When the stream of boys ran across the lot, I thought about my brother, tried to imagine him as a younger boy, playing this game. A time when he could just be a kid, running freely with no pistols weighing him down, no threat of the police roughing him up, just free and flowing and boyish. I didn’t have the energy to run and jump, and my soul was heavy from losing him to the streets.

And Stacia wanted to fight.

When she appeared on the playground each morning, I sat up straight, like a threatened animal. She’d been chasing me since the night that I went out walking through the neighborhood and she had scratched me, though she’d planned to do much worse.

She couldn’t catch me in the building, so she started hunting me at school. One morning, I mustered up the energy to play All in Together. When we got to the part where they sing the birthday months, a bunch of people had already jumped out of the rope, but me and two other kids were still in, I flipped around and saw Stacia running in my direction. I slid out of the rope and bolted toward the playground monitors. I had a small lead, but she was gaining on me. The boys chanted, “Run, G, run! Run, G, run!” but it wasn’t funny; Stacia had become a gangster, running with the older girls, and I didn’t know what she’d do to me. I worried that she now had a razor or that she’d fight dirty and hit me with something that could cause a terrible injury.

We were no longer those girls who had crashed the boys’ game earlier in the summer. She had aged, and I suspected that she was no longer just a lonely kid who bullied people because she had been unloved. I was convinced that Stacia felt like she had to prove to the girls that she’d been hanging with that she was just as hard. So I ran for my life.

Stacia chased me for a few days, then she just stopped coming to school, even though the summer session was nearly over. It was as if she’d decided she didn’t need school anymore.

I didn’t see my brother as much either. He was just out there, in the wild doing whatever he wanted. Sometimes, I’d catch a glimpse of him down in the playground or walk by him on my way to church with the Browns. He’d acknowledge me with a small nod, and I’d use my eyes to beg him to come home and be with us. Once summer school ended, I spent more time looking for him out the window and through the gate on the porch. This obsessive behavior went on for a few weeks, and then one very strange evening, things changed.