I can’t draw worth shit, but I spend the next couple weeks sketching the same picture of a boy with a low fade and a wide nose, flat like a pug’s, standing in front of a black hole, one leg engulfed in dark matter, the other in the light. It’s been yet another failed experiment to distract myself, to worry less about whether Officer Monster will get indicted and put in jail for what he did.
I’ve tried everything, even drowning myself in my music, but nothing seems to work—nothing seems to stop the grief from grabbing me by the throat and choking the oxygen right out. I almost think that I get worse as each day passes. I sleep. I wake. I sleep. I wake. And I keep on doing that until they seem to become one and the same.
All my days are a hazy, unhappy mess inside my fragmented home, and outside my window, where real life waits in all of its shadows, the sun getting consumed by the hand of the night, I see white people walking happily down the street and it’s a goddamn aching punch in the gut of something people like me don’t quite yet have: freedom.
I wake up and eat my Lucky Charms slowly. I wake up wondering how many mornings and nights I’ve got left. I wake up trying to convince myself that it was all just a dream. But this only brings more grief. Because this shit isn’t a dream, man.
One day my brother was here, and then the next, he wasn’t.
And it’s such a strange and depressing thing to wonder how many days it’ll take for Mama to stop kissing Tyler’s urn. How long it’ll take for her to stop talking to it in the morning and at night.
My Mondays become Wednesdays and my Wednesdays become Fridays and my Fridays become Mondays again. At least, that’s the way it seems. Time has become such an agonizing thing to bear. There’s only this moment right now, the next one, and the one after that. And I realize that the saying was bullshit all along. Time does not heal. It only anesthetizes.
Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays are days that I spend with Faith. And it’s so nice to have her around. Her presence, though it comes in tiny doses, is like a drink that I down to blur out all the bad things that have happened in my life.
Faith’s also teaching me how to be the only child, which guts me as much as it dulls all this hurt. But I find ways to turn the hurt into anger and the anger into lonely and the lonely into busy, even if it means trying to push through the pointless schoolwork Ms. Tanner drops off at my house every day and drawing shitty-ass stick figures and black blotches of ink.
Faith is doing work for her college one Monday night, flipping through a textbook. I sit on the edge of her bed, watching her, trying not to think about the fact that I have to get my application done since I got an extension, and I don’t think I’ll be able to. Isn’t it fucked up that my brother is gone, and I might get to go to MIT because I fit the kind of black boy category they’re looking for?
“What’re you thinking about?” Faith asks, glancing up from her book.
“Nothing,” I lie. She waits, and I let out a sigh. “Just about college. What I’m going to do.”
“You’re still being considered for MIT, right?”
I shrug. “Yeah.”
“You seem so excited about that,” she says with a small smile.
And the thing is, once upon a time, I really did think I was excited about it. “I used to be. Not so much anymore.”
She closes her textbook. “Why not?”
“Because of everything. Tyler. I don’t know.”
“It can be hard to feel like you’re moving on with your life. After Kayla died, I felt like I didn’t have the right to go to school or anything like that.”
I’m nodding, my eyes tearing up. I’m so fucking sick of crying.
She puts a hand on my knee. “You don’t have to feel guilty.”
“You know, before he died, I told him that he didn’t have to do what was expected of him. Everyone looks at us and expects us to be into the drug life because we’re black, and I told him he didn’t have to go down that path. But I’m doing the same thing, in a way. Applying to MIT just because people say that’s the best school to go to.”
She opens her textbook again. “Sounds to me like you’re not actually that excited about MIT.”
When I get home, I tear open an Oatmeal Creme Pie and stare at my computer screen, looking at MIT’s website. And I exit out. Open up another tab and start looking at other colleges. Best schools to double-major in science and African-American history. Historically Black Colleges and Universities, like Howard University, where a lot of famous black people went. Taraji P. Henson, Chadwick Boseman, Diddy, Zora Neale Hurston, and even Thurgood Marshall.
My bedroom door creaks open.
“Hey.” Mama smiles warmly at me. She’s wearing a black-and-white sundress. “You’ve got a visitor.”
I feel my eyebrows furrow. “Who is it?”
She places a hand on her hip.
I minimize my tabs and lift myself up to go check, walking down the hall and into the kitchen. A girl is sitting at the table, but she stands as soon as I walk in, chair scraping back against the tile. It’s the girl from the hearing, Daphne, with a sweet potato pie in her hands.
