She passed me one side of the headphones. We stood shoulder to shoulder at the little listening station, the wire tugging between us. The recording was an old interview from the eighties—a detective pressing a suspect who’d been lying for three days. Farrah gasped suddenly.
“He slipped,” she said under her breath.
“How?” I asked, legit lost and confused.
“Pronoun. He said ‘we’ when he meant ‘I.’ He’s telling them without telling them.”
I looked at her incredulously. “You peeped that from two seconds?”
“From the way he breathes after,” she said, eyes on the suspect’s face in the grainy black-and-white monitor. “That little pause says a lot.”
I nodded because I heard it, too, now that she pointed it out.
“You always been like this?” I asked, when the audio cut out and a narrator launched into a dry ass explanation.
“Like what?”
“Breaking people and behavior down into pieces to make ‘em make sense.”
She took off the headphones and turned toward me, close enough that I could count the gold flecks in her honey eyes. “You scared? About my learning people? About my learningyou?” she asked.
Shrugging, I tapped the headphone against my thigh. “I ain’t scared of being understood. I’m just selective about who gets to try.”
She held my eyes for a minute, a little smile playing around her mouth. “So, why I get to try?”
“Who said you did?”
She rolled her eyes, that smile growing. “Boy, please.”
We wandered again, past a case of handwriting analyses, past knives and evidence bags, until the flow of the room spilled us into a small space that was an interrogation room replica. It had a metal table, two chairs, and a two-way mirror slick and dark on one wall. Someone had gone all out, trying to make this shit authentic. The overhead light was hot and harsh, and the closed door made the room warmer. A plaque invited visitors to sit, to see how discomfort and posture changed a conversation.
“You tryna play good cop, bad cop?” she asked, one eyebrow rising.
I sat, stretching out my legs. “Who said I ain’t tryna play lawyer and defend myself from your assumptions?”
She scoffed. “Definitely what I should be doing, all the assumptions you’ve had since day one about me.” She slid into the chair across from me and immediately pulled it closer to the table, leaning forward. It shifted us into a frame I recognized toowell. I had sat at tables like this, back when I didn’t know half the shit I did now. The memory ghosted over me, and I straightened.
Her eyes widened, tracking my movement. “You been in rooms like this.” She said it, not asked it.
“Girl, it just reminds me of a school principal office,” I said lightly, refusing to reveal too much.
“But it’s not,” she pointed out softly.
We stared at each other. The truth hung between us, so obvious that I had to acknowledge it. I sighed.
“Yeah, but you not from that world. You from… what? Libraries and debate clubs?” I said finally.
“Don’t play me, Mekhi,” she said, but there wasn’t anger in her words. “My family is one generation from the hood, and I still got family there. I know what sirens sound like when they approaching the block. I know what it feels like to wake up at family’s house and have to push a dresser against the door ’cause folks arguing outside. Don’t do me.”
“That why you study this?” I asked, meaning what the museum showcased.
“Partly,” she said. “And for my cousin?—”
She stopped, her mouth closing, her eyes filling. I waited. I don’t know why I waited; patience in conversations wasn’t my style. But something about the way she looked told me that if I moved too fast, she’d stay forever quiet, and I’d never hear it.
I wanted to hear it. Toknowit. To knowher.
“Mariah has… had an older sister. Marissa got snatched when I was thirteen,” she said, eyes going somewhere I couldn’t go with her.
