"WHAT DO YOU make of this?" Trevor Lawrence asked.
Darien Rencher sat with Lawrence on a kitchen counter in an apartment just north of downtown Atlanta, the sweep of Piedmont Park in the distance, the city roiling below. The two -- one white, one Black, teammates at Clemson, friends -- heard the whip of helicopter blades overhead. They saw the fug of smoke cloaking the streets. They watched as police and protesters shut down the highways, the arteries to the city lacerated.
George Floyd had been killed four days earlier.
Lawrence and Rencher had come to Atlanta to visit friends; they arrived to a city on fire, and Lawrence wanted to know what Rencher thought of that fire, of those helicopters and that smoke, of the unrest boiling up all around them.