She took down the picture of her and Phillip and stroked it lovingly with her free hand. “We met about a year ago,” she said. “We were both going to Community College, trying to get our lives back on track. That’s where we took this picture. It was right after a math class we had together. We were out on campus around lunchtime and this guy dared Phillip to try to do the Wu Tang,” she said with a muffled laugh. “He was, like, this white boy from North Dakota, and he was jumping around in the grass outside the student life building, trying to do this crazy ghetto dance. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Is that when you knew you liked him?” Mann asked.

She sighed sadly, looked at the picture once more, and gently placed it back on the mantelpiece. “I never really knew I liked him, because I never saw myself being with someone like him. I always imagined myself with someone who looked like me. Someone who understood what it meant to be black, and not only black, but dark black. I thought that was the most important thing in the world, because when you grow up in the ’hood looking and talking like me, you’re teased for everything from talking white to looking black, and if you’re not careful, you can end up hating who you are.”

She went back to her armchair and took another sip of her lemonade. “I never hated me,” she said. “My grandmother saw to that. She taught me to speak well and walk proud and carry myself like a lady. She died when I was in eleventh grade, and my grades and test scores went way down. That’s how I ended up at Community instead of Penn.”

“What about Phillip? Did he ever tell you how he ended up there?”

“His parents wanted him to go to school at North Dakota State, but he didn’t want to stay there. He wanted to meet new people and see new things, and he’d been in trouble in Fargo. Nothing major, just stupid stuff kids do. Drinking, rebelling, trying to figure things out on his own. After a while, he just left. A friend of his was already going to school at Drexel, but Phillip’s grades weren’t good enough to get in, so his friend agreed to help him find an apartment while Phillip got his grades up at Community College.”

“Did you ever meet this friend?”

“Not until recently,” she said. “By then it was too late.” Her eyes lost focus as she stared through Mann and into the past that had died just a few hours before.