The coffin looked so much like a white Cadillac that Ana thought there ought to be a hood ornament. The chrome-trimmed lid opened like a sunroof. Why not a vanity license plate?

Dat lay there in saffron robes, wearing a golden hat with bangles. His head like a wind chime. Dude might as well have been cremated in his checkerboard Vans shit.

Ana remembered tenth grade when Dat showed up with the checkerboard socks, checkerboard hat, checkerboard jacket, checkerboard pants, checkerboard underwear. He didn't even own a skateboard. Plus he was about four-foot-nothing, so all that black-and-white crap made him look like a munchkin.

Ana ran her fingers along the purple, quilted-silk liner. The morticians had shaved Dat's downy hazing of mustache and tweaked his lips into a wise-ass smirk like he had just got done telling a big-ass lie. Whatever subject anyone brought up, Dat had always had some important tie to it-his dad played guitar for Metallica, or surfed professionally, or worked at NASA.

Even when he sold Ecstasy, he lied, claiming his pills were double doses, charging double for them. He lied about his customers, too-E-40, Too Short, Sean Penn-on the theory that if he said enough shit something would eventually be true.

The four of them-Ana, Dat, Bicho, and Tony-went back to elementary school, back to racing their dirt bikes down Fillmore to Auntie April's Café, where Dat ate his wings with gobs of catsup, which grossed everybody out.

Bicho was now living the clean life in Christian school. He looked like a computer-generated version of his old self, a golden brown, A&F-model mix of Filipino, Chinese, and Nicaraguan.
Tony's Hawaiian-Chinese heritage, on the other hand, had left him portly. His penchant for weed and beer didn't help. He'd gotten impetigo in sixth grade; it had degenerated into a permanent swath of horrendous pustules across his neck and chin. His bleached prongs of hair drew attention to his ugliness.

Ana, dressed in black, turned away from her own reflection in the coffin. She felt like a Rorschach of gloom.

At first, she had rivaled Bicho for leader. Dat was just in it for cruising-he never led with wheelies or skids. Tony always lagged behind like he'd been born with a Marlboro in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other.

When they started shoplifting in seventh grade, Ana drifted to the back. When they started dabbling in drugs in eighth grade, she stopped hanging out with them completely.

Standing in the garden of Evergreen Mortuary, Ana was bugged by all the Zen shit-the gurgling fountain, placid Buddhas, wispy bamboo, orderly rocks.

She scanned the mourners looking for Bicho and Tony.

Dat made so much money selling E that he bought an eight-year-old Civic for three grand. "Three grand too much," Ana teased him. Dat believed that Civics were, dollar for dollar, the best, if only you changed the engine's computer card so it could rev it up a bit and make some noise.

To disguise his drug income from his grandma, Dat got hired at Starbucks, got the nerdy shirt and the green apron, then quit.

Weekend nights, boy took the last pill himself, partied until daylight, and slept a few hours nestled in his car's back seat. Dat only went home weeknights to keep his grandmother from worry. She never talked about how she got him out of Cambodia or who his parents were, even when he asked. She fed him pork broth noodles so he'd have strength for his job.

Dat didn't stop with changing the computer card. He dropped the body, added gold rims and a spoiler. Next came blue neon lighting under the chassis-the spaceship look. A steering wheel that looked like it belonged on a video game. The woofer in the hatchback made the car vibrate so much the screws that held the license plate twisted out.

Then he saved for three months and had it detailed like a checkerboard. Kids at school yelled X Car when Dat drove by.

Drugs made their lives into a reality show in which Ana was waiting for the episode when they got busted.

Dat invented a game called The Loop. The route was counter-clockwise around the Bay: Bay Bridge, San Rafael Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, and back to start. Dat blew through the FasTrak tolls like he was collecting bonus points.

He got popped on a Sunday morning racing The Loop by himself. He was tearing toward the East Bay, trying to beat his record time. Surely he had been zigzagging, doing his trademark four-at-a-time lane changes, fitting between cars like playing Frogger.

Ana imagined he cut off the cargo van, then let the van get right beside him, like he always did to the car he was harassing. He loved to flash his fake gold teeth speckled with plastic diamonds.
The driver of the van must have looked at the Cambodian kid in checkerboard hat, jacket, everything, and said, this shit is too much.

Witnesses said the side door of the van opened up as they raced past Emeryville side by side.
Legitimate thugs sprayed the checkered Honda with automatic weapon fire. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. One of those long clips that arched like an Arabian sword. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

The checkerboard Honda slowed to a stop like a bumper car at the end of the allotted time. There was no movielike explosion. There was no bursting through the guard rail. The van calmly got off at the next exit, Richmond, the notorious.

Dat's grandmother saw Tony before Ana did. The old woman screamed, "Youdidthis, youpretendgangsters, likeyouwereniggersand notdecentpeople." The scrawny woman clawed at his eyes and ripped his black Banana Republic shirt. She tore the front of her own dress and collapsed.
Unsure of how to react, Tony stepped to the side and lit a cigarette. A funeral director rushed toward Dat's grandmother with a CPR kit and a defibrillator. A Buddhist monk guided Tony through the garden and out a side door.

Ana followed Tony across Geary to the stairs of Our Lady of Kazan, where he squeezed the tobacco out of a Swisher Sweet and filled it with weed. Tony huffed the smoke and asked, "What do you think Dat's doing with all these paper gifts they're burning for him?"

