“I want you to find the answer,” she said. We all groaned. It was a Ms. Pierce answer. Our teacher never told you the answer to questions you had. Once, somebody tried to settle this argument about Wacker Drive. They heard that it ran north and south, and somebody else said it went east and west. She sent us all home for the weekend to find the answer. Turns out, it was a trick question; in Chicago, Wacker Drive runs north, south, east, and west!

Right after our argument about Roosevelt Road, these boys in dingy white tees got on the bus, their ashy hands gripping scuffed-up mop buckets and drumsticks. As soon as they all sat down in the back of the bus, Stacia turned around, leaned past Mama, and yelled, “Y’all going to the fireworks?” Mama and the boys started talking at the same time, but Stacia heard her name, so she looked at Mama.

“Remember we talked about being a lady?”

Stacia just stared at her, like she couldn’t remember. There was nothing about being a lady that got her excited. She probably tuned out that little speech right as it was coming out of Mama’s mouth. She nodded anyway.

“Would a lady yell across an entire bus?”

“Sorry,” she said, but then she snapped her head back, hoping the boys would repeat their answer.

At Balbo and State, we tumbled off the bus like clowns, in our red, white, and blue outfits. Me and Stacia jumped off the last step, our legs flying everywhere. Mama pulled us all aside right away and threatened to take us across the street to get back on the bus going home. We promised to act right. She made us hold hands, and we stomped down Balbo Street, up and over and down the bridge, and then Tonya spotted the Buckingham Fountain shooting water high into the sky.

“Look!” she said, louder than I ever heard her say anything.

Everybody said, “Oooh.”

We walked and walked until we found a spot to put out the blankets. When we settled into a place on a hill, Mama let us roll around, while she snapped pictures of us enjoying the sky and lake and grass.

We played Uno and hand games and watched birds fight one another for scraps of food that people tossed on the ground. We were looking at the masses of white people, curious about who they were, and how they lived. I remembered what Quan told that kid he called Lil Man, that we had to move because white people wanted to be closer to their jobs.

His words would follow me around for years.

While Precious and Stacia were locked in a tense game of Uno, me and Tonya rolled down the hills a few more times. Out of earshot, Tonya said to me, “I wish we could stay here forever.”

“We got enough food,” I said.

“We could sleep right here in this grass!”