She disappears into the crowd.
Call her when I’m ready, huh? I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for the shit that’s about to happen.
NINE
My brothers come home with a message—Daddy’s spending the night at the store.
He also leaves instructions for us—stay inside.
A chain-link fence surrounds our house. Seven puts the big lock on the gate, the one we use when we go out of town. I bring Brickz inside. He doesn’t know how to act, walking around in circles and jumping on the furniture. Momma doesn’t say anything until he gets on her good sofa in the living room.
“Ay!” She snaps her fingers at him. “Get your big behind off my furniture. You crazy?”
He whimpers and scurries over to me.
The sun sets. We’re in the middle of saying grace over pot roast and potatoes when the first gunshots ring out.
We open our eyes. Sekani flinches. I’m used to gunshots, but these are louder, faster. One barely sounds off before another’s right behind it.
“Machine guns,” says Seven. More shots follow.
“Take your dinner to the den,” Momma says, getting up from the table. “And sit on the floor. Bullets don’t know where they’re supposed to go.”
Seven gets up too. “Ma, I can—”
“Seven, den,” she says.
“But—”
“Se-ven.” She breaks his name down. “I’m turning the lights off, baby, okay? Please, go to the den.”
He gives in. “All right.” When Daddy isn’t home, Seven acts like he’s the man of the house by default. Momma always has to break his name down and put him in his place.
I grab my plate and Momma’s and head for the den, the one room without exterior walls. Brickz is right behind me, but he always follows food. The hallway darkens as Momma turns off the lights throughout the house.
We have one of those old-school big-screen TVs in the den. It’s Daddy’s prized possession. We crowd around it, and Seven turns on the news, lighting up the den.
There are at least a hundred people gathered on Magnolia Avenue. They chant for justice and hold signs, fists high in the air for black power.
Momma comes in, talking on the phone. “All right, Mrs. Pearl, as long as you sure. Just remember we got enough room over here for you if you don’t feel comfortable being alone. I’ll check in later.”
Mrs. Pearl is this elderly lady who lives by herself across the street. Momma checks on her all the time. She says Mrs. Pearl needs to know that somebody cares.
Momma sits next to me. Sekani rests his head in her lap. Brickz mimics him and puts his head in my lap, licking my fingers.
“Are they mad ’cause Khalil died?” Sekani asks.
Momma brushes her fingers through his high-top fade. “Yeah, baby. We all are.”
But they’re really mad that Khalil was unarmed. Can’t be a coincidence this is happening after Ms. Ofrah announced that at his funeral.
The cops respond to the chants with tear gas that blankets the crowd in a white cloud. The news cuts to footage inside the crowd of people running and screaming.
“Damn,” Seven says.
Sekani buries his face in Momma’s thigh. I feed Brickz a piece of my pot roast. The clenching in my stomach won’t let me eat.
Sirens wail outside. The news shows three patrol cars that have been set ablaze at the police precinct, about a five-minute drive away from us. A gas station near the freeway gets looted, and the owner, this Indian man, staggers around bloody, saying he didn’t have anything to do with Khalil’s death. A line of cops guard the Walmart on the east side.
My neighborhood is a war zone.
Chris texts to see if I’m okay, and I immediately feel like shit for avoiding him, Beyoncé’ing him, and everything else. I would apologize, but texting “I’m sorry” combined with every emoji in the world isn’t the same as saying it face-to-face. I do let him know I’m okay though.
Maya and Hailey call, asking about the store, the house, my family, me. Neither of them mention the fried chicken drama. It’s weird talking to them about Garden Heights. We never do. I’m always afraid one of them will call it “the ghetto.”
I get it. Garden Heights is the ghetto, so it wouldn’t be a lie, but it’s like when I was nine and Seven and I got into one of our fights. He went for a low blow and called me Shorty McShort-Short. A lame insult now when I think about it, but it tore me up back then. I knew there was a possibility I was short—everybody else was taller than I was—and I could call myself short if I wanted. It became an uncomfortable truth when Seven said it.
I can call Garden Heights the ghetto all I want. Nobody else can.
Momma stays on her phone too, checking on some neighbors and getting calls from others who are checking on us. Ms. Jones down the street says that she and her four kids are holed up in their den like we are. Mr. Charles next door says that if the power goes out we can use his generator.
Uncle Carlos checks on us too. Nana takes the phone and tells Momma to bring us out there. Like we’re about to go through the shit to get out of it. Daddy calls and says the store is all right. It doesn’t stop me from tensing up every time the news mentions a business that’s been attacked.
The news does more than give Khalil’s name now—they show his picture too. They only call me “the witness.” Sometimes “the sixteen-year-old black female witness.”
The police chief appears onscreen and says what I was afraid he’d say: “We have taken into consideration the evidence as well as the statement given by the witness, and as of now we see no reason to arrest the officer.”