We started talking about dying long before the first woman jumped. What our parents would do once we were gone. What Mr. Nuñez, the assistant principal at Nautilus Middle School, would say about us on the morning announcements, how many of our friends would cry right there on the spot. The songs they would dedicate to us on Power 96 so that all of Miami Beach could mourn us—Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” D.R.S.’s “Gangsta Lean.” Who would go to our funerals—boys who’d broken our hearts, boys whose hearts we’d broken.
She was a French woman, the first jumper, that’s what people said. She didn’t live in Southgate Towers—Papi’s high-rise apartment complex, where he also worked as a security guard—but her boyfriend did. According to the boyfriend’s neighbors, they’d been having problems—she drank a lot, he drank a lot, they fought. That night, the neighbors told Papi, she’d been banging on the door for a while, calling the boyfriend’s name when he wouldn’t open. My father was in the security booth outside the lobby when he started getting calls from some of the Southgate residents. They thought they’d heard a crash, something falling from the sky, the air-conditioning unit on the roof maybe. Or maybe someone had flung something heavy off their balcony. Nobody had expected it to be a person, least of all my father.
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