Orange June

Hunters wear orange in the woods so no one mistakes them for prey. After fifteen-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was shot dead in a Chicago park in 2013 — a week after she performed at a presidential inauguration — the people who loved her put on that same color and asked the country to see them the way the woods sees a hunter: as a human being, on purpose, not to be fired on. Every June since, on what would have been her birthday, the orange comes back. This is our month of it.