Kekla Magoon: This line has particular resonance at this moment, deep into the COVID-19 pandemic. It is interesting, how different the world becomes when there is someone you can touch. For example, at one point, Tina twisted all of my heart’s ventricles with this line: “I am old enough / to die.” The younger POVs throughout this novel are so heartbreakingly honest and deceptively simple. It then turns to Tariq, ending with the harsh moment of remembering. This section begins with Shae, how sometimes Tina forgets that she’s gone. Her sections are written in verse, and this last one is about those moments before we remember reality. (And the subject of the companion novel, How it Went Down.) Tina was also one of Shae’s good friends.
OnLines: This comes from Tina, the sister of Tariq, the sixteen year old who was killed by a police officer on the same street as Shae two years earlier. The children lost to violence in the life of this community (Shae Tatum from Light it Up, Tariq Johnson from How It Went Down, and presumably others unnamed) are forever gone, and I have no choice but to leave the reader resting in that knowledge at the end of the book. Kekla Magoon: It’s the same thing here, kind of, in terms of encapsulating the larger truth of what has occurred.
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