townhouses were two storey, two or three bedrooms depending on the layout. The end cap of the rows were one level, one bedroom. Its landscape was fairly well maintained, as an old Jamaican fatherand-son team tended the lawns every Saturday morning. Life percolated along at its usual rhythms. A Hispanic family, a grandmother with her two adult children and a few toddlers, chatted amiably in a doorway. A few children rode their bikes unsteadily along the drive. Some teenagers huddled under trees engaged in the play dance of hormone-fueled flirting and banter. Green's people loitered on porch steps or ducked between patio enclaves in order to conduct business.

As one went deeper into the court, the pleasant facade broke down. A gradual erosion into dilapidation the further away it got from casual eyes. Cars jacked up, tires missing, windshields cracked if not entirely knocked out, glass shards still pooled beneath them. The townhouse window shutters shattered or dangled at odd angles. Chipped paint and rotted wood made up many patios. A couple of end condos had the back patios missing entirely. The siding on the end townhouses missed a few slats. A patch ran perpendicular to the rest and still revealed wood rafters of roof. The disrepair from storm damage when a tornado touched down a few years back. This was where King lived. He removed the 'For Sale' sign from his front window.

King couldn't pinpoint when he'd developed spiritual eyes — soft eyes some folks would say — able to take in everything, the full picture, and even feel it on some level. He was connected to the court and its people. Up until then, all he'd wanted was to keep his head down, mind his own, and muddle through. No, that was a lie. In his heart, his life had always been one of quiet discipline, despite his circumstances. Reading. Meditating. Working out. Always in a state of preparing for something. Maybe he sensed something was coming. It had to be more than simply knowing that he was meant for something, a purpose, because who didn't have their childhood daydreams fueled by a belief that they were destined for greatness? King sat on the porch of his condo, whiling away most of his days peoplewatching. Every time he wandered toward the front of the court, Green's crew declared a time-out. Lingering at the front of the court, he had an unobstructed view of the park.

School dismissed barely twenty minutes earlier and those who walked home trickled into the park. A lot had changed at Northwest High School even in the few years since King attended there. Back in his day, before every major holiday break — Christmas, Spring Break, even summer vacation — the school collapsed in a cauldron of racial tension. Too often, the police helicopter circled the school as mini-riots spread throughout the campus, the slightest spark — a jostle in the lunch line, the wrong color boy rebuffed by the wrong color girl — provided all the excuse needed to pit black against white. Now, with the major Hispanic influx, the game had done changed for real.

A white Toyota Corolla, a decade old with a rusting bumper, screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, drawing everyone's attention as a half-dozen girls tumbled out. Alaina Walker just got out of juvey and was not allowed to associate with her gang sisters. The crossroads moment of her life was between a boring-ass life with no friends or risking her probation by standing tall with her girls. Some folks couldn't help but gravitate to chaos. If chaos was all they knew, chaos was their comfort. Chaos was safe. Alaina marched her crew into the face of Lady G. The two simply hated each other and neither, if pressed, could tell anyone why. It was as if the air between them poisoned with a pheromonal hatred whenever they neared each other.

'Perhaps we should, as a community, just put an embargo on bad weaves,' Lady G said.

'What are you doing here? Trying to fit in?' Alaina tossed her hair back from her neck, revealing a tattoo that read 'Numba 1 Dick Sucka'. Her doorknocker ear rings and gold bracelets combined for a symphony of jangles whenever she moved. Most days, Alaina was all right. East side fools tripped so easily when they thought their man was being stolen out from under them. She had two brothers and one on the way, but she was the oldest. A man, especially one with long money, represented the hope of stability and a way out. Even Baylon. That was Alaina's way. Being too desperate and short-sighted to get out was a contagion which led her to choose bad men to cling to. Lady G had seen her too often around the way with too many bruises for the occasional scuffle. But that, too, was Alaina's game and she played it like the soldier she was.

'Pissing off mommy and daddy. You should know about that,' Lady G said.

'You want to get down? We can get down.'

'I'm telling you, she's Baylon's girl,' a girl stagewhispered to Alaina.

