“They daddy took them,” she told me, and she wasn’t crying or nothing, and I wondered what could make a kid get chased by girls who probably had guns and razors or get dragged off by grown men or live without her brothers and sister and not cry every single day. I didn’t ask anything else; I just let her talk.

“Every time Mama told us to stay in our room, I knew that she was smoking that pipe. I started to hear voices in the living room. Then the TV was gone. One day, I came out of the room, walked down the hall, and looked. People was all over our living room, looking like Mama did that day, and she wasn’t even in the house.

“Some of them was people from downstairs, crackheads that I had seen scratching and looking crazy around my building. That’s when I knew that she was on that stuff. I ran back to the room and closed the door. My heart was beating so fast, I thought my chest was gone blow up. After that, things started changing. Furniture started leaving the house. We ain’t never have no food in the refrigerator.”

“How do you eat?” I asked.

“At school.”

“That’s the only food you get? At lunchtime?”

She shook her head from side to side. “I go to breakfast too.”

“You can eat at my house, Tonya,” I said. “Anytime you want to.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

And after that thank you I asked, “If your mama on drugs, who taught you manners?”

She hunched her shoulders and smiled. She looked so pretty and innocent, and it broke my heart that my friend had this life.

“She wasn’t always on drugs. She used to work and be nice and stuff, but she changed. She would tell me and my sister and brothers to be nice to people even if they mean to you, and say ‘thank you’ and ‘excuse me’ and ‘please.’ And she ain’t take no stuff from nobody, but now, she act like a little kid. People talk to her any kind of way, and the drug dealers, even though some of them ain’t nothing but sixteen, she let them say anything to her, and sometimes—” She stopped and dropped her head.

“What?” I asked, leaning in.

“She do stuff to them.”

“What kind of stuff?”

She looked down at her feet again, but then said, “Nasty stuff.”

My eyes got big, and all that I could say was “For real?”

She nodded. “Then some of them came after me.”

My mouth dropped open, and I thought about all the stuff that Stacia had said about Tonya knowing a bunch of dudes on the block, those boys dragging her out of the rope that day, and how she said she’d been caught in Nook’s car, probably doing stuff to him.