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away. His skin was wet: the night was so hot I didn’t know if it was sweat or tears.
    â€œYou heading to Oak Park?” I asked. After days of others knocking but not walking in, Rog’s sister Rhea had found Rog. I do not like to imagine what it must have been like for her.
    â€œYes,” Brandon said.
    I left him behind in the middle of the street. When I arrived in the Oak Park subdivision, I parked my car on a cement curb and walked over to stand on the lawn in front of Rog’s house. People stood in drifting pockets at the edge of the same streetwe had partied on. Charine and Tasha met me there. We faced the house. A long hearse, gray and black with silver accents, took Rog away. It had a hard time maneuvering the driveway. The street lamps buzzed. When they rolled Rog out on the stretcher and loaded him into the back, I cried, my mouth open. I hated the hearse. I wanted to set it on fire. As the driver clumsily crushed the grass and swerved out of the yard, I thought of what my ex had said to me before I drove away.
    â€œThey picking us off, one by one,” Brandon had breathed.
    After the people dispersed and Rog’s immediate family locked the house and turned off all the lights, we milled in the street, waiting. We waited as if we could will the hearse back to the house, will Rog to rise out of the back, alive. Will him to joke, to smile. I drove home across the black, inky bayou by myself. I thought about Josh. I thought about C. J., about Demond, about Ronald. I rode with the windows open and thought about Rog.
    I thought about what Tasha and Brandon had said, and I wondered who
they
were. Rog had died by his own hand, by his own heart; were
they
us? Or was there a larger story that I was missing as all these deaths accumulated, as those I loved died? Were
they
even human? My headlights lit a slim sliver in the darkness, and suddenly
they
seemed as immense as the darkness, as deep, as pressing. I turned off my music and rode home without the narrative of song, with only the bugs’ shrill cry and hot wind whipping past my window. I tried to hear the narrative in that, to figure out who the
they
that wrote our story might be.

    After Rog’s funeral, I tapped Rhea’s shoulder. I opened my arms, hugged her. Her big, expressive eyes were bloodshot and wandering. I wondered what I would have wanted someone, anyone, to say to me when my brother died, anything beyond
Are you all right?
and
Are you okay?
I knew the answers to those questions. I whispered into her ear: “He will always be your brother, and you will always be his sister.”
    What I meant to say was this:
You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s not here? Doesn’t it? Because in order to get out of bed this morning, this is what I had to believe about my brother, Rhea
. But I didn’t know how to say that.
    After every funeral in the hood, including Rog’s, there is a gathering or a repast. Older women brought large pans containing casseroles and meat to Mrs. P.’s house. We all found our way there, and we parked in front of her house, some of us in neighboring yards, our cars half on the grass, half on the asphalt, this time in the middle of the day. We ate with plates balanced on our laps, one foot in our cars, the other out. We smoothed our shirts down, white T-shirts with pictures of Rog framed in blue. In Rog’s picture, he has deep dimples and an even, blinding smile. We breathed heavily.
    The memorial shirt is most common at funerals for young people. I do not know if it is common in Black neighborhoods in the North or East or West, but in the South, it has become as traditional as