THE BENCH AT THE bus stop was covered with black spray paint. PB’S, it said, the squared letters making spidery, jointed patterns on all the buildings and walls in the neighborhood, even on the elephant-skinned trunk of the palm tree Shawan leaned against while she waited for the bus. When she had gone out into the yard this morning, she thought, her sisters had been scared. Nygia and Tanya held her shoulders, but she shook herself sharply and frowned. “Quit, y’all, I’m goin outside and tell them sorry-ass punks get out my yard. Mmm-hmm, in my robe and all.” She walked out onto the step quietly, letting the wrought-iron screen door click into the lock.
Five of the Playboys stood on the sidewalk, leaning against the chainlink fence that surrounded the Johnsons’ square of yellow grass. Shawan knew that they were watching the apartment house across the empty lot, waiting for the old man in the downstairs apartment to leave. He had a new TV, delivered in a box that anyone could have seen. Shawan stared at the boys, their arms draped over the fence casually, but the backs of their necks tight and wary. She had seen the short one run his palm, fingers spread, over the slight bulge made by a gun in his jacket. “Shawan, they packin, you know it,” Nygia said through the screen.
“So. What y’all doin in front of my house?” she said loudly from the step. They all turned, heads swiveling like those submarines in the cartoons, she thought, and the short one said, “None a your damn business, bitch.” He was maybe sixteen, three years younger than Shawan.
“I don’t want you doin it in my daddy’s front yard,” she said. “And don’t give me no trouble cause you think I ain’t about nobody.” She thought of V-Roy. These were young ones, who had probably forgotten V-Roy already.
“Nathan Thomas my uncle, and he be over here in two minutes if I call him. You know who I mean,” she said, nodding her head at the only boy she recognized, with shiny-curled hair and a sliver of pink on his lip that looked to her like a tongue always poking out. They stood, hands in pockets, their eyes filled with hate and their elbows stiff as hangers; she kept her arms folded over her robe, afraid to move even backwards. The pink-lipped boy spat into the cool morning dirt and cocked his head toward the avenue. Nathan had been in the 102nd Street Crips years ago, and Shawan had known that they would recognize his name and his arsenal of weapons, even though he did nothing now. The Playboys moved slowly, pushing off the fence with their backs, keeping hands crushed to their thighs. “I’ma get that bitch,” the short one said. Shawan was shaking, but she pressed each thumb hard against a rib and became calm. Nygia scratched the screen mesh and said, “Uncle Nathan still got his rep.”
Now she was late. The deejay said it was 5:42, “Wake up with Willie G. Time,” and Shawan usually caught the 5:30 bus. In the early morning cold, the avenue was nearly deserted. Them boys might be hidin out somewhere, she thought, waitin to jump me. Let em go head on. I’m tired of they mess, running the street like they own it. If they gon try and snatch my box out my hands, they better use the piece. Just kill me, cause I’ll kill you.
Willie started a new song, the congas beginning the beat, and then the rest of the drums and bass pounding the rhythm. Shawan turned the knob on top of the radio all the way to “Bass.” She loved the deep reverberations, the snap of the bass and its power under the surface of guitars and organ and, underscoring all, the cupped-palm handclaps. Church in the funk. She never turned the knob to “Treble” because it made the radio sound tinny, like white music.
Shawan leaned out over the curb. The bus was still several stops away. Drumming her fingers on the side of her thigh with one hand, she held the radio close to her body with the other, and the bass thumped in her chest. The ornate black grill covering Sims’ Liquor became soft and pretty as lace when she looked at it with unfocused eyes.
With the hiss of opening doors, she had to turn the music off. Holding the box in her lap, staring at the black mesh and silver knobs, she felt the screaming of the brakes and engine pound her with noise. She needed the music, the box, each moment to calm her. When she opened her eyes every morning, she heard menacing silence, empty air without rhythm, for only an instant. She would reach out and turn the radio on, watching her own fingers grasp the lever. It never disturbed Nygia, sleeping next to her, and Shawan sometimes lay in bed for two or three songs, looking at the walls and the thin curtains. Some mornings, just after she woke up, things seemed sharp and unusually defined. She could see each thread and the square, regular weave of the curtains with the sun piercing them, and the hole in the plaster just below the window looked as if it was filled with tiny chalk beads.