'I. Am. Not.' Lady G bristled, rolling her eyes at the sudden respect by proxy she was given. She could fight her own battles and didn't need the shadow of Baylon as a cloak of protection. She never trusted the chivalry of men.

A second car pulled up and that's when things truly went to hell. Percy jumped out of the notquite-stopped car. Standing just over six feet, a buck eighty and change, he could have been a running back on Northwest's sad- ass JV team. A soft-spoken boy who carried himself like he was afraid he might accidentally break those around him, he, Rhianna, and Alaina stayed over at the Phoenix. Alaina's mother had slammed the car into park and squeezed her six month pregnant self out of the driver's seat and waddled quickly into the fray.

'You girls don't need to do this.' A sweet, a pure fool, Percy called himself intervening, trying to calm the situation. He had a way about him. Pain didn't become a part of him, wasn't something he marinated in or dined upon like so many others. Like air, he took it in and let it out. Not that he could express such lofty notions himself. Even now, he realized the escalation was a simple misunderstanding, but he lacked the words to communicate it to any of the girls. His hope was that a mother could quell the situation. Poor deluded fool. As if adding maternal estrogen into the mix had any hope of doing anything except fan the flames.

'You need to mind your own,' Lady G said.

'Stay the fuck away from him,' Alaina reared, rarely letting the opportunity to spray her particular brand of venom pass.

'No one gets to tell me who I can and can't be friends with.' Lady G was pissed at Alaina getting loud. She didn't even like Baylon, but the effrontery of being checked by this heifer, well, pride was pride.

'You spread your legs for any trick who'll buy you a Happy Meal.'

'Don't hate cause you don't know how to keep a man,' Rhianna chimed in. Most people dropped their guard around her. She had an angel's face, soft and round, her toffee-colored complexion seemed darker against her white teeth and gray eyes. With her small frame, no one expected her to be able to scrap like she did. But the girls knew. Lady G knew. And Alaina for damn sure knew.

'You know what? You a nigga and I don't mean that in no nice way!' Despite the three inches Alaina had on her, Lady G neither cut her eyes away nor stepped back. Neither girl was about to be punked, especially not in front of their people. Not to mention that cell phone cameras were already being waved about with nosey folks ready to parade their shit all over YouTube. 'He's from our neighborhood. People like you shot and killed my cousin (rest in peace).'

'Fuck you and your neighborhood.' Lady G put her hands on her hips in a now what? pose.

Sometimes when confronted with situations one couldn't control, instinct dictated either of two responses: fight or flight. The crowd surged forward as Lady G and Rhianna got rushed. Alaina dropped her head and charged Lady G in a tackle. Lady G let her body go slack to take the hit but control the fall to the ground. Her legs sailed over the girl's shoulder. Alaina squatted over her belly, throwing punches into her. Lady G could handle Alaina. A fight wasn't no thing — the cost of doing business out here. Some you won, some you lost; it was about how you carried it afterward and Lady G could carry this and its attendant scars. No matter which way it turned out.

The flutter of panic which tripped her street antennae was the chaos. The fight had degenerated into a mob. Folks were straight up wilding, fighting just to be fighting. She took a kick to the ribs from a faceless body — barely felt beneath her layers of clothes — her focus on Alaina. The fight had become a stalemate. Without room to maneuver, the two wrestled about essentially entangling each other's arms and interlocking legs so that neither could get in a clean blow. An unspoken message between them as the fight was no longer about them. As they strained against one another, each took a second to do a glancing assessment at the scene about them. The vibe was ugly. They flew under the radar of the crowd, largely unnoticed.

• • •

Neither claimed a set — the investigating detectives would later breathe a quiet sigh of relief over that. The last thing they, the neighborhood, or the school needed was escalating gang retaliation. A crowd of looky-loos gathered around, cell phones out to capture as much as they could.

Folks were their own worst enemy, getting caught up in their own foolishness. 'You can't lose if you don't play,' King's mother used to say. King scampered toward the melee. Fights happened. The way King saw them, they were healthy. So much stuff kept going down, poor folks struggling to get by, frustrated, pissed off, they occasionally needed to vent some of that hostility off or else they'd just selfdestruct. The girls wrestled about,

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