Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds is the YA novel-in-verse version of Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Except the main character, fifteen-year-old William Holloman isn’t dead. Nor is he in heaven. He’s very much alive in an elevator the morning after his older brother Shawn has been murdered a few blocks from their home. Lying next to Shawn is the plastic “Thank You” bag containing the special soap for their mother’s eczema he had just purchased.

Long Way Down has forever changed my views of elevators again. After reading The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory, every time I entered an empty elevator, I wondered if I’d end up temporarily trapped with a handsome stranger whom I’d end up dating. Not a bad meet-cute at all. I prefer that association with elevators.

But now, elevators will remind me of the excruciating ride Will takes the morning after his brother’s death. The first timestamp after entering on the eighth floor is 9:08:05 am and the last timestamp is 9:09:09 am when he reaches the lobby, the L button having been pressed several times during the short-long ride. In less than two minutes, Will revisits painful memories and learns revelations of his not-long life.

Following a long line of tradition, Shawn has taught Will The Rules, which keep coming into play.

1. No Crying
2. No Snitching
3. Revenge

Despite hearing his grieving mother’s muffled wailings for her eldest son, Will wiggles free a lopsided drawer in his once-shared room with Shawn. It’s his first time opening it. It’s his first time holding a gun. He’s obeyed the first two rules and intends on doing so with the third.

Even though it’s early in the morning, the elevator stops on each floor after he leaves his eighth-floor apartment. With each stop enters a “person” from Will’s life or neighborhood who has been lost to gun violence.

First is Buck, his brother’s best friend; Dani, a childhood friend now appearing grown up shot while both played on the monkey bars; Uncle Mark who was killed while dealing on a street corner trying to earn money to buy a camera; his father, killed after going after the wrong person avenging his brother Mark; Frick who killed Buck and Will is rocked to his core when he learns who killed Frick. For whatever reason, all the riders share and smoke cigarettes…except for Shawn, the last person to board the smoke-filled elevator.

Upon seeing his brother, Will attempts to talk to Shawn and breaks the rules by shedding a tear when his brother refuses to speak to him. “My favorite, my only” is how he refers to his big brother. Will had lost his father at the young age of three but unlike Shawn his father “spread his arms, welcomed [him] into a lifetime’s worth of squeeze” and chatted as if it were the most natural thing to do. His father’s voice is what he imagined Shawn’s voice would be when grown. Meanwhile, no matter what Will asks or says, Shawn refuses to utter a word to Will in the elevator.

The story is jarring and emotional in so many ways. In countless US cities, young Black boys and men (and girls and women) find themselves caught up in an endless cycle of violence, whether affiliated with a gang or not. Unwritten street codes are so deeply ingrained in them by friends and family members that they feel no choice but to adhere to them no matter their own uncertainty and fears. Families are devastated losing one member and decimated losing multiple loved ones. In Will’s case, he’s lost a childhood friend, uncle, father, brother and quite possibly his own life depending on his decision once he exits the elevator.

Seventeen years later, grief still has a grip on me after losing a cousin who was like a brother to me to gun violence. Saying he was like a brother isn’t just an empty phrase. His mother and my father are twins. He and my biological brother, born a month apart, shared a bedroom and dresser like Will and Shawn. My bedroom shared a wall with theirs. I couldn’t get to my bedroom without passing theirs at the top of the stairs. They entered my room without knocking. Used my lotion, took my socks and CDs without permission. We have childhood studio family portraits together.

My heart dropped when I read the verse in Long Way Down when Buck’s real name is revealed to be James, a fact that Will learned only after he had passed. We called my cousin by his middle name Garvens, but non-family called him James, his first name.

I wish that Long Way Down only made me sad because it made me recall reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven, a novel about the main character being ushered through the afterlife after he’s killed in a freak accident saving another person. In one scene, his late wife comes to him, appearing as her younger, pre-cancerous self. That scene in the novel made me cry openly on the Brooklyn-bound L train. Though it’s been decades, I remember both versions of my mother, whose real name I didn’t learn until I read it on her headstone.

I wonder…I wonder when it’s my time, who will be the first to greet me. I’ve missed my mother the longest. Thirty-seven years. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, has only been gone for two. Smack dab in between is Garvens. I wasn’t ready to lose any of them. The grief for one or all comes out of nowhere and steals my breath.

There were no rules passed down to me. Garvens was murdered a few blocks from home, as was Shawn. It’s technically an unsolved, cold case, perhaps because like in Long Way Down anyone who may know something believes in Rule #2. For all I know, someone acted on Rule #3. I certainly never followed Rule #1.

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