The officer peered at the house—the large, mansion-like house—and sucked on his teeth. “Mind if I see some ID?”
* * *
There was a police officer standing on her front lawn. And a tall, broad black man. And…Camille squeezed her eyes shut. Then opened them again, unable to believe what she was seeing.
“What’s my teacher doing here?” Paige exclaimed.
“That’s Darius!” Taylor flung open the car door before Camille had a chance to pull to a complete stop in the driveway. She ran up to the police officer while a few paces away, the black man—the black boy?—stood frozen in place, his hands raised like he’d done something wrong.
Had they caught the prowler?
Was he about to break into their house and the police arrived in the nick of time? But then, Taylor had shouted a name. Darius.
Darius. Darius Jones, Crystal Ridge’s new quarterback. The kid who took Cody’s spot on the football team. The kid who was winning Crystal Ridge more games than they’d won in years. Anaya’s younger brother. He was at their house. Miss Jones was at their house. A police officer was at their house.
“Wait here,” Camille told Austin and Paige, then hurried out after her eldest.
“He shouldn’t have to show you an ID,” Taylor exclaimed. “He’s a friend from school.”
Heat flooded Camille’s cheeks. She had never in her life heard Taylor speak rudely to another adult. To her, yes. Taylor treated her rudely all the time. But another grown-up? Never. Certainly not to a police officer.
“What’s going on here?” Camille demanded.
The officer looked a little bashful, a little uncertain as he stood there holding a woman’s purse. “Do you live here, ma’am?”
“Yes. This is my house. This is my lawn. My name is Camille Gray.”
“Well, Ms. Gray, we received a concerned phone call about a half hour ago. I came to check things out.”
Camille looked around the houses in her cul-de-sac. How many of her neighbors were looking out their windows right now, staring at the scene unfolding on the front lawn? They had become the neighborhood spectacle, and the boy—this boy her daughter called a friend—was still standing there with his hands in the air.
She wanted to yell at him to put them down. For goodness’ sake, if he really was her daughter’s friend, he had no reason to stand there in such a guilty manner. But then she saw his eyes.
In every mind, there was a camera, and there were moments in life when that camera clicked and a memory was captured like a photograph. Camille knew without knowing how she knew that this was an image she would remember forever. When she was arthritic and gray with age-spotted hands, she would be able to pull the photograph from her memory and see the police officer with the purse, Paige’s second grade teacher, the flashing lights of the cruiser as her wide-eyed children stared out from the backseat of her Highlander, and the teenage boy with his hands lifted and a world of fear raging in his eyes.
“Well, sir, there’s nothing to be concerned about here. Whoever made the phone call must’ve been mistaken. This boy is my daughter’s friend.”
The officer nodded. Then he handed the purse to Anaya.
He offered a polite apology—to Camille, not to them—and drove away, his lights no longer flashing.
Anaya was tight lipped and gray. She wouldn’t meet Camille’s eyes. She didn’t offer an explanation. She didn’t say hi to Paige. She took her brother firmly by his elbow and pulled him toward her car on the street, its driver-side door hanging open.
And just like that, they were gone.
Austin and Paige scrambled out of the car.
Paige’s eyes were bright with excitement. Twenty-minutes ago they’d been streaming with tears. All because Camille told her she would have to write an apology note to Jubilee.
“She never apologized to me for screaming and spitting at my birthday party,” Paige had said.
“Maybe she should have,” Camille said back. “But I’m not Jubilee’s mother. I’m your mother.”
Paige had jutted her chin in such a perfect impersonation of Taylor that Camille saw her future flash before her eyes. Another hostile teenager under her roof, waiting to happen. “It’s not fair,” she grumbled.
Well, tough cookies. Life isn’t fair.
Camille had bitten her tongue. It wasn’t the time to start quoting her father. “When you hurt someone, Paige, you apologize. End of story. And today, you hurt Jubilee.”
That was when the waterworks began. That was when Paige started begging for her daddy and Taylor made snide comments under breath.
“She’s just trying to get out of it.”
“I am not!” Paige shot back.
Now that same weeping eight-year-old stood in the driveway, her eyes completely dry. “What was my teacher doing here?”
Camille looked at Taylor, who was staring at the place Anaya’s car had been. Her cheeks were pink, almost red. “Taylor?” she said. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you know he was coming over?”
“No.”
“He didn’t text you or—”
“I told you, my phone is dead.”
Camille rubbed her neck. “Darius Jones. He’s the football player, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know the two of you were friends.”
“Do you need a list?”
Camille swallowed. She would not blow up. She would not blow up.
“We have French class together.”
“French class. So…is he who you’ve been meeting at the library all these evenings?”
“It hasn’t been all these evenings.” But Taylor’s blush grew more pronounced.
Her daughter liked him.
Camille could tell that her daughter liked Darius Jones, the boy who had taken Cody’s spot on the football team. Maybe this was why she said no to Cody’s homecoming proposal. “Are you going to the homecoming dance together?”