With the bass sliding and changing in her ears, the steady clapping which made her imagine a line of people swaying, heads thrown back, she could think clearly and her thoughts slid along lightly on the sounds. Often at work she would tell her supervisor she was going to the restroom, and then she would stand in the tiled break room and listen to one complete song echoing from the walls.
They were putting the calls through rapidly, scattering voices all over the building. “We in the groove now,” Mary T. said to Shawan. The calls finally slowed at lunchtime, and the switchboard operators sat back; Shawan felt the hollowness of her head with the earphones pressed in tightly.
Leonard was singing Diana Ross’s song “Muscles” when no calls came through on his headset. “I want muscles, all over his body, from his head down to his toes,” he sang in his falsetto, moving his shoulders delicately.
“You better stop dreamin, baby,” Mary T. said. Leonard was six-four and weighed two-hundred-forty pounds. He shape like a tear, Shawan thought, the way somebody draw a tear, not like it really look if it’s on a face. After it leave your eye and go down your cheek.
His head was small, with a bald spot at the crown, and his hips were square. He had to turn sideways to pass through the narrow spaces between desks. His desk was covered with pictures of Diana Ross, cut and pasted over carefully with pictures of him so that they stood close together, the way Mary T. said the National Enquirer had famous people secretly married when they hadn’t even met. Taped to the backs of the operators’ chairs were Xerox copies he had made, announcing “Diana Ross and Leonard ‘Mr. Entertainment’ Jackson appearing now at the Roxy.” Shawan had brought him Diana’s picture, from Ebony. He wanted to be just like her, he said, but he’d have to settle for singing like her.
“Girl, what you think of the new song by Aretha?” Leonard asked Shawan. He turned to Mary T. and Cherie and said, “Note, I’m askin our resident music expert, y’all.”
“Mmm hmm,” Cherie said, hummed, in her high voice; it was the way she emphasized everything Leonard said. When the supervisor, Mrs. Badgett, left for a doctor’s appointment or to run an errand, Cherie and Leonard would leave their seats, turn on Shawan’s radio and do the new dances, looking over their shoulders at the office door. Shawan could measure the two years she had worked in the building by the first dances Cherie had done—the Smurf and the White Girl, long ago. Shawan never danced. She stayed in her seat and moved, not wanting anyone to see her from all angles, vulnerable.
Mary T. said, “Yeah, Shawan, what you think of Aretha’s bad self? Is it the new jam?” Shawan dipped her shoulders and said, “It got potential.” She snapped her fingers, and a call came through to her ears. When she had finished with the voice, she drummed softly on the table.
“She be doin all kind of stuff with her voice,” Leonard said. “I personally have a different style. Mr. Entertainment, y’all!” He rocked his narrow shoulders. “But I still rather have a little butt like Diana’s,” he smiled. They all laughed, and Leonard’s hand went up to the tiny patch of grayish hairs over his ear.
This was when she missed V-Roy the most, on a Friday afternoon, coming home from work. He would have been there at her house, waiting in his blue car with gray primer like camouflage. They’d be gone, riding for hours. V-Roy cruised, cool and slow, and Shawan deejayed, switching radio stations to keep only their favorite songs playing. They didn’t stay in the neighborhood. V-Roy drove out to the beach, and along the coast past the airport. Sometimes on late summer evenings when the sun was just dropping they drove to Hollywood and watched the people. Or they went all the way down Sunset, starting from downtown, watching the neighborhoods change colors—Chinatown to Mexican to any-color Hollywood, to huge gates and houses and hedges, rich white neighborhoods near the hills and then blue, the ocean.
“Let me get a gangster lean,” V-Roy would say, “so we can cruise right.” He kept his lower body directly behind the steering wheel, shifted his shoulders toward the middle of the seat, curving his waist as gracefully as one of the samurai swords he wanted. “Say, baby,” he teased, close to Shawan, looking out through the center of the windshield. “Do I got it now?”
She nodded, laughing at his exaggerated cool, his half-shut eyes. V-Roy had been her best friend since high school. He lived one street over, and when they walked together and people teased them, Shawan always said, “Nuh-uh, don’t be thinkin that. He’s my partner. We don’t mess with each other.” He wasn’t in the Playboys, but his older brother Antoine had been, and V-Roy hung out with Rollo, who had been in for three years.
