First, I noticed that the breeze wafted around the scent of death.

Some people think it was whatever still bubbled up in the grimiest parts of the Chicago River, the remains of scraps of slaughtered livestock from the Back of the Yards just west of Robert Taylor. I didn’t really have any facts on the matter, but I can tell you this: it made me think, This must be how bad a dead body smells. I’d find out later on that there were dead bodies all around me that day, and it would make that eerie thought, This must be how bad a dead body smells, seem like some kind of spiritual awareness that I am not comfortable claiming. Not even now.

It happened sometimes on really hot days, this odor, traveling across the city like a bold tourist, leaving no neighborhood untouched. The other thing that made the day notable was the absence of its usual suspects. From the very start of the day, you couldn’t find anyone outside. This is how the neighborhood would look as we approached fall, with my building hemorrhaging families, but that day, I knew that the building was full, that everyone had chosen a hiding place and crouched there.

I kept wondering if Meechie had holed up on the second floor with that girl, and I wondered where Stacia would lie low on a day like this. I assumed she’d just stay in 1502. But I wasn’t supposed to care about Stacia anymore, who was trying to be grown and act like her mean sisters. I looked in the playground, empty. The bass and rhymes, missing. No kids speaking to one another on maximum volume, screaming down the porches. Something was definitely wrong. We had choir rehearsal at the church that Friday night, but I knew, even if the Browns didn’t, that we shouldn’t leave the building, that if we were smart, we’d get to our sheltering spaces like everyone else.

The Browns refused to acknowledge these kinds of signals, though. They kept their heads in the clouds, focused on church business. I would hear Ms. Patty reminding Precious to “be in this world, but not of it” when she tried to tell her about something happening in the neighborhood. Ms. Patty had even said it to all of us one day when she peeked out of her screen door and caught us staring out the gate at the wrecking ball.

She’d taken 1 John 2:15–17 completely out of context. It warned about loving the world and the things in it. We lived in a drug- and gang-infested neighborhood, so I was hyperaware of anything that seemed off. This sensitivity was viewed as interest by the Browns, so they went above and beyond to appear as if they didn’t even notice the activity on our block.