“He at that age, Fe Fe. Everybody checking for him now. My brother left last year when he turned fifteen.” I looked for a sadness, any crack at all in her hard shell, but she just reached for the ropes, motioning for us to start a game.

“Me and Sweat used to be close like you and Meechie. He’d read to me, Moon, and Jet The Three Billy Goat’s Gruff and the Berenstain Bears and do different voices and read fast in some places, then slow down and make us beg for the next part.” She smiled, like she could see a specific moment vividly.

“He played with his voice and stopped to add extra shit about the characters. Then, one day, he showed up at bedtime and ain’t have no book. Moon asked him, ‘You ain’t gone read to us?’

“He said, ‘Yeah! I got my own story.’ We looked at his ass like his feet left the ground!” She got quiet for a second, then she said, “My brother could’ve wrote his own damn books.” She eased her chin up and told me, “Could’ve been a teacher.”

We held the rope in our hands, but hadn’t started turning it, just stood there looking at Stacia, who wasn’t a bad storyteller herself. She knew that we were waiting, that she had us. But this Stacia wasn’t the one who showed up every day, ready to snap, using a volume of voice turned up too loud. She had seen things living in the same apartment as the gangsters running the world downstairs. This Stacia spoke softly.

“One day, Quan put the library books on the stove and burned them in front of all of us. Sweat watched the fire black out them words. ‘You gone quit acting like a lil bitch,’ Quan told him. Then he grabbed Sweat by the back of his neck and pushed him out the door.

“I went to the stove after they left, poked my fingers around the burnt pages, rubbed the black dust in my hands. It’s crazy how quick something so special can turn to nothing.”

Precious heard Stacia’s words, but she was still missing a lot. She asked, “He read to you when he got home?”

Stacia stuck her neck out and called Precious stupid with her twisted-up face, but I cut in and told her, “They burned the books so that he could stop being soft.” Then the look in her eyes told us that she’d gotten it. Stacia finished.

“Sweat ain’t come home until the middle of the night. I waited and waited for him to show up with a story but dozed off. I jumped up when I heard his keys at the door. He turned on some music videos and lit a joint. When the smoke made it to my room, I went in there.