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Libby
22 Years Later – Police Brutality
Oscar ‘Oz’ Franks is my friend, my colleague, my trusted superior. But right now, as the end of our twelve-hour shift approaches and he refuses to stop wiggling in his damn seat, I’m about to take him the hell out and call it a workplace accident.
“Oz!” I swing out and smack his arm. “Quit it already.”
“I gotta pee.” He squirms so his belt squeaks against the leather of our seats. His legs are thick, his hips wide, so he takes up all of his seat and half of the gap between so the flashlight on his belt scrapes my arm every time I relax. “I told you an hour ago I had to go.” He turns left off of Main and onto a quieter street. “Seriously, Tate, I might just let it go and fill my jocks in a sec. You brought this on yourself.”
“For fucks sake.” I point toward the end of the street. “Go to the gas station and pee there. I need coffee anyway. There are only so many minutes I can stand sitting in this damn car with you without artificial energy to keep me sharp.”
He follows my instructions with a sly grin and a black ballcap pulled low over his whiskey-colored eyes. He speeds up a little, then yanks the wheel so we turn into the gas station with a sharp squeal of the tires. This place is large enough for six cars to be filling up at once, plus a diesel tank for hauler trucks, but right now, it’s half empty, and only three cars and a motorcycle take up space beneath the massive awning.
Oz leaves the engine running and the radio playing on some weird, soft jazz piece as he unbuckles his seatbelt and throws himself out the door. Hands on his hips, gun on his leg, he runs around the side of the building toward the toilets, and I toss my head back and groan.
It’s nine in the morning, and I’ve been with this man for twelve hours already. I love him to bits. I consider him family in many respects, and his wife and kids are the sweetest things. But twelve hours with an obnoxious Latino will send even the hardest of minds a little crazy.
Unbuckling, I reach across the driver’s seat, cursing my short arms, and pull the keys from the ignition. We’ll both be dead meat if I leave them behind and someone steals the car while I’m inside eating coffee beans.
I pull back and catch a flash of my hair in the rearview mirror — tied back in a low bun. It was neat when I left the house, so neat that the bear I was forced to call Miss Abernathy, my school principal, would almost be proud.Almost. But she was never truly satisfied, such was the foundation of our relationship for twelve long years.
When you go to a private school for girls, surrounded by wealth, and you’re there because your tuition is being paid by someone else, the whole world knows you don’t belong. The world knows you’re a poor girl in a rich girl’s uniform. They know you’re a tomboy in an estrogen-filled academy and wish for nothing more than freedom.
From kindergarten right through to graduation, I was in that same damn school, with those same snooty bitches, ducking beatings in the bathroom — because while they were petite and didn’t want to break their professionally manicured nails, they hated even more a poser amongst their flock.
It was offensive to them that I was a poor girl in their space.
It was disgusting to them that I refused to bend to their ways.
A princess is only a princess because of the tiara she puts on her own head; I refused to wear a tiara, and I refused to acknowledge the others who wore them.
Which meant I received my fair share of beatings between the ages of five and ten.
When I was nine, I met someone who told me not to tolerate that shit anymore. I think of that boy sometimes when I’m alone, or when I’m scared. Or lonely. I think of him when the news is on, or when I’m at work and the topic of dirty cops comes up. I think of him often, especially when I think of my mom. He and I both lost our mothers to the same crime, to the same people. The difference is, it took me longer to figure it out.
That boy — Gunner, whose last name I didn’t learn until I was long out of school — helped me become stronger. We met one time, and hung out for only an hour, but he made an impact on my life. He promised love and family, and I never forgot.
But he’s dead now.
That’s what I heard whispered across dinner tables and around corners. While he was running for his life from the very man whose bed was mere feet from where I slept on the weekends and holidays for eighteen years, I was stuck inside the club and left to wonder if he made it beyond the club parking lot. I was left to wonder, crying myself to sleep five nights a week at school, and sitting awake in my room on weekends, for fear that my father wanted to introduce me to the same end.
That boy was eleven years old when we met, and he was eleven years old when he died, and it’s rare that a day passes when I don’t think about him. He was just a boy, and they were men with guns. He had a letter opener and no sweater, and they had money and reason to want to shut him up.
I have access to computer software now that I never could have dreamed about when I was nine, and despite hearing of his fate, I’ve run his name at least a dozen times in hopes of finding him. It was a dreary, windy day twenty-two years ago when he ran out of the Hayes club and just… vanished. I don’t know where he was buried, I don’t know where his mother was buried. I’ve searched for a driver’s license in hopes it was all a lie, I’ve run him for traffic violations, becauseeveryonehas at least one of those. Tickets, fines, passports. I’ve searched for a mortgage, employment details, wedding licenses. I’ve run every search using both his mother and his father’s surnames.
That boy is gone, and a part of me wonders if he ever truly existed.
But he did. He must’ve.
Because after that day, I became stronger. It took time, of course. Everything worth doing takes time and patience, but it was because of him that I learned how to fight back. I learned how to block a bitch and fold her wrist before she yanked my hair. I learned how to stand up for myself, even if I was short compared to the others in my grade.
I was in fight-or-flight mode my entire schooling life, but they learned to give me space. If they left me alone, I left them alone. And though they didn’t like it, they knew they didn’t have a lot of choice; nose jobs were expensive, and though they had the means, they didn’t have the guts to endure a fist to the face and a broken nose.
I push my car door open when the smell of gas station coffee proves too tempting; the fact that gas station coffee is tempting says a lot about my mental health and the last twelve hours spent with the obnoxious Oz.
I slam the door shut and pocket the keys. Fixing my belt, I walk through the automatic doors and head straight to the back, toward the sludge machine… err, the coffee machine.
