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Can’t we be left alone in our own neighborhoods? We just want this to all go away.”
    The white nurse who was taking my temperature stopped cold while that lady was talking. Her eyes were glued to the TV screen and she was nodding her head, when Grandma said in a sharp tone, “That woman’s wrong. You can’t ignore a cancer. But she don’t know nothing about healing like you do.”
    â€œWhy, th-ank you,” the nurse answered through half a stutter.
    All together, I stayed at St. Luke’s for nine days. My last two days there, I was feeling almost back to normal and itching to get out, with a rep from Dad’s insurance company pushing for me to leave, too. When the doctors finally said I could go home, they made me ride downstairs in a wheelchair, because that was their insurance rule. But as soon as those sliding-glass doors opened, and I took my first hit of outside air without that sterilized hospital smell to it, I jumped up to my feet fast.
    There were a few reporters waiting outside the hospital, and one asked how I felt about the kids who beat me. That’s when Mom wrapped both her arms around me, and I didn’t fight her on it.
    â€œI don’t feel anything for them, like they didn’t feel anything for me,” I answered.
    â€œDo you hate them, Noah?” another one asked.
    â€œI don’t have love for nobody like that,” I said, with my hand balling up into a fist at my side.
    â€œHow about the one with the bat, Charles Scaturro? Is there something you’d like to say to him?”
    â€œHow do you feel about white people, Noah? Can you trust them?”
    The questions started flying.
    â€œI just, just—” I said, shaking my head, without any more words coming.
    There were only curses in my brain, and I knew enough not to say them.
    Then my father told those reporters it was time for us to go home, and they backed off.
    The first cab driver in line outside the hospital was white.
    â€œWe’re going to East Franklin—Twelfth and Dupont,” Dad told him.
    But the driver said, smug, “I don’t go over by there. That’s off my assigned route.”
    It took a second for what he’d said to sink in.
    Then Mom roared, “Take down his damn license number!”
    â€œYou see this?” my father called to the reporters. “What happened to my son—it doesn’t change shit !”
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    Asa and Bonds had been keeping a low profile and hadn’t come to see me in the hospital even once. I didn’t hold it against them, though. I’d have been covering my ass, too, if I could, hoping the cops wouldn’t find any charges against me. But the second day I was home, Bonds called me on my cell to say they were both coming over and Mom overheard me talking.
    â€œTell your criminal-minded friends they’re not welcome inside this apartment,” Mom said, cold. “And from now on, as long as you’re livin’ under this roof, Noah, I want to know where you are, twenty-four/seven.”
    So I watched out the window and went downstairs to meet them on the stoop as they turned the corner. Every building on the block was an exact Xerox copy of mine—a four-story, eight-family apartment house filled with black families.
    Only the colors on the outside of them were different.
    Even as a little kid digging in a flower box with a toy steam shovel, I remember wanting to plow those houses under and rebuild each one again to be special.
    Halfway down the block there were a bunch of kids in bathing suits making noise, running through the spray of a fire hydrant with a sprinkler cap on it. Asa and Bonds must have ducked through, too, because I could see their wet footprints behind them, fading into the hot pavement.
    â€œDaaaamn,” said Asa, seeing the patch of stitches in my head. “That’s no joke when they operate on somebody’s skull.”
    â€œHow you been holding up,