The Gangster We Are All Looking For

The Girl encounters someone from her old neighborhood in Linda Vista and pretends not to know him, even when he says her name and calls her a liar. She says that her father—whom she now refers to as her father instead of Ba—taught her how to move forward even when the body is broken. Throughout the Girl’s adolescence, her father fights imaginary enemies while drunk in the alley outside her window. When a neighbor yells at him, her father threatens to kill all the residents with a single shot. The Girl imagines the bullet piercing and pulling all of them close together, “suspended against the blue sky like a string of fish Ba hoists high from one end” (101).

One chilly fall night when she is 16, the Girl runs away from home while barefoot. In the spring, she encounters the aforementioned man who recognizes her. However, she isn’t ready to return to her parents’ turbulent home, so she keeps running. She wonders what season it is when she wakes up in a one-room apartment “thousands of miles away from the streets where [she] grew up” (102). Across the street from her apartment, the sun shines on a red brick building.