Ana looked into the pewter sky and shook her head. Dat's grandmother was right. If Tony and Bicho hadn't dangled petty crime in front of Dat like fried chicken with catsup, Dat would still be playing trumpet in band and twirling a wooden rifle in JROTC.

Tony answered his own question, "Dat's saying, Yo, dis shit don't even work, it's paper, you motherfuckers, it's freaking Monopoly money, yo, this isn't Marvin Gardens." He chuckled and passed Ana the blunt. She walked away.

Monks chanted and banged gongs. Teenagers lined up by the altar to burn paper servants and paper cars. The wind whisked the smoke away as if the gifts were insults.

Ana drifted through the crowd, while people cried into a microphone about how great Dat had been. "He always helped me with geometry," one girl in a saffron miniskirt sobbed.

Tony sneered into Ana's ear. "Geometry homework, balls, how about how she let Dat finger her pussy for free hits of Ecstasy?"

"Did you ever believe anything Dat said?" Ana sighed. "Remember when he said Mac Dre lived by his cousin in Daly City?"

"Dude didn't even have cousins," Tony replied.

The teenagers rippled with flirty laughter. Ana spit into the bamboo. "This is more of a class picnic than a funeral."

"This is bullshit," Tony said, as he pushed through the procession of praying monks and began emptying his pockets into the coffin: his real iPod loaded with Tupac, Biggie, and Mac Dre; his BlackBerry; that fat wad of cash Dat always slobbered over; peppermint-flavored cigars; a dime bag of weed. He unlatched his Cartier watch and threw that in. He reached down, took off his black Air Jordans, and placed them at Dat's feet. "Dude needs real shit in the afterworld," Tony explained. "Fuck that paper crap."

Dat's grandmother, heaving, rushed toward the coffin. She raked out the objects and threw them into the rock garden. A monk gathered the rejected stuff without hesitation and placed it all into the ritual barbeque. Except for the wad of bills, which a skinny old monk grabbed and disappeared into his robes.

People gagged on the fumes of melting plastic. Dat's grandmother collapsed on the astroturf spread under the raised coffin. The newly arrived paramedics attended to her.

Tony ignored the crowd staring at him. "Where's Bicho?" he asked. Ana shook her head. Bicho knew Dat got shot. Radio and television was obsessed with the murder. Blacks killing blacks didn't even make the papers; every week some banger died over rap-inspired machismo, or some little kid got mowed down in the crossfire. Those deaths never got mentioned. But when someone got popped on the highway, it felt like anyone could get shot anytime for any reason. A general state of panic had settled over the Bay. So Bicho knew about it. He had to know.

Tony patted his pockets for cigarettes. A funeral director politely handed him his scorched Air Jordans and asked him, in Chinese, to smoke outside. Tony threw his smoldering sneakers into a koi pond and maneuvered through the people dressed in all white, the people dressed in all black, the people dressed in saffron. Cambodians bore colorful headdresses of Buddha metal. Dour Christians squeezed Bibles. High school kids Dat didn't even know held their paper funeral gifts and giggled like they were about to roast marshmallows.

Tony pushed through the crowd. He stopped dead when he ran into Bicho's father, Buddy, who was standing by the three-tiered fountain wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt like he was popping into the funeral between errands.

Tony knew Buddy was there to gloat that he had moved his family out of San Francisco before something horrible like this happened to his own son. Buddy had no reason to mourn. No reason to dress in black or white or orange. Dat's death was the punch line to the parable he'd been preaching for years.

Buddy saw Tony with Ana and turned away; he was the archangel who'd warned them; who'd had to banish them once they got the terrible knowledge they didn't even know they were seeking.

The ocean was a quarter of a mile away, and the air bore that hazy quality that made everything look pastel. Tony and Ana sat on the steps of the house across the street from his mother's, working their way through a pack of Marlboros.

Bicho pulled up in his father's minivan and flashed the lights.

Ana climbed in the back, and Tony bounced into the passenger seat. He fiddled with the iPod hooked into the dashboard: Mac Dre bumped, Back in the day I used to kneed the knots, posted at the spot I used to bleed the block.

He adjusted the bass as the minivan cruised down Geary to Franklin and then on Broadway through the tunnel to Chinatown-a symbolic drive-by of Tony's grandmother's project-all the way to the Embarcadero.

As they cruised west through the Marina, Tony mumbled rap lyrics, while Bicho shouted insults at drivers. Ana felt that if they kept driving they would eventually arrive at someplace that would soothe them, but the more they drove, the more the panoramic views loomed around them like threats.

As Bicho spun the minivan onto the curve that led to the Golden Gate, he said, "Let's do The Loop."

Tony put his feet on the dash like they were going to crash. "Naw, man," he said, "let's not."

Bicho opened the storage container between the seats and grabbed his father's Smith & Wesson .357. "Ride over to Richmond," he said. "Show them Chinatown ain't soft."

"Leave me out here," Ana demanded. "This is why I stopped hanging out with you queers in the first place."

"I can't stop here," Bicho yelled as he hit the gas. "You have to go over."

"You're not even from Chinatown! We're from the Sunset!" She kicked the back of the driver's seat. "It's stupid! You're stupid! Let me out!"

The minivan swerved into the next lane as if the gun was forcing them off course. The tires went thup-a-wup thup-a-wup thup-a-wup on the lane-reflectors. The backs of the bullets reflected like half-crescent brass moons....

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