Meg Medina: Hi. I'm Meg Medina, the author of Burn Baby Burn, which is the story of 18 year old Nora López, living in New York City in 1977. I lived in New York in 1977, and back then the city was just a mess. The streets were filthy with garbage. Entire neighborhoods were being torched, and we had a serial killer named Son of Sam who was murdering young girls and their dates. I think readers now deal with their own version of violence, shooter drills for schools, and frightening images of brutality on the nightly news, and just much more, so I don't think it's so different then and now. I thought I'd read to you from the first chapter. Nora and her best friend kept Kathleen have just seen the movie Carrie, and meant to be home earlier, but it's gotten dark and now they have to walk home under a train trestle nearby. So here goes.

It's completely dark now. In the daytime, this is a quiet stretch, lined on either side by a few old houses with tiny front yards. We'll have to walk beneath the train trestle, after which comes the block of buildings where I live. I think sheepishly of Meemaw, who always tells me not to walk this way alone, especially not at night. A thousand times she's warned me, and I always sneer at her dramatic lectures about this patch of weeds and broken glass, about the dark corners where a girl can be pushed, dragged off to the dead end, and then God knows what? It always seems so stupid, so Meemaw, but now I stare ahead at the gaping shadows we'll have to walk through, and wish we had just waited for the next bus. I think of the graffiti, and the broken bottles in there, the smell of urine that always chokes you when you walk by.

Suddenly, I think of the murder in Forest Hills. We just need to get under the underpass. "We'll get close and run," I whisper, as Kathleen and I link arms. I practice our sprint in my mind, the way athletes do. We'll race through that patch and break through to the other side, victorious. It'll only take a few seconds, no more, but as we get closer, my feet slow down, and it feels as though I'm walking through molasses. Kathleen slows down too. Each tree trunk we pass makes us skittish. Anyone could be hiding in the shadows. I hear a man's voice in my head. "Hey girls." Click, click, click like a gun cocking over and over. It's just our boots. I tell myself, closing my eyes. Move faster, but behind my eyelids, an ugly picture waits.

Kathleen's pretty white coat is soaked with blood as she lies on the ground. "I don't want to," Kathleen whisper suddenly. "Let's go back. We'll call my mom from a payphone. She'll be pissed, but she'll get us." I pause, unsure. Northern Boulevard seems so far behind us, and the shops are all closed and dark. We're already at the trestle. We'll only have to run 20, maybe 30 steps. We're practically adults, aren't we? Nearly 18, as Kathleen always says, not scared little girls. "We're almost there," I say stubbornly. "We're just psyched out from the stupid movie." And, with that, I pull us into the darkness.