She told me, “Stop running with that Buchanan child, trying to save her.”

Mama Pearl knew me well. She’d been in my life since the day that I was born. After my grandmother passed away, she’d taken over the job, loving on me and Meechie, trying to mold us into something positive. Since Mama had no doubt told her about my friendship with Stacia, she’d been watching me even closer.

“What you gone do with your life? Huh? That’s what you needs to be thinking about.” She started walking, but I stood there, watching her. The words hanging back with me. I hadn’t thought about what I wanted to do with my life just yet, only what I would do after school every day. The answer was usually the same: grab my friends, jump rope.

I waved slowly at Precious, who lived on the same end of the floor as Mama Pearl, then walked the other way, toward my apartment. I stopped at the iron, crisscrossed gate—our window out into the neighborhood—and jammed my face against it. I could see that the crowd had begun to spread out and return to its usual activities. I scanned the playground for Stacia, and worried when I didn’t see her anywhere. Then she appeared next to me. We looked through the gate, quiet. I stared at the woman on the ground, lying in the place where we once stood.

She wasn’t moving.

“You think she dead?” I asked. When Stacia didn’t reply, I moved my face from the gate. She didn’t move hers. I put mine back and asked myself, Did my friend just help kill somebody? It was strange to think about. Though we dropped the topic then, I would return to this moment later in the summer, and throughout the years.

That day, the wrecking ball broke apart the bricks and window frames, never stopping, even when the crowd got crazy. Even though somebody lay motionless on the ground. Broken parts of the building fell out of the sky, slow, feather-like; it hypnotized us, and we all sat like that, watching, for a while. Then people remembered that they had jobs to do: help their kids with homework, sell drugs, start dinner, look for pop cans, beg for crack quarters—hoping they could collect enough change to buy rocks.