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don’t have a clue. When the men came, something stepped outside of me and watched with its arms folded. Nodding. As the men drove us away, that something lifted its hand and waved. I watched it. I was it. It’s gone now.
    Lulu lived five doors down from us. Earlier that evening, before the bullets came through the kitchen window, she had tiptoed up to my room and hugged me the way she had done so many nights before.
    We had known we would be leaving but didn’t know exactly when. Each morning before school, Lulu and I hugged each other hard—thankful for another day together. Each night, we cried and said our good-byes. Lulu and I had been born in the same hospital. Our mothers said we turned toward each other in our neighboring incubators and smiled. We were both born a month too soon in the middle of the night. We both weighed less than five pounds. When Lulu left my room, I pressed my face against the pane and cried.
    Cameron was in her own room. Months later, she would tell me that when the men came, she was in the middle of writing a letter to Joseph. I think I loved him once, she said. I hope you don’t ever have to know what it’s like to leave a guy you loved.
    I loved Lulu, I said. And Grandma. And Matt Cat. It’s different, though. The way I felt for Joseph, before he started saying all that stupid stuff and showing his true colors, is . . . I don’t know. It’s something in your heart. You don’t get it. You’re too young.
    I’m old enough to know we only have one heart, I said. Love is love.
     
     
     
    THE MEN WERE QUIET, TALL. ONE BLACK. ONE white. When Cameron asked where the next place was, the men said it was too unsafe to tell us. We climbed into a van with blacked-out windows. Matt Cat had gone to live with Grandma two days before. But as the van rumbled off, I swore I could hear him howling.
    The black man wore a yellow jacket. The white one wore a peacoat. The black one’s hair was cut like my father’s—a little on the top, the sides and back shaved close. He was the one who told us what our last name would be.
    You’ll have to pick new first ones, he said.
    Toswiah was my grandmother’s name and her mother’s name, too. Whenever I told someone my name for the first time, I had to spell it out for them. Toswiah, I’d say slowly—pronouncing it Tos-wee-ah so that it didn’t get mispronounced. Then I’d wait for them to go on about how unusual it was. I am tall and narrow like Cameron and Mama. We wear our hair the same way—pulled back into a braid that stops between our shoulders. Our hair is kinky enough to stay braided without any elastics or barrettes. We all three have the same square jaw and sharp cheekbones. Striking, my mother used to say. Does that mean pretty? I’d ask her. But she’d just smile and shake her head, tell me being pretty didn’t matter. Cameron has eyebrows like our father—thick and black. Sometimes I think she’s beautiful. Sometimes I can’t stand the sight of her. The night we left Denver, we were dressed almost alike—blue hooded sweatshirts underneath purple down vests. Cameron was wearing the tights and turtleneck from her cheerleading outfit and a long black skirt. I was wearing jeans.
    Are you twins, the black one asked.
    Of course not, Cameron said. Jeez!
    Toswiah and Cameron—Jonathan and Shirley Green’s girls. My name is Evie now. Evil Evie. Evie Ivie Over. Here comes a teacher with a big fat stick. . . .
    For more than thirteen years I’d been Toswiah. Then came an end to that system of things.
    First they took our names away.
    Then the house would be sold, the money from it tunneled through this system and that system until it became a check for Evan Thomas. We were running away from death in a black minivan with a brown leather interior. It wasn’t our car, the old brown BMW. That car was behind us, too. As we drove away, I closed my eyes, trying to remember Lulu and that yellow moon. The night got quieter. I knew Denver was