What if he was an easy baby, cherub-faced, and not burdened with colic, and later childhood eczema that made him scratch behind his ears and between his fingers until the skin bled. Or he didn’t cause his parents to reconsider their belief every child needs a sibling as they watched his bright-lights-calm-as-butter sister—a blessing, his parents said—with her talent for Easy-Bake Oven cakes and play dates. What if he grew up, clear-skinned, broad-shouldered, and never saw the inside of the principal’s office, or how it felt to be in the lowest reading group or the sharp slam of metal lockers against his back. What if he didn’t meet the older boys behind the high school, a ball cap pulled tight over his ears, his scabby fingers shoved into his pockets; and later still, met people under the overpass with their trash-can fires and shouts of buddy, pal, bro, people who handed out belonging like the rainbow of pills they stole and sold. What if, when the darkness came and his veins overflowed with blues and greens and purples, he wasn’t locked in a hospital room with a bolted-down bed and a guard outside the plexiglass wall, and shame didn’t root in his bones. What if he never heard the shriek of a cell door, or felt the dirty rub of mornings, and the itch that never went away. Or when he phoned his parents, what if their voices lifted, and his mother asked, “Are you warm enough, eating enough, happy enough?” and his father said, “We want you to come home, son,” and he knew then that he mattered, that friendship on the street was a blade with only one side. And he understood he could get clean, be someone, and he emptied his pockets at the train station and headed home—a word no longer stuck in his throat—and what if his parents were waiting, arms outstretched, instead of the door locked, no lights on except for his sister’s room, and she looked down at him from her window for a moment before dropping the blind like a guillotine.