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my stomach, and I don’t want to get that way in front of Dad. He’ll go for the throat if he senses any kind of weakness.
    “Tyrell?” Dad calls. I didn’t even hear the door open. My fingers fumble for the remote, somewhere near me. On the screen, Tariq’s face appears. I’ve been waiting for them to cycle back to the story.
    Dad comes in from the kitchen. “Tyrell, did you hear me?” His tone says he’s already called after me more than once. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t turn it off. Not now.
    His work boots approach me. I don’t need to look at his face to know why he’s mad. I forgot about the vegetables Mom left out for me to chop. They’re supposed to be done and ready by the time she gets home to cook dinner. He’s going to grab me, rip into me, but I don’t even care. I don’t look away from the news report.
    “Tyrell!”
    “Shut up!” It’s a bad thing to say to Dad, but it just blurts out. His step falters. I never talk back to him. Not ever. I duck my head against my knees.
    Dad comes around the TV to see what I’m watching.
    “That’s your friend, isn’t it?” He stands by the arm of the couch, knees at the level of my head.
    I look up at him. Tariq has been in this apartment a thousand times. Probably a hundred times in the past year alone. Two or three times a week means a hundred and four times minimum, up to a hundred and fifty six. And I’m only really counting weekdays there, which means tack on another fifty or so for the times he stopped by on the weekends.
    Dad’s looking back at me, expecting me to say something. The numbers just whirl in my head.
    “Yeah,” I say. “That’s Tariq. You know him.”
    “Tariq,” he says, like he needs to be reminded. “Right—that gang member who got killed last night?”
    “He wasn’t a—”
    Dad’s voice rises over mine. “He’s a friend of yours? What the hell are you doing hanging around people like that?”
    My throat clenches and I can’t even answer him.
    “God damn it, Tyrell.” Dad stomps into the kitchen.
    In my peripheral vision flashes the same still image of Tariq that they keep showing, over and over.

5. THE VIGIL
    MS. ROSALITA
    You can hear the women wailing all up and down the block. Mournful and high, cries like soaring birds.
    I’m too old for tears. Old enough to see we’re all caught up in a great big circle. Birth, life, death. I see the beauty in it all.
    It’s supposed to be natural, though. You wear yourself down until your heart stops beating. Until your chest no longer sees fit to rise. These kids, though. These guns. Their bullets, their little tubes of metal that fly up and down the block … that’s nothing natural.
    I can’t blame the women for crying like gulls. Any young boy’s death is a slice across the pristine circle. It is a tragedy.
    When I hear them start up wailing, I go on down to the street, to walk with them. I take their supple young hands in mine, the backs of which wave like the ocean. Veins, beneath a whisper skin. I tuck their tear-streaked cheeks to my breast, to comfort. I am nothing, if not a picture of the truth that life goes on. And on. And on.
    They tell me they were his friends. Beautiful young women, their faces lined with the first of many sorrows. It is a thing I cannot erase from them, nor would I try. We are caught in the circle.
    Come with us, they say. To the vigil.
    I stroke their hair. They are so young. To keep vigil means to wait. To keep watch. But these babies, these beauties have no idea what it means to wait. I walk with them.
    There’s a brick wall up, right over near where the shooting happened. It was all taped off for an hour or two, maybe through the night, but by the morning all the yellow tape had come down, and people started leaving flowers and candles and so on lined up along the sidewalk like a tribute. Someone came along and hosed down the bloodstain, but you can still see it. Real faint. I’m ninety-four, but my eyes are still good