He was going to teach Shawan to drive someday. She was in no hurry. She liked him to drive so she could take care of the music, lean her head on the smooth vinyl seat, and watch people walk slantwise. Mrs. Badgett at work, with fine red veins in her nose like broken windshield glass, couldn’t believe Shawan didn’t drive. “Everyone drives,” she said. “It’s just impossible to get around in L.A. if you don’t.”
“Don’t have a car,” Shawan said. Her bus had been late, and Mrs. Badgett was disapproving. “I’ve seen a car key around your neck,” she said to Shawan. Shawan pulled out the key V-Roy had made for her one day. “It belong to a friend,” she said, her voice hard. After Mrs. Badgett left, Mary T. said, “White people think everybody born with a car under they ass.”
“I heard that,” Shawan said. “I’ma get me one someday, though. Watch me.”
V-Roy had taken her downtown to buy the radio. It was her present to herself for her nineteenth birthday. They went to one of the Mexican-run stores where the radios crowded the windows and blared out onto the sidewalk.
“Girls don’t never be sportin boxes like that,” V-Roy had said, pointing to a black suitcase-sized radio. “Rollo got one a them.”
“I know what he got. I could carry it if I wanted to,” Shawan said sharply, walking into the store.
“Girls don’t be jammin that much, period,” V-Roy continued, smiling, waiting for her reaction. “That’s for dudes.”
“You gon quit with the ‘girls’ stuff?” Shawan said. “I ain’t every girl, and I do what I please.” She stared at the radios lining the wall.
“You know I’m just botherin you,” he said, leaning on the counter. The way his legs crossed over each other as he stood made long, smooth folds in the silky material of his sweatsuit, Shawan remembered. His small teeth showed when he stuck his tongue in the corner of his mouth, the way he did when he smiled. She bought the silver radio because it was different from all the black ones, and it had a clear, strong sound. It was the size of a large shoebox.
V-Roy died three months later. He was sitting on a picnic table at Ninetieth Street Elementary School, with Rollo, just after the sun had set. Lemoyne Street Crips shot Rollo twice in the leg, and V-Roy in the head, once.
Shawan watched Nygia’s stomach in their bedroom when Nygia undressed, imagining it hard and round and soon shiny as the domelike bald spot on Leonard’s head. Nygia was three months pregnant and had quit her after-school job at McDonald’s. “I’ma need some money to go to the store tomorrow,” she said to Shawan. “Daddy ain’t got paid yet.”
Shawan went slowly to what had been her car money, hidden in a hairdress can. She had saved $420, with the smell of gasoline seeming to come from the bills, but now since Nygia wasn’t working and needed so many things, the tight roll of money was spindly, thin as a cigarette.
She lay on the bed, listening as Nygia left with her boyfriend and Daddy rustled into his uniform. He left for work at 9:00 p.m., to guard a building only four blocks from hers downtown. Tanya would sleep, and the house would be silent but for the music. The shadows of the iron bars across the windows lay over her chest. Look like I’m on a barbecue grill, she thought. The moon must be bright.
It was full, she saw when she stood on the step, and it moved fast across the sky. The street was bright and silvery, the cars glinting. She could see stars through the telephone wires. The radio played a slow saxophone and a caressing voice, and she changed the station until she heard the staccato beat of a Whodini rap, fast as a scary person’s heart.
She walked down the street, toward the Ninetieth Street school, past the benches where V-Roy was shot. His blood, what she had been sure was the dark stain of his blood, was indistinguishable from the spilled wine and black circles of ground ash left by other people since. She watched two boys play basketball. The moonlight glared white on the cement wall behind them, where Shawan had been playing with Tanya’s tennis racket several weeks ago. A teenage boy on a ten-speed had ridden up and tried to take the racket. He grabbed it from behind, jerking her arm up like a chicken wing, but she turned and swung her other fist into his chest. She ran forward to kick at the bicycle tire, and he fell. She kicked him, let him flail the racket at her like she was the thief, and trapped the netting against her thigh with the heel of her hand.
She remembered how she had told Leonard and Mary T. at work, and how they had laughed. “Ain’t nobody takin nothin away from Shawan,” Mary T. said, and Leonard pinched her biceps. “She like it when somebody try and dog her,” he said. “Don’t you?”
