by Lamar Giles
I was ready to rub more salt in his wounds, but Kya tapped my shoulder, motioned for the receiver. “Can I?”
Knowing what was coming, the joy of bragging wore off quickly. “Yeah. Cool.”
She gripped the receiver, pressed it to her ear, and delivered a message that Paris, maybe, never got the chance to.
The nerves I felt were more than any I’d experienced stepping onto a stage, or grabbing any microphone. Maybe because this wasn’t for me. “I don’t know how long you lied to her. I don’t know how she reacted when she found out who you really were. I can’t imagine how you told her, if you were compassionate or ashamed or indignant. I don’t know anything about you, because she didn’t. You were never there, and Paris told me, more than once, what she wanted to say to you, if she had the chance.”
As he’d done for Fuse, he leaned even closer to the glass, his undamaged eye widening in a way the bloodied one wouldn’t allow. I sensed a desperate anticipation in him. So, no, Paris hadn’t had her say. He robbed her of that too.
“Paris told me, that if she ever met her dad, she’d say”—the words caught in my throat like a fish hook, forcing them up felt like tearing something, but I did it anyway—“ ‘I did fine when my mom died. I did fine when I got my first drum machine. I did fine when those girls from down the block wanted to beat me down. I did fine when …’ ”
“What else?” he said, tears glistening. “What else?”
“Mostly, that was it. See, it was like a song she’d been working on for years. She added to it when new stuff happened. ‘I did fine when school was hard. I did fine when Grandma’s sugar got bad. I did fine. I did fine.’ The coda was always going to be the same, though. ‘I did fine without you.’ ”
No blinking, no tears, no fear. Not from my side of the glass. Not anymore. I put every bit of venom into my final words for Winston Bell. “She wasn’t wrong. The only good thing you did was her, and you took that from the world. I hope you rot here.”
I laid the phone on the slim lip of the stall, in case someone else had something to say. We were done. At least I thought so.
Winston’s voice sounded tinny and far away as it crackled through the receiver. “Wait, one of you.”
Fuse picked up the receiver and held it so we all could hear. “What?”
“The recording, from where you hacked my phone, is that the strongest piece of evidence you have?”
Fuse glanced to me, shadows darkening her face.
Barker leaned into the receiver, speaking quickly, and sounding afraid. “We’re not at liberty to discuss our evidence.” Pointedly, he told us, “Don’t say another word, girls.”
Winston said, “Because I’ve already spoken to a lawyer, and he doesn’t think you have a ton of admissible evidence. A lot of what you described sounds less than legal.”
What was he saying? I couldn’t tell because his voice was flat, his face emotionless. If he was threatening us, he lacked the malice. If he was taunting us with the possibility that he might walk, he lacked the supervillain-esque glee. Honestly, his vibe reminded me of my days with the Smart Ones, when a tough equation halted progress and ruined an afternoon. What math was Winston working here?
He twisted on his stool, announced to the guard, “We’re done.”
“Hold on a sec,” Fuse said.
The response: a click as Winston dropped his receiver in the cradle, severing the connection.
“Wait.” I pounded my fist on the glass as he joined the guard at the door.
What just happened? What had we done?
The lock released on his side, opening a portal. Winston stood, and I dropped the receiver, letting it bounce, then dangle on its cord. Before Winston vanished into the guts of the jail, Fuse saw what I saw, what hadn’t been visible because his body blocked the view of his right hand when he’d entered the room. She squeezed my arm, likely more freaked by the visual than his ominous last words.
The hand was heavily bandaged.
A splotch of red seeped through, bright and blotchy.
His pinkie was gone.
Three days later, Detective Barker asked my parents to bring me to the station to speak in person. Apparently, he’d heard something recently that made him extra cautious about talking over cell phones. Ahem.
Mom wanted to bring our lawyer, but the detective assured her that wouldn’t be necessary. At the station, we found Kya and her mama waiting. My stomach did flip-flops. What had Winston done now?
