Isaiah had that look in his eyes. The same coal black anger that I see in young Mr. Bryson. As Isaiah drifted away and away from us, his eyes became angrier and more distant. He began to affect the street style of the day—a large Afro, tight silky shirts made out of some synthetic material, wide-legged, low-waisted pants. And when he spoke, he never looked either me or my mother in the eye. He regarded me as something of an oddity. Little professor, he’d call me.

“Hey, little professor. Got that nose stuck in a book again, I see. What you think’s in there that’s gonna help you out here on these streets?” he said once when he was about sixteen, sitting insolently on the other side of the kitchen table where I studied. I did not look up. “I’m talking to you, professor,” he said, his voice raised just a threatening notch.

I looked up, annoyed and, for the first time, a little afraid. “I’m trying to finish this assignment. It’s due tomorrow, and I don’t want to be late.”

“Don’t want to be late,” he said in a mocking tone. “What the fuck difference do it make if you’re late or not? What do you think finishing this shit is going to do for you, boy?”

My voice rose to meet his. “I think it might get me out of here. I think it might improve my mind and teach me about something besides hanging out on street corners and drinking cheap wine. I think it might …”

My words trailed off as Isaiah rose to his feet. Though he was two years younger, he had lost the slightness of his youth and now looked more like our father, tall and bulky and threatening. He could have flattened me with one blow. “Think you better than me, huh? Well, come on, then. Show me who the real man is. Show me.”

I looked up. This brother I had once known, whom I had shared a bed with until just a few years before, whose smells and habits and tastes had been as familiar to me as my own, was now a stranger. When we were little, before we left Georgia, we used to sit together on our ragged front porch, our dusty legs touching, and see how many june bugs we could catch in a jar on a summer evening. One. Two. Three. Four. Our breaths would mingle as we leaned over the jar, our heads touching, our skins one against the other. Sometimes on those nights, as darkness fell and the world was silent, I didn’t know for sure where Isaiah ended and I began. We were just one brown boy one breath, one flesh.