She turned up the music and walked away from the school. A lowrider cruised by very slowly, a car she didn’t recognize, the same song on her radio pouring out through the car’s open windows. The loud, uneven throbbing of the engine sounded like drums. She didn’t look at the car, but kept her eyes straight ahead. Could be the dudes shot V-Roy, she thought. She saw the sharp flashes of gray-blue light from TV screens as she turned her head toward the houses, and the car’s taillights drew away from her, the strong threads of song from the car and the box separating imperceptibly.
Walking in step to the beat, she dipped at the knees; this was V-Roy’s street. She moved her eyes over the yards and looked into the alley next to his house. Three large trash bins, pale with white graffiti, stood against the fence, and Shawan walked past them cautiously, tensing. Come on, she thought. Where you at? She fingered her necklace, the key, the way she always did when she walked; boys would run up behind people and snatch hard so that the clasps broke.
The blue Dart was parked far back against the fence; she couldn’t see who was in the yard, but she heard Antoine’s voice and laughter. “Let’s book, cuz. It’s time to go,” he said, and Shawan saw him then, his blue bandanna tied around his head and knotted in the front. He stared at her. “What you need, now?” he called.
“Nothin from you,” Shawan said. She didn’t move.
Antoine got into V-Roy’s car, and two boys followed. He turned the headlights on; they lit up the radio, made it shine. “Get outta the way,” he yelled over the noise of the car. She walked past the driveway.
She was almost back to the house, her eyes blurred with staring at the sidewalk and seeing the gray primer of V-Roy’s car, the one crazy hair that poked out from his eyebrow when she looked at the side of his face, and someone said, “Hey, girl, what you doin walkin around? You trying to get jumped?”
It was Marcus, whose aunt, Mrs. Batiste, lived next door. He had come to L.A. the month before, from Virginia, when the Navy transferred him to Long Beach. He opened the door of his car, a big Buick, and walked into the yard. “Why you walking? Ain’t you got sense?”
“I got legs. I can walk,” Shawan said, looking at his knees.
“Why you want to stay here and you could be with me, at a club?”
Shawan said, “Not if you act like last time.” She lifted her chin and bit a tiny piece of her inside lip. He had taken her to his apartment and put his hands all over her. Like he own me already, and I don’t have no say, she thought. He want all the say, not like V-Roy. Marcus looked at her with admiration, but it was mixed with admiration of himself, for picking her. He had run his hands over her buttocks, said he liked how she walked like a boy.
“You want to go drivin, right now?” he said. Shawan looked down the street. The sidewalks, the cars, were brighter than in the day.
The seats were plush, light blue like the car. They drove down the avenue; the deep yellow light from a bar was a triangle of color in a block of dark doorways. Shawan reached down to turn on the radio, but Marcus pushed her hand away and put in a cassette of love songs. “Why you don’t sit over here?” he said, touching the seat beside him. His eyes were green, his skin the same gold brown as hers, Nygia and Tanya said he was fine. Shawan thought, he look good but he know it. He think too much when he smile.
“Cause I don’t feel like it,” she said. Facing out the window, she leaned her head back and saw herself in the glass when they passed streetlights.
“Where you want to go? Anywhere you say.”
“Not to your apartment,” she said. Her face faded and reappeared. “Just drive.” They headed toward the ocean. She had gone to the beach once after V-Roy died. She took two buses, to Santa Monica, but the bus wasn’t right. You couldn’t cruise and listen to the music unless you had headphones like the boy several seats away from her. Every so often he sang out in a piercing voice, teasing her because they were songs she knew were playing on her station, and she was holding her silent radio.
Flames shot up into the sky outside the window, and Shawan sat up. “Natural gas,” Marcus said. The fire released itself from a needle-thin white tower, reaching higher suddenly and then shrinking back until the flames were sucked into the opening, again and again.
He drove past the harbor, talking about the ship he worked on. Shawan watched his leg when he pressed the brake; the muscle was short and thick. He saw her. “Why you stay away from me so much? I ain’t hurtin you,” he said. “I want you to be my lady.” She saw his tongue when he said “lady,” just touching the underside of his teeth.
“I ain’t nobody’s ‘mine’,” Shawan said, looking past his face to the window. “Don’t nobody own me.”
