It strikes me now that a part of why I cannot retreat comfortably back to any era when I looked like a child is because there were so many years when I wasn’t a child to the people around me. The teachers, who said I spoke too grown or the cops chasing me and my boys down for shoplifting a candy bar, the older homies on the bus or in the halls who would try to accelerate me and my crew into what they—still children themselves—imagined as adulthood. No, I have no use for innocence beyond the dead. The dead are innocent, departed from the treachery of the world.
