A guard, officer, whoever, came around hours later with a premade baloney sandwich in a Ziploc bag. It was two pieces of bread and one round slice of baloney in between. I checked three times to make sure I wasn’t missing a slip of mustard, something, anything.
I held the sandwich up to the guard. “Would you eat this?”
He didn’t look at me. The cell door closed. The locking sound made my stomach flop, his keys tinkling away like little raindrops. It started to sink in that I wasn’t going home, that all the other protestors had likely been released, and I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. I crowded into the corner, making myself small as if the threat were the cell itself and not the people outside it. I remembered my dad. He’d be scared about my not coming home (Today? Yesterday? Last night?). Where was my one call? I went to bang on the door, but no one came.
I laid on my back, glaring at the ugly light. Rah had been in prison for six years. I wondered if Rah’s cell was like mine. Probably not. I’d heard Louisiana had some of the worst prisons you’d ever seen. Though I wasn’t sure what a good cage looked like. Maybe clean. Maybe a window. Maybe not a baloney sandwich that made a series of sour farts trill out of me that now I had to live with. Maybe, definitely, a window, not that it’d be open.
My dreams took on a webbed incoherence: Anwar running after me in an olive grove before disappearing into a crumbled, bombshelled building. A soldier forcing me to duckwalk at gunpoint. Me hugging atree that was also my father. Nia stepping off a balcony to fall but flying instead, gasps all around, her figure becoming Jay’s in midair, that figure becoming the sparrow on my driver’s license. Eating my plastic zip ties for breakfast. A small yellow-haired child skipping into the street, taunting, laughing, who was also the president.
I flopped awake, so confused about where I was I couldn’t even cry, the act felt too small for how I felt. It’d been over a day. I knew that because I’d been given three baloney sandwiches. A guard could walk in here and do anything to me and no one would know it. Righteousness briefly pierced my fear. I had rights even if they were treating me like I didn’t. When was this fucking trial? I wanted my call. I wanted a pen, to write. When I asked for one, the guard scoffed, “What? So you can stab yourself with it?” That was actually a good idea—I hadn’t even thought of that. She added, “You don’t get pens in jail.”
Then how the fuck did Martin Luther King write that letter?!
I began to cry when the officer walked away, and I saw a translucent cicada shell crushed at the bottom of her shoe. She’d been outside.
Forty-eight hours was a long time when you had nothing to fill them with. Was this how my father felt without liquor? An emptiness you stuffed and stuffed but that kept expanding? I was running out of daydreams. Horror stories replaced them: about people thrown in prison for thirty years because they couldn’t afford a good lawyer. The president had talked about sending American criminals to El Salvador. I could be sent across the border, and they’d say there was nothing they could do to bring me back, like the darkest disappearing act in the world. I was lucky not to have been beaten or shot on the spot when I attacked Ryen. I was in a cage, but somehow, I was lucky. I kept thinking that I didn’t belong here, and the revelation struck me, late—later than I want to admit—who did?
I tripped into an awful, ragged sleep, stomach rumbling, jerking awake a minute later. Light blasting. Hopelessness crowding my heart. I recalled how, days ago, I sent my mom’s call to voicemail, how, thelast time I saw my dad, I silently shouldered past him to get to the fridge.
And what did we really change between the lock-in and now? What good was it if, at the stroke of the wrong pen, it could be undone? What was chanting if not an empty prayer? What was protesting if not walking in circles?
That night I dreamed of my grandma’s house in New Orleans: a pale pink shotgun with green shutters, a porch with a white railing that looked like a doily, a small, narrow build like a country church made for a pair of dolls. In the dream, I’m a little girl again, trapezing down the hallway, searching for the stack of manila folders she kept under her kitchen table so I can turn the dream into a book. When I come hurtling through the arched door, she flings her eyes at me like emerald stones, and I know this is still my home even though I’ll never live inside it again.
Being held in a box is a terrifying but clarifying experience. What once seemed important is revealed to be so stupidly insignificant, you can’t help but look at your former free self and smile, laugh. Look at her! Torn between two boys, turning red when she tries to kiss that girl on the steps, always trying to have her cake and eat it too, as the saying goes. Look at her, on that fire escape, getting high with that crazy friend of hers, admiring the pretty rowhouses in the distance. Look at her, huddled over her laptop, writing her little books, deep in thought. That girl felt so far away from me then, but my love for her kept growing in that cell because, in those seemingly insignificant moments, she was the freest she’d ever been, the freest she’d ever get to be.
I was lying on my side when the door clanked open. “Get up, let’s go.” The police chief had made a call. There would be no arraignment. I was being released. I didn’t even know who the police chief was, but, whatever, thanks, man. They handed me my stuff like they’d dug it out of thetrash. Just like that, this particular nightmare had come to an end; it was too baffling to try to understand.
When I turned on my phone, I had a dozen missed calls and a text from the Democratic Party asking me for three dollars. Still nothing from Anwar.
There was, however, a terse email from the university: “You will not have access to the classrooms, facilities, dining hall, or any other buildings on campus. If you have belongings on campus, you will have 15 minutes to retrieve them.”
I was being expelled.
Stepping out of the precinct, the night sticky with heat, I calmly typed, “Fuck you, I wasn’t coming back anyway.”
My phone buzzed immediately. I thought it might be the dean, although the dean of the college probably wouldn’t respond to an email that said “fuck you.”
Instead, the alert was about the announcement of the nation’s biggest literary award: A biting, intelligent, timely, urgent novel about a woman who escapes slavery but who’s killed as soon as she finds freedom had won this year’s fiction category.No novel better captures this moment, said the committee.
Chapter 74
My mom’s car was parked outside the precinct. Legs unsteady, I walked toward it. She was asleep in the driver’s seat, chin drooping to her chest. I lightly rapped the window. She didn’t move. I tapped again. The last thing I needed was for my mom to have died picking me up from jail. I smacked it with my palm. She shuddered awake, bleary-eyed, confused. Swiveling her neck around to find me, she went from confused to completely pissed.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” she said when I got in. I knew this wasn’t a real question. She shook her head. “Your father’s on the phone. Talking about some white boy you let in the house.”
“What?”
My dad was already talking when I pressed the speaker to my ear: “… shoulda made your butt walk home. You lucky we ain’t make your butt walk home.” He kept saying this like me walking home would’ve been worse than being imprisoned and eating six baloney sandwiches. “And who the hell is this white boy at my door saying he lives here now?”
“White boy?”
I’d completely forgotten about Brad. Logging into my Craigslist account, I saw he’d messaged me saying he was planning to move in today.
“That’s our new tenant.”
“Our who?”
“He’s living in our basement.”
