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listening to him and Mama go back and forth about the consequences. The night before, I had walked in on Mama sitting at the kitchen table, marking spelling exams and crying. But Cameron had gone on like nothing was happening, even though every radio station in Colorado was telling the story.
    “I can’t believe you’re gonna screw up our lives like this,” Cameron yelled.
    “I’d want someone to do this if it was one of you,” my father said.
    “They didn’t kill us, ” Cameron said. “Don’t do this to us, Daddy.”
    At dusk, someone fired three shots through our kitchen window. I was upstairs in my room, spying on my father. I could see him from my window, standing on the back deck, staring out at the trees, every now and then his shoulders rising and falling. Cameron was in the basement. Mama had just walked out of the kitchen to set the table for dinner.
    Outside, a few birds were making noise. When I ran downstairs, Mama was slumped against the dining room wall, her head in her hands. Daddy was beside her, his arms around her shoulders. Cameron stood in the corner of the dining room, hugging herself hard. Glass covered the kitchen table and floor. The bullet holes were like small black caves against the white kitchen wall. I stared at them without blinking. I was not afraid. Some part of us that had been the same way forever was gone. The holes in the walls proved it. The dead boy, his mother in his room at night calling and calling his name. I thought of dead people in the movies. How their eyes flutter open like magazines. I thought This part of my life is over now.

7
    MAYBE SOMEWHERE IN HIS HEAD MY FATHER imagined Raymond Taylor as his own son. Maybe he looked at us in that moment and saw two daughters—his copper pennies—safe, but not safe. Girls. But black girls. And me, tall and skinny and always running and climbing trees and, even at thirteen, still coming home with skinned knees and jammed fingers. Me, who was always begging to have my braid chopped off so I didn’t have to deal with my hair every day, closer to a boy in some ways than a girl. Maybe he looked at me, his youngest copper penny, and thought It could happen like this.
    Me and Cameron sat there, my love for Daddy blossoming into something deeper, Cameron’s disgust growing fast as a weed.
    Later that night, I walked into the den to find him holding a picture of himself with the cops in his precinct.
    “I don’t feel safe anymore,” he said. He put down the picture and left the room.
    I looked at the picture for a long time after he left. I had known everyone in that picture my whole life. Twenty-two officers, all in blue. Look again, though. Blue and white. Blue and white. Blue and white. Then Daddy. Blue and black. Look again. Harder. Longer.
    That night, the men came for us.

8
    MY MOTHER USED TO LISTEN TO HER OLD records all the time. She’d put the album on our old turntable and set the needle down gently. Then the music would lift up around the room. Sad, cloudy-sounding music. Songs about people going off to look for America and hearts being broken. Songs where the men sounded like they were singing with the last breaths they had in the world and the women sang low and gravelly about men coming and going. Now the songs come to me—bits of phrases, pieces of tunes. They come to me late at night when I’m not expecting them. Words and words and words. You know us, they whisper. You know us.
    When the men came, the moon was out, hanging down close outside my window. I’d never seen it that way before—full and yellow and looking close enough to touch. The men came in the night with guns under their coats and the moon saying its own good-bye. Their coming surprised me. And then it didn’t. They’d always been coming. From the day I was born they’d been coming. Lulu used to say that we’re just paper dolls made at one of God’s play dates. He knows the scene, she’d say. From start to finish already. Even if we