Barker didn’t take us into an interrogation room. We took a different path through the police station, upstairs, into a conference room. A monitor sat at the end of a conference table surrounded by a dozen leather chairs. The detective motioned for us to sit down.
“What is this about?” Dad said, voice echoing.
“Yeah,” said Kya’s mama, “I don’t like all this secret squirrel mess.”
Barker said, “Trust me. It’ll be worth it.”
So we took our seats. Me and my parents on one side. Kya and her mama on the other. Kya sat directly across from me, sporting her skittish look.
I feel it too, girl. Whatever this is, we can handle it.
Barker sat, and I braced myself for the inevitable tsunami. Had Winston escaped? Were we going to have to go into witness protection to hide from him?
Barker said, “I wanted to give you the good news myself.”
Good news?
“There won’t be a trial. Your questionably obtained evidence won’t get ripped apart by some sleazy defense attorney. You girls will never have to sit on a witness stand. The man you know as Winston Bell is pleading guilty to his involvement in your friend’s death. He told his lawyer the day after we met him. He’s been deposed. The paperwork is being finalized. You got him.”
Both Kya and I shifted to the edge of our seats. I didn’t know if I’d heard him right. “He admitted he murdered ParSec?”
Barker mouth twitched. “He confessed to involuntary manslaughter.”
Kya said, “That’s not murder. That’s way different than murder.”
Barker showed his palms, as if trying to push any disagreements we had away. “He’s going to jail, girls. That’s a win. Something that doesn’t happen if you didn’t do what you did at the—”
“How much time is that monster going to get?” The question was unexpected, coming from my dad. His hand fell on my shoulder, and a part of me melted. I wrapped my hand around his fingers, felt five again.
“The max sentencing for the crime is ten years,” said Barker.
Kya’s mama grabbed Kya’s forearm, said, “But how much time is he going to get?”
Barker said, “Because he’s cooperating, it will be significantly less.”
“How much?” Kya snapped, startling the room.
“Maybe as little as a year if he behaves in jail.”
The room became airless. I had to stand, get some oxygen from somewhere. One year? How many years did he take from ParSec?
Kya doubled over in her chair. Sobbing. Her mama rubbing slow circles on her back.
As I paced, I noticed the arrangement on the far side of the room. A chocolate-frosted cake and bottles of sparkling cider. Barker brought us here to celebrate. I said, “You thought this was going to be a party, didn’t you?”
Barker said, “You may not see it this way, but there’s good news here.”
Kya said, “But not justice.” She got up and left the room.
Suddenly all eyes were on me. Her mama said, “You’re probably the only one she’s going to talk to right now.”
I followed into the hallway where Kya had pulled her ever-present flash drive from her beneath her shirt, clutching the plastic in her fist. Her phone was in her other hand, and she was scrolling.
“I know you’re not okay,” I said.
She grunted, kept looking at her phone.
“So, what are you?”
Kya met my gaze. “Patient. #ParSecNation is still lit.”
I’d seen thi
s look before, when she was ready to slow-roast Florian. “Kya, you’ve got the crazy eyes. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking a year works.”
“What?”
“There’s enough unreleased Paris music on this drive for us to keep the Dark Nation satiated for that long. Then, whenever Winston’s back on the street. Maybe they take him for a ride he deserves.”
Images of his seeping red bandage flashed behind my eyes. What acts might the Dark Nation evolve toward in a year’s time? Yooooooo. “Um, Kya … you’re terrifying right now.”
“No. I’m hungry. Let’s go get some of that cake.”
And we did. It tasted better than I imagined.
I returned the Savant key to Miss Elsie. To make up for stealing it in the first place, I offered to escort her to the building and show her around Paris’s place. She accepted.
Through the lobby, past the doorman, up the fancy keycard-controlled elevator we went. The unhidden gleam of awe in her eyes. She spent a lot of time touching the things in the apartment.
