Free The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds Page A

was over. I got that, too.
    There was no choir, thank God. Just a skinny girl with braids who got up and blew the roof off the church. She sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and when I say she sang it, I mean she sang it. She dug deep and belted out notes strong enough to reach Nancy, I swear. Tears streamed down her face, and even though I couldn’t see anybody else’s face, really, I could tell a lot of people were crying by the way folks were thumbing the corners of their eyes. I paid close attention to Nancy’s mother, a pretty, dark-skinned woman, sitting up front in all black. She had dreadlocks wound up in a bun, and she rocked back and forth while another woman wrapped her arm around her and fanned her with one of the church fans.
    I looked at the program. Next was the obituary.
    The preacher stepped up to the microphone. I’m not sure if he had on a sharp suit, or just jeans and a T-shirt, because he wore a long burgundy robe like the ones you wear when you graduate from high school. I was looking forward to wearing that same kind of robe soon. He had a baby face, but I could tell he was way older than he looked by the creases in his forehead. He stood at the mic for a moment, and then began to read the obituary off the program.
    It was pretty short, I guess because Nancy’s life was only nineteen years long. She barely had time to do anything. I thought about how if I died, my obituary would only be a few sentences.
    Matthew Miller was the son of Daisy Miller and Jackson Miller. His best friend was Chris Hayes. He couldn’t land a date to save his life. So he died. The end. Oh, and there would probably be a picture of me on the front of the program. One of my senior pictures. Robot face number twelve.
    The pastor read. Nancy was the oldest of two. She graduated from Brooklyn Tech with honors. Her favorite subject was English. She loved poetry and music, especially R&B, but her favorite thing to do was run track. She got a full scholarship to the University of Maryland to run and did really well her freshman year, winning her first race a few days before she died. Or, as the pastor read off the program, “before God called his angel back home.” The preacher at my mom’s funeral said something like that too. I guess that’s better than saying “died.” But it still means the same thing. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. It still sucks.
    I thought about Nancy. She was a runner. A winner. She was good at school and at sports, which almost never happens. And judging from all of the teenagers jammed in this church like kids stuffed in a camp van, all on top of each other, sitting in the aisles, standing along the back and side walls, she also was pretty popular. Nancy must’ve been a cool chick. But even though she could run, she couldn’t run fast enough to beat death.
    I also couldn’t help but think about her mother, in the front row, heaving and rocking, and occasionally lifting her hands as if begging God for some kind of help. I now knew what it was like to lose a mother, but I don’t know how my mother would’ve felt if she lost me. She used to always say whenever we’d hear about some kid dying in the street, “Parents ain’t supposed to burytheir kids. It just ain’t right.” I knew, and not just because she told me a trillion times, that she loved me like crazy, and that she would’ve been shattered just like Nancy’s mom, begging for God to take her instead, crying, screaming for me to have a second shot at life. There wouldn’t have been a joke in the world funny enough to help her laugh through it. There wouldn’t have been a joke in the world funny anymore, period.
    So I felt for Ms. Knight. Ms. Knight didn’t look like she had a whole lot of money, so I could only imagine how much she spent on that heavy casket. But to her, I bet it was worth it. My mom would’ve done the