He told Ayanna on the night of May 11, he and Amir talked on the phone for a long time. Most of the conversation was about The 400 Blows. They felt like the movie’s title was cooler than the actual movie, but there was still a lot to talk about. It seemed dated in some ways, and so, so white, but there was also something in it that they both keenly thought spoke to how they felt being in mostly white schools, of having classmates and teachers who sometimes didn’t see them, saw only their expectations of how intelligent they should be. Together, they had a three-hundred-movie-deep list to watch and discuss. Amir wanted to be a screenwriter and director; Felix sensed they were always dancing around the fact that they wanted to make movies together for the rest of their lives, but saying it aloud, affirming the feeling, wasn’t masculine. Both of their parents had big ideas about how men should be, and they felt that hovering around all their interactions was a hand always pulled back to swat them into place.

Ayanna could feel the weight of what he was saying. His tone was similar to her own whenever she talked about Olivia.

“I think about this all the time,” Felix said, “how he kept saying ‘I feel like we shouldn’t go to school tomorrow.’ He couched it in a Star Wars reference, ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’ And then we laughed, because we always had bad feelings about going to school.”

They walked in silence. Leaves crunched and rustled beneath their feet. She weighed telling him he didn’t have to keep talking if he didn’t want to, but it was clear he wanted to talk about his friend.

“One of the strange things about memory is, I feel like I can remember almost everything he said, but thinking about it, I’m almost completely obliterated out. I know I wasn’t sitting there silent, but every part of it is him.”

His voice was quieter.