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closed to slits like he was smiling, but he was not.
    â€œWhat up, Rog?” I said.
    â€œWhat’s up?”
    He hugged me, black T-shirt loose on his frame. His shoulders barely touched mine. He was already pulling away, already out of the polite embrace. He was already back in the car with two men from the hood. He was already swallowed by the black reach of the highway. The wind from the Gulf stuttered in, blew sand lazily across the parking lot, across my feet, and Rog disappeared into the dim, tree-tunneled streets of Pass Christian, like an animal down its secret hole.
    Years later, Charine told me she tried to visit Rog after he died but before he was found. In other words, she visited him when she thought he was alive. She and her friends banged on the door of the dark, shuttered house, not knowing that Rog was already dead inside. His sister Rhea would find him two days later. They called his name: “Rog!” They said, “His ass is probably passed out in there. Rog!” Louder. “Come open the door!”
    Now, Charine says, knowing how he lay behind that door breaks something inside of her.
    Years later, Nerissa told me about Rog’s visit with her in February 2004. This would have been when Rog and our cousins were doing too much coke because C. J. had just died. This would have been when they were raw with love, with losing. This would have been when Rog passed out, when our cousin was afraid he wasn’t breathing, when hecarried Rog into Nerissa’s bathroom and put him in the tub, ran the water cold, hoping for a miracle, for the flame not to go out. My cousin cried. He yelled, “Don’t do this to me!” Beat Rog on the chest. “Not you!” Yelled at Rog, “Not again!” And then Rog drew a breath and opened his eyes.
    Rog did cocaine, and then he took a few Lortabs on the night of June 3, 2004. For once, there was no party, no casual gathering of friends at his mother’s house. Then Rog, the boy with the beautiful smile and the long face, lay back in his bed, feeling high and low, feeling everything and nothing, all at once. Perhaps he was thinking he should be somewhere else, maybe out under the palm trees in California, walking along Venice Beach with his cousins, smelling incense that you could almost mistake for weed. Maybe he thought of the sky over the Pacific Ocean, the water stretching away to meet the clouds and disappear over the horizon, the way it seemed to go on forever. Maybe he was thinking of his family, of his mama’s return from working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig. Maybe he was thinking about the air conditioner, how good it was to lie in a cool dark bed at home, to be. Maybe he wasn’t thinking about any of these things, but I like to imagine that he was thinking about all of them when the seed of the bad heart that had killed his father sent out roots and bloomed violently in Rog’s chest. Sometime that night Rog died of a heart attack.

    I was at my mother’s house, alone, when my brother’s last girlfriend, Tasha, called and told me Rog had died.
    â€œThey killed my brother!” she sobbed. She’d been close to Rog.
    I left my mother’s house and drove through DeLisle, deep into the country. I drove with the windows down and my lights low. On a solitary road I ran into my ex-boyfriend from high school, Brandon; we stopped our cars in the middle of the empty darkness that is endemic to rural Mississippi. I’d known Brandon since I was seven years old, and his face was as familiar as my own. I walked to his car and passed a hand over my forehead and leaned into the driver’s-side window. His own eyes were wide and black, and the woods around us burned with calling insects.
    â€œYou heard?” I said.
    I hugged him. Rog was his first cousin, his younger cousin. They had the same black eyes, the same curly black hair. Brandon nodded. My face brushed against his as I pulled