He continued. “The airport is still open, surprisingly. But people aren’t flying, no surprise. Giant death beams from the sky are a lot harder to ignore than high prices and a big ass terminal. We’re not technically under a state of emergency, but even Waffle Houses are closed, so do technicalities even really apply? Um, that’s about it. Oh, and this is our case. Like you and me. NSA thought about picking up, then the Pentagon, then Quantico, but it looks pretty clusterfucked, so it got rolled down to us. They’ve been trying to close this office for a while anyway. About damn time. We’ve got a press conference at nine. I’m glad you wore heels. You don’t see a lot of tall black women on TV these days. That’s it!”
“Okay,” Tilly replied, gesturing toward the doorway. Rick Herrington was only tolerable in small doses. Rick sauntered out, leaving Tilly in silence. It was only 6:46. Goddamn, he talked fast. Tilly reached across her desk and grabbed her name plaque, fixating on the engraved words: “Tilly Erickson, Senior Agent, Cybercrimes Division.” She’d finally gotten a case worth her rank, but it had all this damn baggage.
° ° °
Zed watched the press conference for #FireAndBrimStoneMountain, as it was now being called, from her computer. Apollo had told them they couldn’t ever discuss the past night via an electronic device, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t read about it. At the podium stood a freckled woman with exquisite eyebrows. She insisted that there wasn’t a story to follow. Zed chuckled as she dryly answered questions from the press, even the silly ones.
“Was this a terrorist attack?” a reporter asked.
“Perhaps,” the woman said.
“Is Atlanta safe?”
“Hopefully.”
“Was this an extraterrestrial event?”
“Absolutely.”
“As in aliens?”
“No.”
“Do you know what extraterrestrial means?”
“Yes.”
“Are Southern values under attack?”
“Cheap gas is the only Southern value.”
“Does the Stone Mountain incident have any relation to the fire off of Campbellton Road?”
The woman paused. “I am not aware of the fire to which you refer,” she belted out, robotically.
“Fuck, they already have leads,” Zed shrieked, slamming her laptop shut. This was the last thing she needed on a day she’d have to spend at home with her parents. They always knew when something was troubling her, and once they knew, they found out. Frantically, Zed paced around her room, seeking some sort of escape from her thoughts and her house. She decided to go see Apollo. Today would be the day she met his parents. She didn’t care whether he liked it or not.
Getting dressed was easier than she expected. She settled on flip-flops and a simple black smock, cute but not flashy. Her hair was trickier. Buns, her go-to hairdo, made her feel confident, but she didn’t want his parents to think she was controlling. His dad always sounded somewhat scared of assertive women. But he also sounded like an asshole. He could probably use a scare. Zed decided to go with buns. On her way out, she exchanged her flip-flops for her black combat boots. Confidence required an ensemble.
The walk to his house was refreshing. Driveways were empty and people were outside, unfazed by the events of the previous night. Zed was pleased. The empty lanes and parking lots being looped on Twitter were unsettling. Graffiti wasn’t supposed to scare people. It was supposed to show them that nothing was permanent, that small acts could alter the world. Zed didn’t know if the neighborhood really got it—after all, unlike her parents and Apollo’s parents, who were dentists, some people just couldn’t afford to miss work—but at least she knew she didn’t live in a neighborhood full of pussies.
Apollo’s dad answered the door. He was a squat man; his limbs hung close to his torso as if they were scared to grow further. “What?” he asked Zed.
“Hello, sir, I am Zadie. I’m here to see Apollo,” she answered politely.
“Cindy, Apollo’s playmate is here. Please deal with her,” he commanded, turning around and leaving the door ajar. Zed stepped into the foyer, her boots loudly echoing on the marble floor. The house had the same design as hers, but something felt off. The stairs seemed steeper, the windows seemed sealed shut. The walls were coated in a metallic black, making all instances of color look like tiny supernovae. Zed frowned at the image of her black smock in the mirror.
