“You got jumped in at Auntie Nora’s house? That’s what you was doing on Perry!” I screamed at him. He just looked at his Tims.

“You gone tell Mama?” he asked. He helped me up. I wiped my face and just looked at him, my brother, a newly initiated gangster. I hunched my shoulders, because I didn’t know if I should tell or not.

His secret wouldn’t last much longer than it took for his face to heal. I came in for water one afternoon and saw Mama sitting at the kitchen table with that saggy look that she had at the police precinct. There was a black pistol and a few tiny bags of crystal nuggets on the table where we eat. “Go to your room,” Mama said with no energy. I knew it was Meechie’s, that he was caught.

From my room, I heard the front door open, and Meechie said, “Ma.”

She said, “Ma my ass! You got this shit in my house?”

“Man—”

“I am not a man,” she hollered.

“I know,” he said, a smirk in his voice. Then her chair screeched back from the table, and I heard the clap of her palm hitting his skin.

“Hit me again,” he said. “Do it. Everybody else do. Just punch on Meechie, he deserve it, right? This shit ends today,” he shouted. “Tired of people putting they hands on me.”

I heard him coming down the hall, those boots stomping hard. He passed my door and went to his room. Mama’s voice echoed down the hallway as she followed him. When she said, “Not in my house! You will not disrespect me and live here,” her sentence clipped off at the end.

It was too quiet, so I eased out of my room, and that’s when I saw Meechie pull a long shotgun out of the inside of his dresser. I stood in the doorway of my room and watched him grab more guns: two more from the rip in his mattress. Like a magician, he summoned them, then made them disappear into a duffel bag.

He stomped out of his room. Mama screamed at the back of his head, “Don’t try to come back!”

He didn’t respond to this, but when he got to my door, he slowed down and looked at me. “You told her, huh?”

That’s the last thing he said to me, that accusation, before he left.