She reached down and pulled out the cassette, listening to the deejay’s familiar voice fill the car. Her voice could be smooth and beautiful as his when she wanted. V-Roy had recorded a cassette with her favorite songs, and she talked between each, using her low, sweet work voice, the one she had learned on the phones. V-Roy played her tape in his car whenever they went driving. He wrote “The Master Jam” on the case. Every time Shawan answered a call at work she practiced, making her voice sure and strong, not breathy. Mary T. and Cherie laughed at how quickly she could change, how assured she made herself sound. “My deejay voice,” Shawan said. Leonard smiled and sang, “Last night a deejay saved my life from a broken heart.”
Marcus stopped the car on the side of the highway. He turned to her and said, “Why you scared of me?”
Shawan felt anger rise in her chest. “I been told you I ain’t scared,” she said folding her arms. He turned the radio down, and his hand on the knob made her more irritated. “Why you do that?” she said.
“Cause I’m trying to get serious with you. When you gon let me do what I want? We could get married, I ain’t playin with you.”
“I don’t want to get married. Why don’t you teach me to drive?” Shawan said. He leaned forward and touched her breast, brushing his finger against the arm she kept over herself.
“Let me teach you something else,” he said, pushing his chin forward. His hand stayed on her shirt, and Shawan felt the anger rise into her throat. She thought, Why it always what you want to do? She closed her hand around his wrist. She held it and squeezed as hard as she could, but he twisted his arm and fastened his hands around hers; his mouth was tight. Shawan looked at his hands. They were red, ruddier than hers. Hers were gold in the light from the streetlamp.
“Girl, you should see what old Spiros up to now,” Mary T. said to Cherie, crumpling her paper bag from lunch. “He messin everybody up, evil man.” Mary T. and Mrs. Badgett took lunch together now, because Mrs. Badgett had brought her tiny television to the break room so she could watch “All My Children.”
“He kidnapped that girl, Shawan,” Mary T. said. She slid into her seat next to Shawan. Leonard said, “You went and got hooked on them shows,” laughing at her excitement. “Mmm hmm,” Cherie said. “She know everybody’s business.”
“I know as much about Spiros and Brooke and them as Shawan know about deejays,” Mary T. said, smiling, brushing against Shawan.
She didn’t smile. “Don’t nobody care about them white people,” she said, looking away. “Don’t even put them with the music.”
Leonard clicked his tongue. “Ain’t no need to go off on her like that, Miss Shawan,” he said impatiently. “You been nasty all week.”
“So. She the one want to live in ice-cream land, I ain’t gotta go with her,” Shawan said. She couldn’t stop the words, or smooth her voice. It was thick and rough. Mary T. looked at her with lips drawn in at one corner.
“And who are you?” Mary T. said. “You somebody more than me?”
Shawan said nothing. She had always waited for Mary T. and Cherie to admire her voice, to ask her about music, when she came to work; now she felt herself wanting to shout at them for no reason. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at the gray metal desk. “But them people life ain’t about nothin.”
“They got some brothers and sisters on now,” Mary T. said. Leonard came to stand behind Shawan’s chair, and he touched the back of her neck. “Not no real ones,” he said gently. “You want me to sing?”
“No. Diana’s songs is all old,” Shawan said coldly. She went into the break room, but while the drums and hands clapping bounced back at her, she cried instead of swaying.
She liked to see their suits, the elegant tailoring, how the coats made a sharp line from shoulder to hand as if nothing could soften it. Marcus had a suit like that, she thought, walking toward the bus stop. Two men who looked like bankers in her building approached, flicking their eyes over the radio quickly and then glancing away in disgust. “Everywhere you go,” one of them said, and Shawan smiled, curling her arm tighter around the metal.
The only open seat was in the middle of the bus, just ahead of the rear door. Her foot was partly in the aisle, flat on the rubber floor, to steady her body when the bus lurched and swayed. An old man sat by the window, leaning his head against the yellowed glass. She stared at his clenched hands; they were black between the wrist and knuckles, ashy gray between the fingers and on the joints.
The bus stopped often in the downtown traffic, and soon the crowds of people waiting impatiently at the crosswalks and the crush of bodies standing in the aisles of the bus surrounded her. Nearly empty buses with signs flashing for Santa Monica and Westwood passed like mirrors. She made her eyes blurry and dreamed until she felt the drag of stops much less frequently and knew they had left downtown and entered the long avenues of South-Central L.A. Her calf muscles relaxed, and she put one hand on her knee.
