Jaylen sat on the rooftop of the rec center, watching the city lights flicker beneath a dusk sky. Zion joined him, two sodas in hand—one grape, one orange. No words at first. Just the kind of silence that only two people with shared history could understand.
"You ever think we'd get here?" Zion asked.
Jaylen exhaled slowly. "Nah. Not like this. I thought we'd either be locked up or laid out."
Zion nodded. "But here we are."
Down below, kids laughed and played. Inside, a teen wrote lyrics in the booth they built from scratch. A single mom filled out a college app on one of the donated laptops. Life was happening—real life.
"Remember when we thought the block owned us?" Jaylen said.
"Yeah," Zion replied. "But we just didn't know we *were* the block."
That night, Jaylen stood in front of a group of at-risk youth. All boys. All quiet. All carrying stories on their backs. He tossed a basketball at one of them gently.
"Who got dreams?" he asked.
No one moved at first.
"You think cause you from the hood you ain't got none? Nah. You got 'em. You've just been told not to believe in 'em."
He paced. "The streets ain't got no love. But you got something better. You got *us*. You got a new blueprint now."
And they listened—because Jaylen was living proof.
Later, he'd write on the wall of the rec center, just above the entrance:
*"The streets don't own us. We were always the authors."*
It became the center's motto. And it lived in every kid who walked through those doors.