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daughter’s boyfriends did she start to panic. Jordan was tall and rail-thin, with pitch-black skin. That wasn’t an issue—Amanda was black, Andre was black, most of the neighborhood was black now—but Lynn worried anyway. “He was like a hoodlum,” Lynn said. “He was into dealing drugs, things I didn’t want her to be around. She didn’t agree. She was like, ‘Aw, Mom, he’s my friend.’ ” Lynn was running out of ideas, and now she felt she was running out of time. She had worked so hard to graduate from high school, even with a baby at home; her daughter didn’t seem to care about going to school at all.
    Melissa was about sixteen when Lynn thought of a Hail Mary maneuver. She called Melissa’s father, Mark. He had recently moved to Dallas, where he and his wife had relocated for his wife’s job. Mark agreed to take his daughter in. The reunion failed almost from the start. Melissa called Lynn every chance she could, complaining: “There are cockroaches as big as cows!” She and her stepmother fought. Lynn secretly liked hearing that they hadn’t hit it off, though she knew she might not be hearing the whole story. Maybe Mark’s wife tried to be more like a mother to her, and Melissa fought back. Maybe Mark didn’t know how to deal with Melissa. Plenty of people didn’t. She stayed two and a half years in Texas until she acted out in a way that couldn’t be ignored. Melissa stole her father’s work van and drove it around without a license. She was so tiny—four feet, eleven inches and ninety-five pounds—that the police pulled her over, thinking there was no way she could be old enough to drive. Melissa was sentenced to community service. Her dad got a fine and, soon after, presented his daughter with a plane ticket home for Christmas. The trip was supposed to be just a visit. Mark hadn’t told Melissa that she wasn’t welcome back, leaving that part for Lynn. On the phone, Melissa told her father that his wife must be keeping his balls in her purse.
    Melissa was relieved to be back until she saw how much had changed while she’d been away. With two thousand dollars left on the mortgage, Elmer and Linda had sold the house in Kensington-Bailey to a single mother, African-American, who installed bars on all the doors and windows the second she moved in. Melissa’s grandparents bought a new place in a suburb of Buffalo called Alden—basically farmland, a world away from Kensington-Bailey. Lynn and Amanda had moved there with them. For Melissa, Alden was almost Dallas all over again. “It’s so boring here!” she’d moan. Her new school didn’t change her mind. Alden was more white than the schools she’d attended in Buffalo.
    She was a senior, with one more year to go, when she announced she was moving out. There was a fight, but Lynn had very little leverage. Melissa was almost eighteen, and Lynn had Amanda to think about as well. Little by little, Lynn started to ease up. Lynn’s sister, Melissa’s aunt Dawn, lived in the same part of South Buffalo where Melissa wanted to move. They were close in age and becoming confidantes. Maybe Melissa could get what she wanted and the family could keep her close. Not that she ever stopped worrying. She was convinced Melissa would never finish school. “You’re not going to get a job without a degree,” Lynn said. What went unsaid was what kind of future Melissa could expect in Buffalo even if she did graduate.
     
    Melissa surprised Lynn. She found a roommate and got a job working at a pizzeria to make her half of the rent. She re-enrolled at South Park High, the school she most likely would have attended if her family had stayed in Kensington-Bailey. After a few months of not speaking, she and Lynn started going out to dinner. Melissa seemed upbeat to Lynn, trying to get her life together. She kept in contact with Jordan, but not all the time. She seemed to be outgrowing him, or so Lynn thought. She kept little notebooks, jotting down how