“Shoes, please,” Apollo’s mother said, entering the foyer and pointing at a half-full shoe rack to the left of the front door. “I’m Cindy,” she continued, offering her hand after nudging the door closed. She wore a brilliant pink maxi dress with two lavender stripes running down the sides and lavish black heels. Zed was both impressed and ashamed on sight.
Zed shook Cindy’s hand firmly, meeting her intense eyes directly. She was a tall woman, bony yet imposing. She was so tall that her head seemed to float above her body, connected by will rather than sinew. Zed stammered out some small talk. “Did you hear about what happened in Stone Mountain?”
“Young lady, please remove your shoes.” Zed immediately obliged, unlacing her boots and placing them on the shoe rack next to a rainbow of differently colored heels and worn brown sandals. Without her boots, she lost two inches of height, placing her farther beneath Cindy’s formidable gaze. Cindy silently started up the stairs. Zed took the hint, trailing her.
There were no pictures on the stairwell, just blank space. Cindy stopped at a bedroom with a crimson door, silent.
“Hey Mom, what’s up?” Apollo bellowed from the other side of the door.
“Your girlfriend is here. She dresses strangely.”
Apollo careened out of the door, grabbing Zed like she was a freed hostage being released to the police, and slammed the door behind him. “Really?” he asked, burying his chin into her neck as he embraced her for a hug.
“I’d ask how’d it go, but they let you in the house, so that’s a pretty good sign,” he said, releasing her to step back and look her in the eyes. “I like your dress, by the way,” he added. Zed shook her head and slid to the floor, sitting cross-legged, a flap of her smock splayed over her crotch. She scanned Apollo’s room. It looked pretty bare for a place where he spent so much time. A mounted TV was the only wall ornament, and a bed, a desk, and a small dresser were the only furniture. On the desk were three monitors, all of them powered on, and a PS4 on standby. Zed searched for some lone analog device, a clock or a tome of Apollo’s beloved manga, finding nothing but more wires, screens, and devices. Theo wasn’t joking. Apollo truly did live his life online. Zed faintly smiled as pictures of her and Apollo appeared on all of his screensavers.
“Are you okay?” Apollo asked. Zed wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at her.
“Yeah, I’m worried,” she finally replied.
“You must have watched the press conference. I caught that too. Of course they have leads. We don’t know if they’re good leads, though.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Zed said, unassured. “I’m just worried about the J. We might be in some Clayton County graffiti database or something. I know you put a C on it, but I feel like we should clear Jerry’s grave, just to be safe.”
Apollo cracked a smile. “Clayton County doesn’t track graffiti. I’ve checked. ClayPo doesn’t even have Windows 7 yet. And no one thinks of what we did as graffiti other than us and maybe some intern at Jacobin. So even if Jerry’s mom turns us in, which she won’t because we put a dead black boy on a racist mountain, what would she tell them? ‘My son’s old friends sprayed a giant C on his grave.’ I think we’re covered. Instead of sweating that, how about we look at some of these goofy-ass hashtags?”
Zed still felt uneasy, but looking at hashtags sounded fun. She scooted over as Apollo grabbed an iPad from under his pillow and queued up Twitter, joining her on the floor. Most of the jokes were forgettable, as ephemeral
as the weak laughs they drew, but Zed enjoyed scrolling through them, watching people make sense of the world by making fun of it. #FireandBrimStoneMountain was the top trending topic, but the real jokes were at #IHadaBeam, which featured endless images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spewing lasers upon national monuments. It was wack that humor was people’s default reaction, Zed felt, but she understood its appeal. Laughter was like that brief moment of silence when you drove under a bridge during rain; it placed you outside of time even as it sped you through it.
Apollo gravitated toward the conspiracy tweets, the ones with ideas too nebulous to coagulate into hashtags. “The aliens are here bro. Future and Ciara were the first sign. I swear,” tweeted one user. “2013: no braves. 2014: snowstorm. 2015: floods. 2016: Donald Glover is cool. 2017: falcons lose and bridge collapses. 2018: Childish Gambino making trap now, da fuck?. Stay woke,” read another tweet. Apollo really got a kick out of that one, sprawling out on his floor as the laughter dispersed across his body. Zed snapped a photograph of him with her phone, studying it afterward. It was a keeper.
