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Tewolde went next. He reached out his hand to take another Snickers.
    We never quite figured out what happened next. Maybe Kiros pushed Tewolde, maybe Tewolde slipped, maybe the old woman slipped. Whatever the cause, Tewolde knocked the tray over and the candy bars scattered, some to Tewolde’s bag, some to the grass, some to the startled woman’s feet.
    We bent down to gather the candy for her. “You clumsy chump, Tewolde. What did you do?”
    We were trying to help her, but the old woman, convinced that we intended to rob her, raised the aluminum tray high overhead, like Moses about to shatter the Ten Commandments.
    Ranting and raving and crying all at once, the old woman smashed the metal tray on Kiros’s ‘fro with frightening force.
    Kiros slumped to the sidewalk, too dizzy to move. “Get up, Kiros. Get up!” We dragged him up and fled.
    The old lady hobbled after us but couldn’t catch us. How could she when she could barely walk?
    We had felt guiltless in taking from those richer than us in Wheaton — maybe because taking was so much fun, or maybe because we considered ourselves modern-day Robin Hoods, taking from the rich and giving to ourselves.
    But even we had rules. Rules forged by the limping refugee woman, by our own flight, by our mother’s homesickness, by “African boodie-scratcher,” by all the many harsh things we had known.
    Our rules demanded that we would never add hurt to the hurting.
    The old woman could not catch us, but she threw her words at us. We heard them and we trembled. For we had always been taught, and we earnestly believed, that the heartfelt curses of the elderly and the weak are heard by Him above, and that they always come true — if not in this world, then in the next.
    As much as our run-in with the old woman shook us up, it didn’t cure us of mischief. We still plundered many baskets and looted many trays.
    It took something else, something completely unrelated to Halloween, to make us consider changing our ways. It took the parking meter.
    It all started when basketball dethroned soccer as our favorite sport. Growing up in Michael Jordan’s backyard, we started to play hoops religiously.
    During the height of our basketball fever, all of Wheaton’s teenage greats converged on one outdoor court: Triangle Park, just over the railroad tracks from where we lived.
    We went to watch and play almost every day, each time crossing the railroad tracks illegally. We had heard that there was a fifty-dollar fine if you got caught, but we didn’t care. We refused to walk all the way around, more than a quarter mile extra, just to use the crosswalk.
    One day we crossed the tracks, walked through the trees, and came out on the other side, across the street from the grassy rectangle that was misnamed Triangle Park. Close to forty Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, Wheaton College students, and Route 38 brothers milled about the court.
    We knew that we would have to wait at least an hour to get a game. We stood on our side of the street, adding our figures to the long line of parking meters that guarded the tracks behind us.
    Tewolde. Myself. A giant, light-skinned, Nigerian-American brother named Bo. And a dark-skinned brother with an impressive ‘fro, even bigger than the ones that Americans had sported in the ‘70s. This was the kind of ‘fro that Eritrean and Ethiopian
tegadalies,
or guerilla fighters, grew out in the wilderness.
    Guerilla-afro brother leaned against the parking meter, and it moved. Not much, but just enough.
    Glancing at the sand-speckled dirt next to the meter, and then at each other, each of us considered the same question: How many quarters did that double-headed parking meter hold?
    “I bet it holds at least five dollars! Maybe even ten!”
    “I bet it holds even more. The meter man probably comes to collect the money every two weeks, and with its two heads, the meter probably collects at least two dollars a day. There’s gotta be at least thirty dollars