I heard her back there yelling, “Wait! Fe Fe!” but I couldn’t slow down, not with Stacia challenging me to a race. Because I was faster than Stacia, I got to the building first. When I reached the playground, I saw what people were actually doing: nothing. They seemed frozen in place, looking up. There was a red construction vehicle reaching up to the top floor, swinging a ball into the structure. I looked over for Stacia, and only found Precious there. Stacia had skirted through the crowd and found her family. That summer, her allegiance would jump back and forth between us and them.

The Buchanans had always been drug dealers with the Gangster Disciples, called GDs for short, and Folks affectionately among one another. By the time they came to 4950, they had high rank within the GDs. Gail, the mother, chose our building so that her family’s status and cash flow wouldn’t change. Not all the high-rises were controlled by the same gang, so when she had to relocate, she was wise enough to select a building with the right affiliation. Since most of her kids were in and out of jail, they were no longer Lease Compliant, and CHA wouldn’t give them a Section 8 voucher to leave the projects—only the option to choose another building. If you had a criminal record or didn’t pay your rent consistently, you wouldn’t be Lease Compliant, and you’d get shuffled around the projects until they were all gone. After the last projects were evacuated, some people squatted in the abandoned buildings or became homeless. The luckiest among this group moved in with family members in other troubled neighborhoods.

You could spot a Buchanan right away: they all had long, narrow heads and squinty eyes. Put that together with a face that could fold into these thick creases when they got confused or mad, and they looked a lot like bloodhounds to me. Gail had twelve kids, but by that school year, three of them didn’t live in apartment 1502 with her. One of her sons, Chuck, was serving time in the penitentiary for murder, drugs, and gun possession, and Boo, a nine-year-old, was locked up too, tried as an adult because the police said he fit the description of a kid who pushed a seven-year-old out of a vacant apartment window. Ed left the family business before Stacia was even born. He was grown and lived with his wife and kids in Hammond, Indiana. She hadn’t mentioned Ed that summer, the outcasted Buchanan. The other nine Buchanan kids lived in 1502, a four-bedroom apartment. The youngest ones—Peach, an eighth grader; Stacia in sixth; Moon, Ty, and Jet, third, first, and kindergarten—transferred from Beethoven to Farren and terrorized kids in the lunchroom and on the playground. One of her brothers, Sweat, was my brother’s age. Later that summer, I’d develop a little crush on him.