“Hey, bro,” Sergio said as Rogelio passed us, assuming his usual position at the head of the pack. “Your mom leave for work early this morning?”

I cringed.

“She goes to work early now,” Rogelio said, not turning around to look, his briefcase bouncing off his skinny leg. “I told you last week.” Behind us Jorge and Marcitos, who were the same age, settled into their morning discussion about the previous day’s episode of Spectreman. Marcitos still had a black-and-white TV and it was Jorge’s duty to update him on anything he might have missed.

His blood is blue, bro. Everyone knows that.

For real, damn, I thought I saw some orange coming through.

Sergio stroked his chin.

“She must like working, huh?” he asked. Sergio elbowed me in the arm. Rogelio didn’t answer.

We neared Saint Procopius, our school’s competing parish. Morning sunlight exploded through the church, casting the reds and blues of the stained-glass windows onto the sidewalk below. As Rogelio passed the front doors, he blessed himself, forming a cross with his thumb and forefinger and tracing miniature crucifixes on his forehead, mouth, and chest. He kissed his thumb to heaven. In imitation, we all did the same.

“Hey,” Sergio said. “How about if your mother was seeing some other guy?”

“She wouldn’t see another guy,” Rogelio said. “She’s got the Lord.” He raised a finger to heaven.

“I know, I know,” Sergio said. “Everyone’s got the Lord, but say you found out she was with some other guy. Maybe you came home and found her on the floor, maybe in bed—” Sergio was looking to the sky, imagining scenarios, sexual positions. He didn’t see Rogelio whirl around, his briefcase flaring out at his side.

“Don’t talk about my mother!” Rogelio said. He pointed a finger in Sergio’s face. “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about.” Rogelio was much shorter and skinnier than Sergio, but he held his finger right off the tip of Sergio’s nose. Sergio didn’t move. Rogelio turned and began walking again.

“Damn, cuz,” Sergio called out after Rogelio. “Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m talking about.” Rogelio simply continued walking.

Sergio laughed and brushed himself off. He blessed himself, held up a cross of forefingers, then marched forward.

We turned down Sangamon Street. Sets of railroad tracks, the dividing line between the darkside and the realside, ran down the center. More kids had begun filling in our side of the sidewalk, all of us waiting until we got to Eighteenth Place, the street our school was on, to cross over. Our school bully, Gustavo Rivera, a large kid with sweat glands that poured like waterfalls, walked on our side as well, torturing smaller kids with “the wedge,” what he called the Saturday-afternoon-wrestling move with which he crushed tiny first-grader heads between his chunky hands.

Across the tracks, only Pepe Ordoñez, Paco Martinez, and Jeremy Witek walked the darkside. We called them the Lost Boys. They had been walking the darkside for as long as anyone could remember, breaking factory windows, smoking, spray-painting unfamiliar gang signs on the crumbling railroad docks. Rumor had it they were orphans, that they lived among the ruins of the darkside like animals, like the Villa Lobos, who for some reason, maybe respect, never seemed to mind the Lost Boys on their territory. The Lost Boys were eighth-graders. They had been held back two years or more and were actually old enough to be in high school.

“I heard Paco and Pepe were in the Audy Home for stealing cars,” Marcitos said from behind us. “That they got butt-raped in there and that’s why they went crazy.”

“Who told you that?” Sergio asked.

“Mona Colón, downstairs,” Marcitos said. Mona was a high-school girl who lived beneath him, one whom we collectively lusted after because at her age she didn’t seem that far out of reach. Paco was said to have gone out with Mona. Some even said that he had had sex with her. And at the time this seemed to have something to do with his ability to walk the darkside. We figured Jeremy and Pepe had had sex with Mona as well, or with the other high-school girls who stood on the corners smoking cigarettes, wearing tight black pants and thick black eyeliner and purple lipstick. The older we got, the more we wanted to be with them, have them hanging off our shoulders the way girlfriends in our neighborhood did. We imagined French-kissing them among the collapsed rafters of the burned-out factories we had always been so afraid of.

The three Lost Boys mounted an abandoned train dock and climbed through a half-fallen brick wall into one of the factories. Up and down Sangamon Street, the kids of Providence looked on in wonder, except for Rogelio, who walked with tunnel vision a half block ahead of us, and Gustavo Rivera, who reached for the head of another unsuspecting first-grader.

At Eighteenth Place, we crossed over the tracks, walked one more block in total silence, then went our separate ways, Marcitos and Jorge to their fifth-grade classroom, Sergio and I to the sixth, and Rogelio to the sacristy of Providence of God Church, where he took prayer sessions before the beginning of every school day.

There had been a time before the Revelation readings, before Ms. Ramirez led processions, before the briefcase, when Rogelio was one of us. Back then his father was still around, and on our way home from school we would see him on the corner sometimes, talking with his partners. Rogelio would run up to him like a good son and his father would pick him up and whirl him around like a good father. Then he’d give Rogelio money and we’d cross the street to Paul’s Drug Store, where we’d buy Slim Jims and Cokes, which we then consumed on the broken concrete steps of the Dvorak Park public pool, pretending we were rich, smoking thin cigars, downing dark champagne.

We only ever knew his father from these scenes and the few things Rogelio had told us — how his father was rich, owned oil wells in Texas, had stock in Shell Oil. We all lied about our families. Sergio said his father was a millionaire cattle breeder in Mexico. I said my family had houses in California, that we could see the Hollywood sign from our backyards, some with better views of the sign than others. After hearing Rogelio’s lie, Sergio began telling kids at school that his father had stock in Shell Oil too. In the court-yard, when the girls asked me or Rogelio if what Sergio said was true, we always said it was, that all three of our fathers had stock in Shell Oil, that our families were part owners and that we all split profits. When asked why we weren’t living in the mansions we claimed to have, we pounded our chests the way the gangbangers did and claimed it was the neighborhood. That we had family here, even the people we didn’t like. And those listening always nodded in understanding.

Those days were full of talk. Talk about our favorite team, the Chicago White Sox, and the hated Chicago Cubs. Talk about where we wanted to visit when we got older: Alaska, Yellowstone Park, places we had researched in our school’s only set of encyclopedias, which were guarded by our school’s secretary, Ms. Margaret, in the main office. We talked about running away. Rogelio had mentioned his aunt who lived in Aurora. Aurora sounded like a nice place and I told Rogelio if he wanted to go I would go with him. Sergio laughed at us for thinking we would ever run away, and when we thought about it more, we knew he was right, and became embarrassed for thinking so childishly.

But Rogelio changed after his father left. In the beginning it was just the Revelation readings, which were fun because for a while we thought Rogelio was joking, the way he wrinkled his brow, the way he moved his arm stiff and strong. But then he started going to church even on Saturdays, our baseball days, our football days. He had become an altar boy and had to stay after school for practice. In the mornings he stopped going straight to class and instead showed up somewhere around third period, having missed most of the morning praying back in the sacristy. And finally, when we did talk to him, Rogelio talked about things we didn’t care about, religious things: You know that Brother Adam went to Providence when it was all Polish? Little by little Rogelio became someone else, someone we didn’t know except for what we remembered.