“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, Farrah.”
It was an out, because I felt like she might need one. My little thug kept going, though.
“Didn’t nobody take it serious ’cause she was sixteen and… you know how they label black girls. ‘Fast,’ they said. ‘Lil fast tailprobably off with some boy,’ they thought. People got a way of blaming girls for whatever happens to them. Anyway, they found her two weeks later.”
“Damn,” I said, useless with that tiny word. “I’m sorry.”
“Icouldn’tdo anything, but Ineededto do something. I went to the library. Checked out books with ugly covers, so I could read about why people do ugly things.” Her jaw tightened.
I swallowed, choosing my next words carefully because I could see the weight of guilt all over her. I knew that weight. “You were a kid, Farrah. You know you couldn’t have done anything, right?”
“No, maybe not,” she said, with a quick, hard shake of her head. “But I wanted to know… for another time. I wanted to learn what the silences and whispers meant, all that bullshit that surrounded us when she died. I wanted to be able to translate it, so I’d understand another time. You ever feel like that, Mekhi? Like you learned a language too late?” she asked, eyes searching mine.
“All the time,” I said, before I could pretend otherwise. “I learned money first. Then contracts. Then people.”
She tilted her head. “In that order?”
“Yeah. That last one should’ve been first, so I didn’t spend so much time not understanding.”
“That tracks, though,” she said, smiling. “You look like a calculator with eyes, sometimes. I can see your brain computing.”
“Cute,” I said. “And you like some glasses with lip gloss, looking all deep into everything.”
She laughed, the sound too sweet for the room we sat in. “A’ight, since we in here being fake detectives, I’ma let you ask me something. Real. Not one of your little smart-ass questions.”
I drummed my fingers on the table, looking at her. Shorty was beyond pretty. I’d known it, even when I hadn’t wanted toadmit it. “What do you do when you can’t sleep?” I asked. I don’t know why that was what came out.
Her smile surprised me, and then it softened. “I go to the kitchen,” she said.
“The freezer?” I asked, expecting a reply about ice cream. Women loved ice cream when shit was going on.
“Uh-uh. I make cocoa. It calms me down,” she said instead.
I nodded. It made sense—that shit seeped from her pores, and I was here for it.
“I think it tricks my body into believing it’s safe.”
My eyes drilled into hers. “You know you safe now, right?”
She shrugged. “So you tell me.”
I didn’t like that. I needed her to know it, to believe it. Protecting her had become a priority, and it felt like a privilege. Before I could say anything, though, she spoke.
“What about you?”
My answer was automatic. “I count exits,” I said.
I’d started after my father died during a break-in, when we ended up moving from one seedy place to another, including another one that was broken into. I always needed to know how to get out.
She looked around the little room as if to check for me. “How many in here?”
“One door,” I said, pointing. “One vent big enough for a cat, maybe. If you count the mirror, there’s probably a hallway on the other side. If I had to, the table got weight. I could use it to?—”
“Damn,” she murmured. “You do that everywhere?”
“Yeah.”
“When you start?”
