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Then I see my father break away from the group of officers he’s been talking to. I watch him turn toward the Pearson house. At first I think he’s studying the broken window, the red door, the cluster of police standing in front of the house. And then he looks to the side of the house where I’m still crouched near the ground.
As he begins walking toward me, he shouts, “Ali. Come on, son. It’s time to go home.”
Oh, my God. He knew I was there the whole time.
BETWEEN MY DEBATEanxiety and then the nightmare over at the Pearsons’ house, I am totally exhausted. I’m sure of this because when I wake up that weekend on Saturday, it’s almost noon. That’s incredible for me. Eight a.m. is my usual weekend wake-up time.
What’s even more incredible is that the members of my family actually let me sleep till noon. Maybe Dad told them I needed my rest. Or maybe they all had better things to do than get me out of bed.
I pull on my jeans. I check my phone. I open up Instagram and give it a quick scroll. I don’t believe it. I see…
Nothing out of the ordinary. Absolutely nothing. No more trash-talking posts about the debate. No more nasty DMs filled with insults and threats. But I do see a new message from Gabe. I open it.
I figured out who made that finsta!Gabe’s talking about that @AliCross4Cops Instagram account, the one with all those pictures of police and heart emojis, and that awful photoshopped picture of my dad.Came from same IP address as A-Train’s account. So I sent him an anonymous text message to shut it down… or somebody would start posting even worse photoshopped pics of HIM!
That Gabe. What a pal. What a genius. (And A-Train, what a jerk!) I’m happy the mystery is solved. I search for that fake account. Yup, it’s gone. I’m about to go back to scrolling when I realize, oh, man, I’ve got to be at a one o’clock basketball game in the church parking lot. I slip my phone into my jeans pocket and head downstairs.
The house seems to be completely empty. But Nana hasn’t forgotten about me. On the kitchen is a five-piece-high stack of pancakes and a glass of what Nana calls milk-tea, which, as you might have guessed, is a terrific mixture of half tea, half milk, and the perfect amount of sugar, “perfect” being a lot.
Also spread out on the table is a copy of the weekend section of theWashington Post. (If you challenge Nana as to why she can’t read thePostonline, she just says, “Ali, I simply prefer my news in a thing called a newspaper.”)
I look at the paper, and I immediately see why it’s been left out and opened for me to see. There on the bottom front page is a big article with a great big headline:
DC POLICE: WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Pancakes can wait. I’ve got to read this.
Wow. It turns out to be a kind of more sophisticated version of the same debate Sienna and I just had. Like our debate, it takes up the question of police behavior, but then—I am really pleased to see—it pretty much gives both sides of the argument.
I start reading. One paragraph begins, “Almost every DC citizen we spoke to was frustrated by police methods but also by the rising crime. Yet all agreed that the solution could only come from people on both sides of the issue changing their understanding and…”
Wait a minute!
Now my eye suddenly catches a different headline on a different article. It’s an article right next to the one I’ve been reading. It’s not long. Not a huge headline. The headline itself practically knocks me over.
THE DETECTIVE’S SON
MEET ALI CROSS
It’s written by someone named Gloria Torres. And after a four-second struggle with my brain, I remember that Gloria Torres is thePostreporter who came to our front door a few weeks ago. She’s the one who asked me about the First Amendment. And I told her what I thought, but… that I didn’t want to be interviewed. She said she’d be back. But I never saw her again. She managed to write something about me anyway. I begin to read the article…
Meet the brash young man who’s caught between both sides of the “citizens versus the police” debate.
Meet Ali Cross. He is the son of prominent DC detective Alex Cross. But young Cross is also a student in a middle school where valid complaints and disagreement about police brutality echo in the classrooms.
I am told that Ali strives to find the wise middle ground in this vitally important debate. And speaking of debates, just yesterday…
Suddenly my phone chirps. It’s an alert from the police scanner app. I guess Gabe reactivated it after all.
I pull out my phone and look down at the screen. There’s been a holdup at Garrison’s Sporting Goods, a great old store right near our church. It’s been there forever. Garrison’s is where my dad took me when I was six years old to get my first lace-up sneakers.
I stop. I think.
I’m really dying to finish this newspaper article.
Then there are the pancakes waiting to be eaten.
Don’t forget the basketball game.
