By the time Laura finds her boyfriend, Andy, in “On the Sidewalk Bleeding,” he is dead, stabbed to death by members of a rival gang. Laura runs for a police officer, who looks down at the boy lying in in the alley and says, “A Royal, huh?” Laura looks at the officer and replies, very quietly, “His name is Andy.”

Laura's words and manner offer us some important insights. First, where the officer sees only a gang member, Laura sees a person, an individual she knows and loves. To her, the boy is not a Royal. He is Andy. He is more than his membership in the gang.

Notice, too, how Laura looks at the officer before she speaks. She may be surprised that he does not recognize Andy as more than a Royal. She may be trying to connect with the officer, trying to get his attention. She may even be trying to see him as a person behind his role as an officer.

When she speaks, Laura is very quiet. She is in a state of shock certainly, for she has just found her boyfriend dead in an alley. She is also grieving, and the fact that Andy is dead has probably not yet completely sunk in. Yet Laura is, apparently, not the kind of person to scream or shout in her grief. Instead, she becomes quiet, reflective. Perhaps she recognizes that Andy's jacket is no longer on him but rather lying a foot away. Perhaps she understands, at least on some level, what this means, that Andy had rediscovered his own identity apart from the Royals before he died. This may be why Laura is so quietly insistent that “his name is Andy.”