She has a look in her eyes like she’s hugging me in her head.
“What’re you doing here?” I say, and immediately regret how rude I sound—but I don’t like reminders of Tyler, don’t like reminders of the hearing. And a part of me is pissed at Daphne, too—for being there, for being the last person to see Tyler alive besides his murderer, for just filming and not doing anything to stop it.
But I know it wasn’t her fault. If she’d tried to stop the officer, she might’ve gotten killed, too, and no one would’ve ever seen the video. Mama and I might still not have any idea what happened to Tyler.
She clears her throat, looking a little nervous. “I just want to say… I’m sorry,” she says. “I would’ve stopped by sooner, but I didn’t want to barge in while you’re grieving.” There’s a pause and then she adds, “I wish I could say I don’t know how you feel.”
I still can’t say anything back. I look down at the floor.
“I lost my cousin to police violence,” she says. Mama stands at the kitchen doorway, staying quiet—so quiet, hands folded in front of her.
I just stand here like a deer in headlights, counting the length of my breaths. In my head, I tell her I’m sorry, but I can’t say any words out loud. And it’s like she understands.
Daphne starts walking closer to me, her arms falling to her sides. “Her name was Jasmine. She was only sixteen.” She pauses and her fists clench. “We grew up together, y’know? And our mamas was just as close as us. Always smoking and gossiping together. Like all the other black kids in our hood, we grew up hearing the horror stories, but it always seemed like just a nightmare—not something real. But when we lost Jaz, that was when it finally hit me that it’s all real.”
I nod at her, swallowing the lump in my throat.
She keeps talking. “My pops used to warn us about the police. He used to say, like all things in the world, there are good ones and bad ones. He used to say get a good look at the cop’s face ’cause that makes all the difference. He used to say memorize the badge number or the license plate number. That’s why I recorded what I saw after the party. Video footage seems like the only way people will even hear us sometimes.”
I nod once again, almost whispering, Yeah. The only thing I can bring myself to say back is “How did you find me?”
And she replies, “You’re famous. Not the good kind of famous, of course, but it wasn’t that hard to find you.”
Mama invites Daphne to stay awhile and then makes us dinner—and I mean a real dinner. Ever since Tyler died, there’ve been donations coming in from all over. Enough money, Mama says, to even send me to school. It won’t bring him back, but it helps. We have fried catfish with hot sauce and macaroni and cheese. But the whole time, Mama and I keep exchanging looks as if we’re reading each other’s thoughts, because the seat where Tyler often sat is filled for at least a little while. And I’m not so sure whether that little while comforts Mama or breaks her on the inside.
Just last week, we had a vigil for Tyler. Faith, Ivy, and G-mo helped set everything up. It was in the park, and it had just stopped raining for the first time in three days, and it looked like the sky had literally fallen onto the earth. Everything was pitch-black, but scattered in random places were little lights—candles. On one of the benches, we had flowers and pictures of Tyler. It looked like the whole community showed up—strangers with Black Lives Matter posters, strangers with the thoughts of buried relatives weighing heavily on their shoulders. Strangers holding signs with names of black victims on them, and Tyler’s in big fat letters. There were people from Sojo High there, too.
Auntie Nicola even called me up because she knew I was taking everything particularly hard, and reminded me that vigils are sort of like funerals, but they’re to celebrate life, not death.
That whole night, until the sun slipped out from some hidden crack, we all prayed. We prayed for grace, we prayed for mercy, we prayed for change, we prayed for guidance, we prayed for one another, we prayed for protection, and we prayed for justice.
Every damn day for what feels like forever, I check the mail, hoping to find something about the judge’s decision from the hearing. And then one day, there’s a letter waiting with Mama’s name on it in the mailbox. The yellow envelope has big red print and was sent from the hearing’s judge and the state. The letter shocks the shit out of me, and I call Mama over. She tears it open, hands trembling, and I know her heart’s probably beating just as hard as mine. We read the letter together, and the judge writes that they’re going to take the case further so that there’ll be a trial.
Mama puts the letter on the fridge, a Bo-Bo’s gas station magnet holding it in place. And we keep carrying on as best we can with fake smiles. Maybe they’re not even smiles. Imagine being sucker punched in the face every morning and smiling about it. I guess it’s not a smile at all. It’s just that you force all the muscles in your face to create the illusion of happiness.