“We’re just friends, Mom, okay? But don’t worry, I’m sure after tonight he won’t speak to me ever again.” With that, she marched to the car, hit the button on the garage door opener, and stomped inside.
Thirty-Six
When Anaya was six, she ran in a toy store. She was always running, even then. That day, she took off out of nowhere for no particular reason other than she was bursting with excitement. Christmas was in twenty-seven days, and Mama had a baby in her belly—a real live baby—and Daddy was letting her pick out a gift for ReShawn. She felt the tickle in her legs, so she ran.
Daddy yelled. He yelled so frighteningly loud, her six-year-old body skidded to a dead stop.
When she turned around, she was certain he was gonna be fuming mad. How many times did he and Mama have to tell her, no running in the house? What in tarnation would make her think a toy store was any different?
Only when she turned around, Daddy wasn’t mad.
Daddy looked frightened.
He came to her, got down on his knee so they were eye to eye, then took her by the shoulders and said, “You don’t ever run inside a store. Do you hear me?”
“Why not, Daddy?” she’d asked, even though she sorta knew. If she ran inside, she could get hurt. She could bang her knee or bump her head or break something that wasn’t supposed to be broke, like those little glass figurines Granny kept in her living room window. The ones that made rainbows on the walls.
Daddy gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Someone might think you stole something.”
Anaya didn’t understand. She would never steal. The Bible said stealing was sinful. It was right there in the Ten Commandments. Thou shall not steal. So why would anyone think she would? She didn’t get it.
Until slowly, over the years, she did.
Like
the time the police came in SWAT gear and raided the neighbor’s house at one in the morning, dragging Latrell out into the yard. The commotion woke everyone in the neighborhood. Porch light after porch light flooded the darkness while Anaya and the rest of her family watched out the window—helpless to do anything as those officers roughed up Latrell and his mama screamed and screamed in her nightgown.
“Don’t hurt my baby. Don’t hurt my baby. Please don’t shoot my baby.”
They tased her. Then they roughed her up too.
A white cop and a black cop. Partners in law.
All for a bag of weed plenty of white kids carried in their backpacks.
Darius had been eight. He tried to watch, but Mama pulled him away. She brought him into the living room and held him close and yelled at Daddy to get Anaya away from that window. But Daddy couldn’t pull himself away. How was he supposed to pull Anaya?
It rattled her for months after.
It rattled her still today as she sat in her bedroom, with Mama gone at her night class and Granny watching a rerun of Black-ish on the living room television. Anaya had just gotten off the phone with ReShawn. She told her what happened. She thought talking about it would help. But Anaya still trembled. She kept thinking about the way she handed over her purse, even though she knew it was a violation of her rights. That officer needed a warrant. But she also knew that if she told him so, he’d take her and Darius to the station and get one. It was easier—safer—to hand it over. When he started pawing through her things, he might as well have been pawing her.
But she just stood there, trembling like she trembled now.
Until Camille Gray pulled into her driveway and Taylor ran over to the officer, upset and unafraid, because why would she be afraid? Her little brother would never turn into a hashtag. That didn’t happen in the world in which she lived.
But Darius?
Anaya closed her eyes. The tears still gathered. They pooled in the corner, and one tumbled down her cheek.
She was a freshman in college when Tamir Rice was shot down by a police officer. Darius was twelve, the same age as Tamir. When she heard the news, she felt the same exact way she’d felt all those years ago, when she watched the police drag Latrell and his mama out the house next door—a helpless, cold feeling deep, deep down in her bones.
She followed the story like a woman obsessed while her classmates and teammates went on with life like nothing horrible had happened.
It made Anaya’s heart rage. Because why? Why weren’t they angry? Why weren’t they livid? Why weren’t any of them demanding justice? He was twelve. Only twelve. And he was shot down dead by a police officer in a two-second span that killed first and cared later. He bled there in the snow for four minutes. Four minutes while those officers stood and did nothing. They shot him down, and they let him bleed alone and scared, all because he had a toy gun that boys across the country played with every day.
“He was reaching for it, though,” her roommate said.
Yeah, and twelve-year-old kids threw rocks at cars too. Because twelve-year-old kids were kids, and sometimes they did foolish things, but that didn’t mean they should be killed for them.
“I don’t understand it,” she’d told her granny. How could her roommate say what she said with so much indifference? She went to church every Sunday, for crying out loud. She said she was pro-life. Well, here was life. A precious twelve-year-old life. “Why don’t they care?”
“Because, baby, when they look at Tamir, they don’t see their little brother.”
But she did.
She would always see her brother.
Anaya walked down to her brother’s room, the floorboards of each stair creaking beneath her feet. There wasn’t a way to get down to him without announcing her arrival.
