Free Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

boys drawn to her by her beauty and her funny, casual coolness. We have a tight bond, we three sisters, which meant that both Charine and I spent days at Nerissa’s first apartment, sleeping on old couches our cousin Rhett had given her. I was sitting at the glass table my mother’d given Nerissa as a house warming gift, after they’d reconciled, when Demond walked in the front door with Rob, Nerissa’s longtime boyfriend.
    Demond was around five foot ten, and he had my brother’s coloring: tan, light brown hair, but he was shorter-limbed and more compact in the chest. He was mostly muscle, where my brother had been softer, still losing his preteen baby fat. Demond wore his hair in dreads that swung and brushed his shoulders when he spoke.
    â€œWhat’s up, Pooh?” This was Rob’s nickname for Nerissa while they were dating. Demond put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, lit it, talked around it.
    â€œWhat’s up, Demond?” Nerissa said. Demond smiled at her and put his arm around her. He was yet another of Rob’s friends that she was close to: they confided in her because they liked her dimples, her smile, her warmth and openness. They told her their secrets, and she kept them. She embodied femininity in the way she sat, legs crossed, toes painted and polished, a bundle of curves, and then sullied it with the way she cussed easily and made them laugh.
    I was drinking a beer. There were many beers in the apartment that year: cold bottles in tight brown sleeves on counters, on tables, leaning in loose hands on laps, on sofa arms. Itwas 2003. We’d gone crazy. We’d lost three friends by then, and we were so green we couldn’t reconcile our youth with the fact that we were dying, so we drank and smoked and did other things, because these things allowed us the illusion that our youth might save us, that there was someone somewhere who would have mercy on us. We drank Everclear in shots in cars loud with beat under overcast, dark-smothered skies, night after night. My cousins turned the hot tip of blunts to the insides of their mouths, exhaled, pushing smoke out into each other’s mouths.
This is what it means to live
, we thought.
    â€œThis is my sister Mimi,” Nerissa said. She nodded at me, and I smiled over my bottle.
    â€œHey.”
    I’d let the beer turn flat, warm, but I’d still drink it.
I am happy
, I thought. And then:
This is what it means to be spared
.
    Demond had grown up in DeLisle. Not only was he unusual because he was an only child, but he was also unusual among my generation because he had both parents, and both of his parents had solid working-class jobs. His mother spent years at the pharmaceutical bottling company where he would later work. Being an only child and having a two-parent family meant Demond was the kid in the neighborhood who had all the things the other kids wanted: a swimming pool, an adjustable basketball hoop. Even when we were children, Demond’s house was the house where all the kids wanted to be. While my brother and sisters and I were too young and lived too far away to enjoy his family’s largesse, the older boys in the neighborhood spent hours at Demond’s, swimmingaway afternoons, wrestling in the water until they smelled strongly of chlorine, their eyes and skin burning. Or sweating for hours in the Mississippi heat, hurling the ball toward Demond’s basketball hoop. When Demond graduated from high school, he joined the military. He enlisted in the army for four years, but at some point in his stint he decided that the military was not for him, so he returned home to DeLisle.
    Demond was a hustler in the traditional definition of the word, in the way that many, younger and older in DeLisle, were made to be by necessity. He would do what he had to do to support himself and, later, his family. He learned trades as he went. Whatever the project called for, he did: once he worked as a