A young man stood up in the back of the bus and pulled a gun out of his jacket. Shawan had moved her head to the clear space by the door, and she saw him walk to the crowd’s end and turn his back. “Everybody shut up,” he said, not loudly. He faced the people in the rear of the bus, holding a shopping bag with brown-string handles, and the people near him began to drop their wallets and watches and rings into the bag. He held it with one hand, his wrist curving up and the bag falling open in front of the people he pushed it near. With the other hand he held the gun close to his waist, so that only the people he watched could see it.
He stood at the other side of the rear door for a moment, waiting as the long crush of people moved forward to leave by the front door. Shawan turned her head forward. Everybody always get off here, she thought. He gon get off, too. He moved just past the rear door and turned quickly, keeping his back to the driver and the passengers in the front. He looked down at Shawan and brought the bag close, pushing against, her when the bus began to move. She took off her watch, and he still stared, the gun pointing downward. The watch cracked against something hard at the bottom of the bag. She saw the man look out the window at the streets, at the old man next to her. He was asleep, his mouth open. He wore no watch. The man with the gun looked at Shawan’s radio, between her clenched legs. She slipped her hands up the sides and under the handle, curling her fingers around the smoothness. I ain’t givin it up. The bag quivered, and he said, “The box, man,” thrusting his head forward slightly, the way Marcus did when he talked. She sat still, staring at a point just past him and to the left, feeling the line of his body waver as the bus slowed. His knee pushed sharply into hers, and she made herself look up at his neck, round and dry, gray as a palm trunk, and then at his eyes. She didn’t blink, only let her eyes shift out of focus so his eyebrows became one thick mustache over the trembling single eye she saw.
He yelled, “Open the door, man,” as the bus stopped, and then he leaped out onto the street. No one moved. As the doors clamped together, in the moment before the gears shifted and roared, Shawan heard the gun fire. The bullet pierced the window behind the door, over the heads of the women in the long seat, and went out the other window. People curled their backs instinctively, putting their heads down. Shawan crossed her arms over the radio and leaned her head back against the metal frame of the seat. He had been shooting at her, she knew. She felt the cold iron on the nape of her neck, watched the buildings slide by, faster and faster.
When she stepped down at her stop, she turned on the music. Her heart felt out of rhythm, and her hands slipped with sweat against the metal handle. You chicken now? she thought. Too late to be chicken, too late to be gettin scary. She looked toward her house and turned to walk down the next street. She listened for the Playboys, for any voices, when she neared V-Roy’s house. It was quiet, and the car had been backed into the yard. It looked far away, dark and indistinct in the gray light of evening. Shawan undid her necklace and pulled off the key. She opened the car door, touching the primer’s roughness, and looked toward the house. When she turned the key in the ignition, the radio came on loudly.
I’ma just sit here and listen, she thought, but then the car smelled like weed and beer, not like V-Roy, and she saw the back door of the house open. Antoine looked outside. Shawan moved the gear shift the way she’d watched V-Roy move it; the car seemed to spin forward out of the driveway.
She stopped at the corner, watching the crowd of buses and cars on the avenue. Everything seemed too slow, just as it had on the bus when the man stared at her, and Shawan looked at the radio on the car seat beside her. She turned quickly onto the avenue, forcing another car to stop, and the radio fell forward. She remembered driving one night with V-Roy, watching two boys run from the sidewalk to smash the windows of the car ahead of them; they took the woman’s purse and ran. There were no boys in the doorways now, but she pushed down on the gas pedal, and the car sped toward the light. Think I’m ignorant, huh? Me and V-Roy never stupid like that. Wait till the light red, then gon stop and show me your piece, say give up the ride or give up your life. Antoine’s boys. No, baby. She saw the yellow, then red, and only pushed harder. The bus driver saw her coming. He stopped in the intersection and honked as she flew over the rut in the street. Shawan looked up, higher than the street, and tried to see where she was, which way she should drive to go to the ocean, but she couldn’t see, couldn’t remember. Another red flash appeared in front of her, and when she sped up again, she hit the front of the car heading across her path. The steering wheel pushed hard at her ribs and collarbone, and then she sat back against the seat. She tried to breathe and couldn’t. She locked the door and turned on her radio, which had fallen to the floor; she turned it up high, changed the car radio to the same station, and filled the car with music while people slapped the windows with the palms of their hands.