“What was you and that other little girl doing here, Kya?”
The Blu-rays Fuse bought still rested on a cardboard box by the TV. “We came here to remember her. We watched some of her favorite movies together.”
Miss Elsie only nodded, then drifted into the bedroom. She stretched herself across Paris’s bed, pressed her head into the pillows.
“I’ll go wait out front,” I said.
“No, baby. Stay.” She sat up, dabbed at the corner of her eyes, before focusing on the open closet. “Paris always did love them shoes. Never knew why anyone needed so many pairs.”
She approached the closet, and I already knew what she wanted. She was Fuse-level short.
I said, “I’ll help you get them down.”
Three Nike boxes came down easily enough, but the weight felt weird. There weren’t shoes inside. I sat them on the foot of the bed and Miss Elsie popped the lid on one.
“Good Lord,” she said, then immediately began pulling stashed stacks of five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills free.
Opening the next two boxes yielded the same results. I went back to the closet because seven more boxes remained on the shelf. When we pulled them down, we found one more box of money. The rest were actual shoes, but still.
Miss Elsie backed away from the piles of money. “What should we do about it?”
“We shouldn’t do anything. You should keep it. She would’ve wanted you to.” Nothing in me doubted the validity of that statement.
She hemmed and hawed some more, and I decided arguing was futile, so I grabbed one of Paris’s pillows, peeled off the pillowcase, and began sweeping cash into the improvised money bag. An unstuck Miss Elsie followed my lead, filling her own sack.
We left the Savant—through the parking deck exit since we looked like comic strip bank robbers. In the Lyft home, Miss Elsie rubbed my knee and said, “I’m glad she had you. Even for a little while.”
The feeling was mutual.
School ended. As did my illustrious career at Cooke High. My senior year would be spent at Coral Oak Academy, which just sounded dumb to me. Were coral and oak ever even in the same place? Also, I didn’t love their whole khaki pants and sweater vests vibe. Ugh. I shall endure!
During that first week of summer, Dad had Suzanne summon me to his office. We hadn’t had a conversation since the concert. There was plenty of him yelling, and me zoning like some out-of-body experience, but not conversations. I was certain this sudden need to use his indoor voice meant terrible things, like when the water recedes all calm and stuff before a tidal wave.
He’d been behind his ridiculous huge monitor; headphone cables snaked from the audio jack. I took a chair that kept the monitor between us, hoping to avoid his judgmental eyes. He rolled his chair from its nook, around to me. No obstructions to save me.
“Has Andrea been in touch about something? Am I in more trouble?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
What was it like, then?
He said, “I have some questions.” He rolled back to his desk, tapped his space bar, and music spilled from his speakers. A custom mix. A sped-up version of the Star Wars “Imperial March” with “Ladies First” by Queen Latifah and Monie Love.
I was out of my chair and around his desk in an instant, watching the footage—my footage—of ParSec mixing on YouTube. Anxiety hit when I imagined the ways he’d find to be mad at this.
“This is good stuff,” he said. “I looked at most of the videos on this channel. All you?”
“I—I came up with the concepts. Suggested some things musically, but once ParSec got the hang of it, it was more like a true collaboration.”
“Your friend seemed very talented.”
“You have no idea.”
He clicked away from the video, pointed at the different rows on the channel’s main page. “You’ve divided these videos into different silos. Entertainment, educational, then straight promotional. Why?”
“I wanted to attract a variety of viewers. Some would be interested in hot music, others in actually doing the things that ParSec could do. Two kinds of sticky content. The promo stuff is more of a necessary evil, but I wanted it available. If someone came to the channel and clicked on a bunch of videos, they might be interested in spending money. I hoped it would create a sort of loop that kept ParSec on a lot of people’s minds all the time.”
“Wow, kid. There are guys with master’s degrees working for me who I gotta yell at to get this much thought and effort.”
