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“They say it was an accident.”

Miss M was the mother of a close friend of mine from school.

I didn’t want to believe it. I knew it couldn’t have happened. Some fucked-up rumor.

But the rumor wasn’t a rumor. The rumor was real.

I went with my friend to the funeral home where her mother was laid with her little infant. They were both wearing white. They’d taken the child from the womb and placed it next to her mama.

Never seen nothing like that before in my life.

People were screaming with grief, moaning and shouting, “Lord, have mercy!”

I got up and walked by the casket. They were so still.

Mother and child.

Dead.

Silent.

Frozen.

By then I was ten, and I’d seen boys killed. I’d seen men shot down in cold blood. But this here was different. This was a mommy and a baby. This was the saddest sight I’d ever laid eyes on.

My heart was so heavy it was hard to get up when the service was over. I didn’t want to leave them alone in that casket. I felt empty. I felt like nothing really mattered if a bow and arrow can go through a mother’s tummy and kill both her and the innocent little thing growing inside her.

What kind of world is this?

I didn’t have no answers. I didn’t want no answers. I didn’t want to cry. I could usually keep myself from crying. But not this time. This time I broke down along with everyone else.

This time was the worst.

“YOU BAD”

Boys start humping on girls at a young age. That’s just how it is. I started seeing it when I was ten or eleven.

But when they tried humping on me, I fought ’em off. After I beat the shit out of a couple, they left me alone. The boys who understood me became my best friends and running buddies. They looked at me like I was no different than them. In my mind, I wasn’t.

Once I had that gun, I was on my way. I hid it under Mama’s summer kitchen, a porch in the back of the house where I could crawl under the foundation.

Life went on.

Me and D played basketball with hoops made out of crates. D had game and so did I. He was also tenderhearted, thin-skinned, and hated being teased. When kids at school ganged up on him and started calling him names, he ran to me and said, “Get the joint.”

“We don’t need to be fooling with no gun,” I said.

“I don’t wanna shoot ’em, I just wanna whip it out and scare those niggas real bad. Go get it.”

I got it. Gave it to D. And the two of us went looking for the boys who’d been ragging on D.

We found them. All ten of them. They saw we were looking for trouble, and they were ready. They had baseball bats and knives, but they weren’t ready for a nine-millimeter.

Neither was D. He didn’t know how to use it. He didn’t distance himself to get good range. He got too far up in their faces. Had no leverage.

“Yo, D,” I said, “back up.”

But by then he was whipping out the gun. One of the niggas saw what D was doing and knocked the joint out of his hand. Gun fell on the ground. Before anyone could react, I grabbed it. I aimed at the nigga who had plucked it and shot the boy through the leg.

For the first time in my life, I’d fired a gun. The guys backed off. The fight was over before it started. D was all smiles.

“You bad,” he said to me. “You ain’t scared of nothing.”

I got this reputation. And I got this attitude. If anyone questioned what I was doing, I’d say, “What the fuck do you care?”

You feel what I’m saying?

I’m saying that no one cared about me. Mama and Pop were cool, but they were off in their own little cocoon. They couldn’t relate to me. They couldn’t control me.

I remember looking at Mama while she read her Bible and listened to her gospel music. She’d be smiling and nodding her head to the good grooves. The Word was making her happy. She was a woman who lived the Word. She tried her hardest to put it on me.

“God loves you,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”

I said I did, but I really didn’t. Didn’t know who God was.

“God is Jesus,” she explains. “He died so you can live.”

“I am living, Mama.”

“He died so you can live forever.”

“No one lives forever.”

“That where you