THE HOMIE KEV WAS KIND, SMILED EASY, AND SPOKE SO soft sometimes I had to lean in to hear him. The homie Kev was cock-diesel and fearless on the football field. The homie Kev took the rap for me without a blink when my grandmother caught me packaging bunk weed in my bedroom.
The fall after we graduated, my homie Kevan Hai Miller was found shot to death on an apartment doorstep. What I remember is feeling my response should be governed by my manhood, that I’d be weak if I wept, whether someone saw my eyes leak or not.
I’d had practice in not grieving. Going into my senior year, our fireplug point guard had beef with my cousin—not my blood, but our mothers were super close—and shot him. My cousin, amen, lived. And yet we might’ve been more worried about losing our PG for the season than the gravity of