The basement wasn’t really a bedroom. It was just a long room, with a washer and a dryer on one side and Darius’s bed and dresser on the other. He gave up his own room when Granny moved in. He said he didn’t mind.
“It’ll be like my own Batcave,” he’d said with a wink and an elbow jab to Anaya, making sure she acknowledged his comic book reference.
Now he lay on his mattress with his head hiding under his pillow.
“Darius?”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even move.
Anaya sat on the edge of his bed and took the pillow off his face.
He didn’t fight her.
He just turned away toward the wall. But not before Anaya saw the tears. She set her hand on his shoulder. The last time she saw her brother cry was the day they buried their daddy six feet underground. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He took the pillow back from his sister and placed it over his head like a little boy wanting to shut out the world.
* * *
Taylor: U ok?
Darius: I’m good.
Taylor: You didn’t seem like yourself in class.
Ten Minutes Later
Taylor: I’m really sorry abt last night. That was super awkward.
Taylor: I wish I woulda been home when you came.
Darius: Me too
Taylor: Does your sister hate me?
Darius: Nah.
Thirty-Seven
Anaya slipped inside the back door of the youth center and headed to the room designated for employees and volunteers, where Marcus installed lockers last summer.
School had been uneventful today. Pajamas had been exchanged for sports jerseys on day two of Spirit Week. Between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Saint Louis Cardinals, her classroom had been mostly red. Nobody got a bloody nose. Nobody ran away. Nobody used a horrible word. There had been no encounter with the police. But still, her fingers were jittery as she twisted the combination of her lock, like aftershocks from the earthquake that was yesterday. When she finished, she fished out her small bottle of sanitizer and squirted some into her palm. She rubbed and rubbed until it disappeared.
Someone tapped her shoulder.
She jerked around like a woman ready to defend herself.
“Whoa.” Marcus took a quick step back and held up his hands.
Anaya tried to laugh, but it came out all wrong—breathless and high-pitched—and Marcus got that compassionate look in his eyes. The one that reminded Anaya of warm, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
“I saw you come in,” he said. “I wanted to check on you.”
“Why?”
“I heard what went down yesterday.”
“What? How?” But as soon as she sputtered the questions, her eyes went narrow. “ReShawn.”
“Don’t be mad at her.”
“Don’t be mad? You know what, that girl can’t keep a secret to save her life.”
“Why’s it gotta be a secret?”
“I don’t want it getting back to Mama.”
“You don’t think she should know?”
“Just so she can worry? She got enough of that without learning her son was profiled by the police in some white, bougie neighborhood he had no business being in.” She stuffed her purse inside the locker and slammed it shut. “He has a prior, Marcus. Do you know what that means?”
“Don’t go there, Anaya.”
But she did. She kept going there. Over and over again. If that officer had been on edge—if he would have felt threatened in any way—yesterday could have gone so much differently. And her brother, the boy with a record? The world would have thought he deserved it. They would have labeled him a thug and moved along like her entire universe hadn’t been shattered.
“Darius is fine. In fact, with the stats he’s putting up every Friday, I’d say he’s more than fine. I’d say that in two years, he gonna be Division I, full-ride fine.”
“And in three years, he could blow out his shoulder.”
Marcus twisted his lips to the side.
Anaya knew she was being negative. But she also knew and he also knew—more than anyone—how quickly a life could turn. A heart could stop beating. A tendon could tear in two. Love could fall apart.
“Are you taking care of yourself?” he asked.
“Do I look that bad?”
“You never look bad, and you know it.”
She tried to smile. She wanted to smile. But she couldn’t smile.
“Look. All I know is you work in Crystal Ridge all day. You come here at night. And then you spend every weekend shampooing heads at Trill’s. Nobody is gonna blame you if you back off, kick up your feet a little. Have a Star Wars marathon. Find a comic con and engage in some cosplay.”
Anaya slugged him.
His cheeks dimpled as he lifted his hands to defend himself.
“I don’t dress up in costume,” she said, giving his arm another lighthearted slap. “And the Saint Louis Comic Com isn’t until June.”
He laughed. “That’s gotta be the whitest convention in Missouri.”
It wasn’t a lie. If someone were to draw a Venn diagram of the black community and geek culture, there would be very little intersection, especially of the female variety. But the small pocket of intersection that did exist—in that space where fans grew up on superheroes like Storm and T’Challa and Luke Cage—Anaya relished. And Marcus teased. He’d always teased.
“So what,” she said, bringing the conversation back around to his original point. “Are you sick of me or something?”
“Nah. But I wanna make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m fine.”
And she wanted to be here. Not just because he was here. Not just because she felt guilty for betraying the district that had employed her father for twenty years. But because she belonged. When she volunteered at the youth center, she wasn’t an outsider. She didn’t have to function on two different levels like she did at O’Hare, where she wasn’t just a new teacher learning the ropes but the black new teacher from South Fork, constantly aware of how she was being perceived.
No One Ever Asked Page 20
