The book drives home that Quan and Justyce are really young men when Quan says he doesn’t miss the rocket ship. The rocket ship represented Quan’s need to run away and escape in order to find happiness. But now, when he looks around, he sees that he is happy. His family is on the road to recovery, he has an amazing friend in Justyce, and he’s free of the constricting loyalty that Black Jihad required. In all ways, Quan has escaped the poverty and the violence that kept him from success as a child, driving home the novel’s assertion that it’s impossible to succeed if a person doesn’t have safety and security at home.