Excerpt from That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The three sisters streets and their brother, Samuel Avenue, contained my world, all of our homeland operations. All my friends lived here, my school was down the street on Samuel and in the other direction was the way to the plaza with Mac's Milk, Hunter's Pizza and Bamboo Garden, which sold takeout Chinese food that my parents said was not real Chinese food. On the other side of the plaza was the "old part" of the neighbourhood, where people had been living longer.

That summer, as they watered their front lawns, the adults leaned across their fences and spoke in hushed voices, flooding their grass with their now forgotten hoses. Us kids gathered in the street with our road hockey gear and baseballs to share whatever intel we'd acquired and trade in gory details. Mr. Finley's brain was supposedly splattered in a million bits across his basement. My friend Darren said you couldn't clean brain completely out—that stuff sticks. Darren knew a lot about brains because he was into comic books and his mother was a nurse, so we took whatever he said as fact. As for Mrs. Da Silva, everybody knew she wasn't right in the head. We often saw her walking around in her housecoat talking and laughing to herself.

Nothing like this had ever happened in our quiet suburban neighbourhood before. No one had even died before Mr. Finley. In downtown Toronto, where the dangerous people lived, at least according to my dad, it probably happened all the time. Dad said downtown was no place for kids because it was dirty and full of fast cars and shady characters, while out here in the suburbs, we were free to play on the street, leave our front doors unlocked and generally not worry about such things. Granted, there was a neighbourhood thief sneaking around, but only small, mostly worthless things were taken—forgotten gardening gloves on the lawn, chipped coffee mugs left on the porch, a rusty screwdriver in a garage. People assumed it was some weird kid's idea of fun. I had my own opinion on who it was, and it was no kid. But no one listened to me anyway.

My street, like the rest of the subdivision, was brand new. Most of the neighbours had moved in four years ago, right after the houses were finished. My parents loved the neat grid of black road, the bright white stripes to differentiate the lanes, the chain-linked fences that divided our properties but gave us views into the neighbours' yards, the young, weeping trees lining our streets. They said you couldn't get "all this" in Hong Kong, where everybody was crammed on top of each other in tiny apartments, and they would sweep their arms to include whatever "all this" referred to, like showcase girls on The Price Is Right. They were always saying, "June, you don't know how lucky you are that you were born here and not there." Mom and Dad had come to this country on student visas fifteen years ago, but the way they told it, it was like they were fresh off the boat. But I suppose they had lived in the city for those years in crammed apartments, and moving out here to the suburbs, Mom and Dad finally got some land. Even though it was only a square lawn and a rectangular backyard, this was a big deal. Land was land.

Between the road tar and the pine boards and the wall-to-wall carpeting, the whole place smelled like a new toy just unwrapped. The kids liked to guess what the area had been before they bulldozed it and put up our houses: Farmland, cemetery, someone else's neighbourhood? But that was for sport. It was brand spanking new and made you feel like anything was possible.

As soon as the houses were built, we all moved in. My parents and I moved from our two-bedroom apartment downtown to our four-bedroom spread of a house in Scarborough. It was only a thirty-minute drive between the two places by highway, but my parents were convinced that the air was even cleaner in the new neighbourhood. At first, it had felt like Disneyland. Since it was the beginning of summer, the heat got us outside, and everybody got to know each other and planned things like fireworks and barbecues on the long weekends. Everybody was invited at first, but then it seemed like people decided who their friends were, and the invitations that used to be shoved in all the mailboxes stopped coming. It was the same for us kids. We met, sized each other up and broke into groups. Things settled into routines.

Excerpted from That Time I Loved You: Stories by Carrianne Leung. Copyright © 2019 by Carrianne Leung. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.