“Honestly, this isn’t making me feel better,” she confessed, standing up, her dress sliding back down to her ankles. Apollo flashed her a look from the floor, his eyebrows hoisted by concern. “I shouldn’t have even come,” she continued, stepping toward the door. Silent, Apollo remained on the carpet as she quickly left the room, closing the door. Her footsteps were muted as she slogged down the stairs in socks, but the eventual tap of her boots on the foyer was clear, undulating throughout the still house before terminating with a thud from the front door. On her way home, she examined her new photo. Softly illuminated by the dull flicker of his screens, Apollo looked blissful. Pocketing her phone, Zed wished she could say the same for herself.
Sol tensed in response to the creaking porch. She didn’t recognize those footsteps. Bounding across her living room in three inaudible strides, she entered the kitchen and armed herself with a knife. The sharp scent of the onions she’d cut for breakfast lingered on its blade. The footsteps halted a few feet from the door, their echo drowning in the drone of the cicadas outside. Sol dropped to an alert crouch, the knife gripped tightly in her left hand. The unknown visitor exhaled deeply. It was a man. Sol remained in place, waiting for his next move.
A sharp jangle rang out. Keys. “Is he from the bank?” Sol mouthed to herself. Her dead grandmother continued to receive bank notices, but Sol never opened mail that wasn’t hers. Her first cellmate, Laura, had gotten four years for that. The stranger casually unlocked the screen door. He hadn’t even had to search for the right key; he already knew which one it was. Sol remained crouching, wondering who the hell was at her door.
Couldn’t be cops. Except for last night and a few tags here and there—oh, and that bike—she’d been on her best behavior. Couldn’t be Jehovah’s Witnesses. They avoided that midday Georgia sun like it was a secular holiday. Couldn’t be Antonio either. She’d always had him drop her off a few houses away. She’d dated him despite his rep, but she dumped him precisely because his rep turned out to be true. Who the fuck was at her door?
Loudly fiddling around, the stranger seemed to be unable to find the right key. Sol fumed. She wasn’t about to go out like Copperhead, pounced on and then killed in her own damn home. Brazenly, she stood up and flung open the front door.
She was greeted by a shriek. Her older cousin, Derrick, stood on the other side of the storm door, bewildered. He’d gained weight, lots of it. He’d also acquired some money. Despite the heat, he was wearing a full suit, tailored and slick. He was still a chump, though. Sol laughed and invited him in. He tarried in the doorway.
“I thought you were in jail,” Derrick said cautiously. Sol could feel his eyes on her chiseled arms.
“I was. Been back home for over a year, though. I just graduated. Three point four.”
“A year? Shit. I had no idea.”
“Really? Your dad picked me up.”
“Weird. He never mentioned it.”
Sol didn’t respond. Stepping back, she invited Derrick in again. This time, he obliged, following her into the kitchen, where she deposited her knife onto a counter and reached inside the fridge, removing a jug of sweet tea. Raising the jug above her head, she offered Derrick a swig. He declined. Sol’s sweet tea was notoriously more tea than sweet.
“So, why are you here, Derrick?” Sol asked, drinking straight from the jug. She neither offered Derrick a seat nor sat down herself.
“You remember my homeboy Mario? He said he had drove by here and Nana’s house was all fixed up and shit. I knew your parents were thinking about fixing this place up, so I was curious about what it looked like.”
“You see my parents lately?”
“Yeah, every couple of weeks or so. They’re doing fine. You don’t talk to them?”
Sol didn’t respond, but her eyes remained on Derrick as if she were still speaking. He avoided her gaze, scanning the room. She watched as his eyes lingered on all of her renovations: new cabinets, new sink, new blender. She had seen that look before.
“So, how are your friends? What did you guys used to call yourselves? The Starjammers?”
