she was supposed to.

I knew why she couldn’t keep up. She kept too many things in her book bag: nasty sugar-free snacks, books to read in the morning before school, books to read at lunch, lotions and sunscreen to keep her yellow skin unburned, and a change of shoes. As long as I’d known her, she’d been packing that stuff in her bag every day.