On one block, people got wet up with Super Soakers; another corner just had people standing around, looking. A fire hydrant shot water high into the air, and we all leaned our faces into the window, wishing we could get off the bus and play. You only got a few minutes of this homemade waterpark before the firemen showed up, pissy.

At 48th Street, we were no longer amused. We saw a wrecking ball, and it sobered everyone’s mood. “My building used to be right there,” Stacia said, pointing to a wide-open space across from a building with wires hanging out the side.

“For real?” I asked her, because I didn’t know what else to say.

Then Tonya looked at her with a sadness that said she understood exactly what Stacia felt. She stared out the window too, looking at the emptiness. But Stacia looked away. Reality snatched us out of our giggling moment. It was like that that summer: one minute we laughed loud and played hard, the next we were silent and worried.

The bus started moving again until we stopped at Beethoven. “That was my school,” Stacia said, our depressed tour guide.

We all looked over at it, then Precious asked her, “You liked Beethoven better than Farren?”

Stacia thought about it for a minute, then said, “I never had friends like y’all when I was there.”

Precious and I smiled at this; it was sweet to hear her talk about us like we were special. Tonya gave us a soft smile then turned back to the window. Precious returned to the novel she was reading. I watched my friends, and the people getting on and off the bus. Every once in a while, I’d catch Tonya looking at me, and we’d smile at each other.

As we drove, the buildings kept changing color every few blocks: red, then white, then red, then white, then red. Our version of the flag, these buildings, like crumbs we scraped up from the plate of somebody else’s American Dream.

After 20th Street, when the projects ended, we crossed Roosevelt Road, and Tonya said, “This gotta be the biggest street in Chicago!” We got excited about that, then Precious snapped her head up from The Coldest Winter Ever, a novel Stacia took from one of her sisters that we’d been passing around our group.

She said, “King Drive is wider,” then she found her spot in the book and kept reading.

“No, it’s not!” I told her.

Then Stacia agreed with me, saying, “King Drive ain’t bigger than this street!”

We started getting loud, so Mama stepped in. “Ladies?” We all looked at her. She said, “Inside voices.”

Then I asked Mama, thinking she would settle it for us. “Which one is bigger?”