Sol snorted out a laugh. “Nah, the Celestials.”
“Because y’all all used to get mad high, right?”
“Sometimes. But the real story is that we all met playing tennis, and when we started out, we used to always hit the balls extra high. Like into the cosmos and shit.”
“That’s funny.”
“I guess. They’re fine. I saw them all last night. Good times.”
“That’s good. Family is here for you too, you know.”
“That’s good to know. I’ll be sure to call you guys up the next time I’m going over best practices for stopping a home invasion or renovating a house on minimum wage. Get the fuck out of my house.”
Derrick held his ground. “This ain’t your house, Solara,” he blurted out, emphasizing her name. Sol’s eyes instinctively flitted to the knife on the counter, but her hands reached toward a drawer. Derrick flinched, his fleshy face jiggling from the suddenness of his movement.
Nana had bought a gun after Kathryn Johnston, an elderly woman, got killed by some trigger-happy Atlanta cops. And she used to keep it in this exact drawer. “Waiting on an order of pig ears,” she always joked whenever someone inevitably stumbled upon it at a cookout. Sol knew Derrick had no idea the gun now resided under her pillow, so she let her hand linger in the drawer. He was such a pussy.
“Found it,” she said excitedly, brandishing a wrinkled sheet of paper. She balled it up and tossed it at Derrick, who caught it with his forehead. Picking it up from the floor, he flattened it out, scanning its legalese.
Sol didn’t feel like waiting. “That’s a copy of the deed to the house. My house. Nana left this house to whoever in the family took care of it. All anyone had to do was stay here for forty-five days and show the bank that they were taking care of it.” Derrick stared back at her quizzically. “I’m an eighteen-year-old homeowner, nigga,” Sol added.
Derrick scoffed. “Good for you. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old with multiple homes. Call me when you get a degree or something,” Derrick said coldly, crumpling then dropping the deed. He left just as quickly, his footsteps creaking more loudly than when he came. Sol slammed the door behind him and went to the window to watch his departure.
He’d been a pile of putty in her presence, but back in the outside world, his gait was confident, his arms and legs swinging freely like cooked noodles hanging from a fork. Sol seethed as she watched him start his car, a gleaming hybrid Hyundai Sonata, and back out into the street, probably headed to one of his many homes. Suddenly the two years she planned to wait before starting college seemed like an eternity. Even after an early release from juvie and an unlikely on-time graduation, she was still a failure. On edge, she walked to her grandmother’s liquor cabinet and r
emoved a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The crumpled deed remained on the floor.
° ° °
Sol heard familiar voices. “I wish she would hurry up,” Kai complained. “These mosquitoes are killing me. Are you sure Waffle House is closed?”
“Yeah, it was on the news. I saw it when I was at Apollo’s house.”
Kai rang the doorbell, holding it down to extend the tinny chime. Sol finally rose from the couch. “Come in,” she grumbled, opening the door. Zed and Kai entered the house, making a beeline to the couch. Sol remained standing, sluggish from her whiskey-induced nap. She glanced at the clock above the television. 4:24 p.m. She’d slept for six hours. Kai and Zed were in high spirits. To Sol, they seemed to glow.
“What’s up with y’all today?” Sol asked, noticing they were both dressed in form-flattering nylon fitness gear and sneakers.
“Apollo…” Zed started.
“Tennis, my nigga,” Kai interrupted.
Sol immediately shook her head. “I haven’t played since, like, tenth grade, before I got locked up. You guys will murk me.”
“Whatever, girl,” Zed chided. “With those arms, you’ll probably be acing us left and right. Remember the first time Theo got an ace? He lost the match, but he insisted that we go to Chick-fil-A to celebrate.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Kai sighed. “I was the one who got aced by him! And hell yeah, he lost. I killed his ass. But y’all never remember my version. To this day, I’m convinced that the secret ingredient in that Chick-fil-A sauce is loyalty.” Zed slid off the couch and dropped to her knees, propped up by the laughter bouncing around her chest.
In the Heat of the Light Page 4