“I pay attention,” I said. “So you don’t have to yell at me.”
“Yeah. Perhaps I don’t.” He shifted in his chair, opened iTunes, and queued up a song. “You loved ‘Ladies First’ when you were tiny. Two years old, in your car seat singing the hook like you wrote it. Took it to heart, I suppose.”
Mild irritation prickled my skin. “You loved it first. Then you didn’t. What’s up with that?”
“You’ve got it wrong, Fatima. Still love all those songs we used to sing, and all the stuff we used to do, but you make room for new things in life. New passions. No one is the same person they were even five years ago. Not even you.”
I scoffed, prepared to counter.
He cut me off. “Your braces are gone. You started having boyfriends. All of a sudden you and your mom talk about stuff I have no clue about.”
“That’s not true.” Was it?
“Right. You barely talk to her anymore. You’re almost an adult, and it’s cool. For the most part. I know it has to happen, and I made my peace with it. But, if I’m not preserving my little rapping two-year-old in amber so she never evolves, might I get the same courtesy?”
I never thought of it that way. Never considered having anything close to this conversation with him. Why is this happening now?
He said, “I don’t know if I have all the story about what happened to your friend, but this thought’s been nagging me ever since the night she died, when I picked you up from the police precinct. What if it had been you?”
My throat was suddenly dry. “Dad, I’m fine.”
“I know, but understand. Even with that thought in my head, I didn’t do anything to change the way things were between us. Because you were fine. Then, it happened a second time, and I hear all about how you’ve been around this man who killed his own kid”—his voice seemed scratchy—“and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer to fix whatever’s broken between us.”
He stood, hugged me. I hugged him back. For a long time.
His phone went off, not a call, but an alarm. I had the ugly, fleeting thought that he’d set a timer on our emotional moment. Glancing at his screen, he cursed softly. “Always a meeting, I gotta hop on a call in a few minutes.”
“It’s fine.” It was, the intensity here was a little much. “We’ll talk later.”
“We sure will. Think about this in the meantime … interning at the office this summer.”
“Seri
ously?”
“Sure. You’ve got solid ideas and a better grasp on modern social media than some of my senior staff. It will be good for everyone.”
“Can I switch up some of that boring elevator music y’all crank through the building?”
He mulled it over. “Maybe on Fridays.”
“Then I will consider it.”
On my way out, he called to me. “Fatima, you’re forgetting something.”
I turned and spotted my phone and car keys on the desktop.
“If you’re coming to work for me, you’ll need all your tools, right?”
I snatched up my things. “I haven’t said yes yet.”
Dad pulled on his telephone headset, switching to business mode. “You will.”
Cocky, bold, yet cool. Good strategy, Dad.
The odds were in your favor.
Having my phone returned felt like I found my way back to civilization after a decade on a desert island. So much to catch up on.
Like Florian’s trifling tail. Her ParSec Love Tumblr had gone quiet after one last story about Paula Klein mismanaging DJ ParSec’s money. That story got picked up by other interested parties—like more gossipmongers and the authorities. That wasn’t the trifling part. How Florian managed to snag bank records from Paula was.
Since the concert, Florian started several sites that seemed to scoop every major tabloid site when it came to news on some very specific artists. The Clutch Boyz. Olivia Merrick. Omar Bless. Her smaller sites still dealt in local gossip—but they were popping too with her spilling the tea on everyone. How?
That whole spoof the amphitheater Wi-Fi thing … our big way to get Winston … well, Little Miss Gossip Blogger must’ve retained access to more phones than we told her to, since we told her to only access one.
One particularly juicy piece of gossip involved Shameik and Olivia Merrick, who got to know each other a little better the day of the concert. #ShOlivia was a thing and the #MerrickMob was on board with it, for now. Olivia’s fandom was already showing some of the rowdier traits that eventually birthed the Dark Nation. Shameik would be smart to treat that girl right. Or else.
