Here’s my last-ditch retirement plan: Park my car on the north end of Flint and wait for somebody to shoot me in the head. Won’t take long, you can bet on that. The city’s so broke there’s only one patrol cop a shift and he’s too scared to get out of his car. So it’s a free-for-all among the criminal element, who celebrate their good turn of fortune by invading occupied homes in broad daylight, chopping in-laws with axes—well, you get the idea. I’d be a goner in no time.

I’m explaining this plan of mine to my buddy Frank on the bridge downtown at Kearsley Street. It’s right by a building that’s been, variously, a Hyatt, a Radisson and a Character Inn. But nobody visits Flint anymore, so these days it serves as a dorm for college kids trying to get the hell out, which is all of them. We don’t fish off the bridge or anything, we just lean against the railing, our fat butts sticking out at the traffic, and watch the Flint River roll.

“You a nut, bro,” Frank says, pushing up his sleeves in the July heat. “Get yo’self shot in the head. Nasty way to go.”

“There’s worse ways,” I say, like I’m an expert on death or something, which I’m not. But quick’s got to beat slow every time when it comes to dying, right?

Frank and I rent rooms in the same boarding house, a few blocks from the bridge. We’re both in our fifties and haven’t worked in a long time. I’m a laid-off third-grade teacher, and he got fired from General Motors for drinking, not easy to do with a union behind you. He’s divorced, I’ve never been married, and neither of us has any kids. Maybe that’s why we’ve taken an interest in L’Shawnda Johnson, a teenager who lives across the street with her prostitute mother: She’s sort of like the daughter we never had.

We’re hoping she’ll smash the odds and leave us—and Flint—behind.

She’s a beautiful girl, long-legged with skin smooth as a plum, and there’s always some boy sniffing around. This, despite one quirk: at least three days a week, L’Shawnda comes home from school and changes from jeans and Ts into a teal-blue dress, long and satiny like a prom gown. We see her on her front porch reading in that dress or parading down the street, on her way to the corner store or wherever, like a queen.

One time she was passing by the boarding house and Frank called out, “You goin’ to the ball, Cinderella?”

She glared at us, mad as hell, but came over anyway, probably because Frank was barbecuing pork ribs on a little grill on the front step, and the food smelled mighty fine. She took the wing he offered, bending way over to eat it so the sauce would fall on the grass and not on her dress. She told us she was going to be a writer someday, of novels and maybe screenplays. The dress was her “writer’s costume,” she said. When she had it on, she could dream up the “most fantastic plots,” stories that just wouldn’t come to her in her “street clothes.”

Frank got the biggest kick out of this, and so did I. We got to know her a lot better after that, heard all about her college plans and hard family life, but it’s that first time we talked to her that pops into my head now as I stand on the bridge and notice something floating on the river, some teal-blue thing, and I look at Frank and can tell he sees it too, and that he knows, as I do, that underneath the blue is L’Shawnda Johnson.

We call 911 on a cell we borrow from some college kid, but it might be hours before the cops get here, if they show up at all. Frank is frantic and threatens to jump in the water after her, but I tell him at his age that’s a last-ditch retirement plan.

And so we stand on the bridge and watch L’Shawnda move west with the current, away from us and toward the sun, her dress billowing up like a hot-air balloon that’s trying to take off, move and move out of sight, out of Flint.