How alike--both born in Bergen County among mansions and stone-lined yards, but my childhood had been framed with lace, yours a light bulb broken before tasting electricity.
My mother called me your “moral compass.” My sister said I kept you from disappearing-- as if you were born from leftover ashes smearing the stone hearth black
as the nights we’d lie awake and you’d asked me what color to repaint your bedroom and how to talk to that boy from your class. You insisted I spend every night at your house.
Sometimes, we’d race our fourwheelers wild, I always lost, far behind you--and further still when you found that skin-and-bone crowd with *****-stained clothes, their teeth and eyes
yellow as their cigarette-tarred fingertips and when they stumbled near, I smelled breath foul as the stench of a mouse dead in my car’s engine--slowly burning out.