James and I started going to Cain’s Ballroom together right after we met. A real estate tycoon—some founding-father-of-Tulsa type who dabbled in politics and the KKK—built it as a garage for his car collection in the twenties. After that, another someone bought the place and turned it into a dance hall. Today, it’s where you go for concerts. They usually don’t get anybody huge—big names go to the BOK Center downtown and charge more than mere mortals can afford. But Cain’s is cheap, fun, and gets great bands on their way up.

The catch is, there’s no seating. It’s just this big dance floor with a few three-step bleachers against the side walls. If you want to get close to the stage, you line up a few hours before the show, rush to the front of the dance floor when they open the doors, and park yourself in the best spot you can get. And if anyone tries to push past you, it’s perfectly acceptable to throw an elbow.

James and I don’t bother with that. We show up just before the opening band’s set and watch from the back. The view’s still great, no one vapes in your face, and you can pee whenever you want without losing your spot. The barbecue place next door does decent sweet potato fries, too. And when it comes to the actual bands, James and I figured out through trial and error that the ones with the lamest-sounding names usually put on the best shows.

“They suck,” James said. He’d picked me up late—just like always—and parking had been bad. So the band opening for Roy Boy and His Kentucky Kickers was maybe halfway done by the time we got our fries and squeezed in next to a be-denimed older couple on the bleachers.

I didn’t think the band was that bad, but I was way more focused on all the things I wanted to tell James than I was on the music. After our fries, though, and after the band finished its set so I didn’t have to scream over them. But James had things to tell me, too, and he didn’t want to wait.

“Poke fine the rectory” and “shop” were all I could make out when he shouted in my ear.

“What?” I shouted back.

He gave me his phone. “Poke fine the rectory” was actually the “Polk-Hoffhine Directory,” a printed list of businesses and people in Tulsa from 1921 that someone had scanned and put online. James reached over and scrolled down to show me an advertisement for the Victory Victrola Shop.

He scrolled some more and pointed to one of the actual listings.

“You’re a god!” I shouted. The woman next to us shot me an ugly look. James pointed to the entry beneath it.

At first I didn’t get it. But then James pointed to the W in William and the T in Tillman.

W. T. The initials on the Victory Victrola Shop receipt. It looked like William the student was Stanley Tillman’s son.

The song ended and the singer started talking about their T-shirts and CDs.

“Impressive,” I told James. “What else ya got?”

“You mean I haven’t given you enough already, sweetness?” James said, which I thought was weird until I noticed he was discreetly pointing at the denim couple. They were side-eyeing us, disapproval practically oozing out of their pores.

I scooted closer, put my lips to his ear, and whispered, “The anthropologist found a tooth in the dirt that wasn’t from the skeleton.” He giggled like I’d used my tongue for more than talking.

After the band finished their last song, James patted his lap and I climbed onto it. He winced, muttering something about his legs being sore from working out that morning, and the denim couple started quietly shitting kittens. Then the roadies came out to set up Roy Boy and His Kentucky Kickers’ gear, and I told James everything Geneva had said about the skeleton.

“Uh, racist much?” he grumbled when I got to the part about her using the skull to decide the skeleton’s race. Denim man cleared his throat and said something to his wife. All we heard was “trashy” and “typical.”

I wrapped my arms around James’s neck, saying, “Maybe. But Geneva kept saying how even though race might be an artificially created construct, patterns of evolutionary differences in skeletal morphologies from isolated geographic areas are measurable and real.”

James’s eyebrow went up. “What?”

“I think she was trying to say it’s complicated. And that she’s not a racist.”

He brushed my hair away from my ear and whispered, “Speaking of racists, shall we?”

I pointed to the OVER 21 wristband he’d gotten with his lousy fake ID at the door. “Only if you buy me a beer.”

James smiled, stood up, took my hand, and planted a big, wet kiss on it. Then he turned to the denims, flashed them my most favorite of his wicked grins, and said, “Don’t worry, folks. It’s not serious. I’m just her baby daddy.”

And then we walked away, leaving them to sputter and grumble over the sorry state of Negro youth in America today.

I didn’t get home from the concert until after one, so I skipped my run the next morning and slept late. There was a sticky note on the fridge when I got up saying Dad was at the office and Mom had gone to the gym. I showered, threw on a T-shirt and basketball shorts, and pulled up directions to the title company. Dad had kept his word and called them, and since I hadn’t been able to get there during the week, Saturday before noon was my big chance.

It was a nice morning. Not too hot, not too sunny. I stopped for a chai at the coffee shop James thought was pretentious—the one next to the barbecue place where people line up for ribs an hour before it opens. Gray clouds hung low around the Art Deco spire of Boston Avenue Methodist. Semis on the Broken Arrow Expressway made the overpass vibrate under my tires.

Half a block past that, I clipped the edge of a pothole hard enough to send hot chai splattering down the inside of my thigh. I cursed and set the cup down quick. Then I saw the cat—frozen in the middle of the road, staring at my car with its tail tucked and its hind legs sunk low.

I hit the brakes.

Slammed forward and back as the seat belt locked.

There was no thump, no yowl. Out the corner of my eye, I saw it bolt, unhurt, toward the sidewalk. Relief and adrenaline jacked through me all at once. Then I was rocketing forward again, so hard that white-hot pain sang through my ribs as they hit the seat belt again. My chin jammed down into my chest before the back of my head whipped, slingshot fast, into the headrest behind me.

The world went black. And when the light came back, everything was slow. Blurry. Quiet. Then a man’s voice was trampling my ears. It was muffled, but loud and angry enough to make my eyelids flutter open against light that seemed too bright to be real.

“… the hell are you doing, stopping in the middle of the street?”

I rolled my head toward my window. The man was waving his arms, cell phone in one hand, running his words together so fast I couldn’t make sense of them. A knob of pain pulsed at the bottom of my skull. The man opened the door and snapped his fingers in front of my face, his cheeks pale with anger.

“Hey! Don’t pretend you can’t hear me. I’m sick of you people acting like…”

Wisps of pain wrapped around each syllable in my head. He kept shouting, on and on and on. The chrome grill of his massive pickup was in my rearview mirror. So was a second figure coming toward us—grizzled, black, and dressed in a dirty shirt and fatigues three sizes too big.

I knew him.

Arvin.

“Hey, you’re my girlie friend from Jackson!” he said, peeking around the truck’s driver. The black and gray stubble on his chin reminded me of my grandfather’s funeral, of the smell of candles and gardenias.

“Back off, buddy,” the driver barked. “Go back to the gutter you crawled out of!” Arvin ignored him and tried to get closer to me. “Gotta get you to Dr. Woods, young lady,” he mumbled in his raspy voice. “She’ll make you all better.”

“Arvin…” My voice floated in the air like a ghost.

“I said back off!” the driver shouted. And when Arvin didn’t, the man put both hands against his chest and shoved.

“Goddamned nigger.”

That time his words were calm. Deliberate. Cruel.

Arvin’s arms flew up. He pedaled backwards, tripping and stumbling into the second traffic lane behind him on the one-way street. Then there was a horrible crunching thud, and Arvin’s body flew up and over the hood of an old gray Suburban. The back of his head hit the street. The Suburban lurched to a stop. The woman inside was screaming.

Arvin didn’t move. Sirens wailed louder and louder, ping-ponging around in my thousand-pound head as flashing red and blue lights filled my mirrors. The siren stopped. The wisps turned into angry fingers of pain squeezing the sides of my head. Then a policeman was coming toward us. The truck’s driver watched Arvin’s body like he expected it to stand up and come at him.

He didn’t need to worry.

Arvin wasn’t ever going to stand up again.