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had become icing on a rotten cake. By the time Art attended classes, the roof leaked, the bathrooms barely functioned, and the school had one of the highest truancy rates in Chicago, with more than five hundred out of about sixteen hundred students cutting classes on any given day. Sixty-six percent of its students were failing two or more classes, while less than half went on to graduate. Assaults on teachers and students were routine.
    “You had people getting killed there,” Art remembers. “Going from Armour to this shit school where teachers didn’t care was such a shocker. It felt hopeless to the extent that I didn’t want to be there. Studying no longer felt like a way out for me.”
    By the end of his freshman year Art had lost all interest in aca demics. In terms of survival skills and fulfilling his immediate needs, the Satan’s Disciples were more pragmatic mentors. The SDs taught him to stop messing with the parking meters and instead break into the cars sitting next to them. He learned how to hotwire vehicles, where to sell the stereos and rims, and the locations of the chop shops, which were particularly abundant in Bridgeport. During thin times, the gang members would even chip in to help buy food for his family. “Once I saw that the gang could provide, moving up in it became the main goal,” he says. “Food and money for the bills were immediate concerns, and the gang helped with those things. It was all bullshit, of course, but I was thirteen, and those good grades I’d gotten before got me nowhere. I was in the worst fucking school in the city.”
    Kelly High and the gang finally collided during the end of Art’s sophomore year, when a rival gang known as La Raza began making inroads at the school. Tensions ratcheted up and erupted in a widespread brawl in the school’s cafeteria; one student was knifed and the assistant principal had his head shoved through a glass food-display case. Although Art had no involvement in those particular acts, he was in the fight, and in the ensuing crackdown he was expelled from Kelly altogether. At fourteen, the eradication of a stellar academic future was complete.
    That seems like a young age for a kid to wash out, but Art did have two siblings who were even younger. Right about the same time he was bashing his way out of high school, his little brother, Jason, was getting in trouble for acting up in grammar school. Jason enjoyed none of Art’s academic advantages and had experienced even less stability. At ten years old, he was not only expelled from grammar school, but Malinda lost custody of him completely. The State remanded him to Maryville Academy, a boy’s school in Des Plaines, where he would languish until the age of eighteen and emerge with less education than Art.
    Wensdae would fail to finish high school as well, but she would get a general-education degree. The only one of the Williams kids who never lashed outward, she would continue her interior battle, with consequences far more violent than any her brothers ever faced.
     
     
     
    THE WILLIAMS KIDS were struggling with poverty, but there was another factor they had to contend with, one that haunted them in their own house. Art discovered it one day during his freshman year in high school after he forgot his key. Knocking on the front door, he called for his mom to let him in. He knew she was home because he could hear her inside, talking to someone. Malinda didn’t respond, which he thought was strange. To the side of the front door was a little opaque window to a utility room, and through the glazing he could just make out the form of his mother crouched in the corner. He banged on the window and shouted at her.
    “They won’t leave me alone!” Malinda screamed back. She explained that she had gone into the utility room to look for supplies to build a spaceship, so she could escape them.
    “Who won’t leave you alone?” Art asked.
    “The little people,” she said. “They’re all