PART 2

The Statue

Mom’s making smoothies every day now, like that’s supposed to save the world. She’ll knock on my door and be like, “I’m making smoothies,” and I’ll want to say, “Nina, you have no idea what I’m doing up here, do you?” But instead I just follow her downstairs because I know she needs me. It was while we were eating our special smoothies that I had this moment.

Our freezer is packed with bags of “triple berry,” like when the world ends we’ll still have power and all these bags of chicken nuggets and “triple berry” will just stay frozen forever. Our freezer was never packed until the virus, but now something falls out every time I open the door.

It’s like the virus is good for business.

So we do the triple with a fresh banana and some honey yogurt and a splash of pomegranate juice and I don’t know whether Mom only knocks on my door for smoothies because she thinks I need more Mom time, she needs more Zora time, or she just wants intel on her psychopath son.

“Do you think Zach’s okay?” she said.

“Zach is Zach.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he’s a psychopath, Nina.”

“Why do you always say that?”

“Psychopaths are everywhere,” I said. “I read that most CEOs are psychopaths and the only thing different between them and Ted Bundy is that Ted Bundy killed people with his hands and they use computers.”

“Where did you hear about Ted Bundy?”

“Netflix,” I said.

“I think you guys are both spending too much time on the screen,” she said.

“What if the screen can save our lives?”

I wanted to tell her about Delphi and MJ, how Buck’s real name is Mitchell John and he was Dad’s friend in the army and how she doesn’t actually know anything about her own life. Like how weird is it that I know my dad didn’t commit suicide but Mom doesn’t? I almost exploded right there while I’m spooning my smoothie into my mouth.

“How is that America has like endless food from all over the world but the countries that make the food are starving?” I asked.

“Why are you asking that?”

“Because I see all these pictures on MIMI of people in Afghanistan wasting away and I just wonder what’s going to happen now that we’re not letting anyone into America anymore.”

“They’ll still let the food in,” Mom said.

“Will the other countries still just keep sending their food to the place that hates them and kills them?” I said.

“Can we talk about something else?” Mom said.

I wanted to throw my smoothie across the room like Zach did with his plate. I get this chill like I did when he and Ethan said they’d predicted I’d come but how I hadn’t come because I’d run into Nicole because I’d taken that weird little break and decided to sit under Toast’s tree and look up at the white blossoms. The chill was definitely not from the frozen fruit. It was because I wanted to do exactly what Zach did and for the first time in my life, I really felt like he was my brother and maybe I’m a psychopath, too, but in my own kind of way. Like he’s the one who would kill someone. He’s the one who actually throws a plate. I’m the one who wants to, but instead takes a breath and changes the conversation. Like I’m the CEO.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me what you learned in the wilderness.”

“You want to know what I learned in the wilderness?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like the survival skills.”

“You thinking about becoming a prepper?”

“Or we can talk about the brown people who pick our frozen fruit,” I said.

“I need to homeschool you, don’t I?” Mom said.

“Why are adults so afraid of the truth?” I said.

“You want me to tell you about the wilderness? Fine,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

Mom looked at me in this way that I don’t think anyone else can, like she is looking into the mind of someone that used to be physically attached to her mind, like her umbilical cord used to send brain waves to me and like we still have this wireless beam between us but it’s weaker now and all she can tell is that something’s off, but even that is like having something that goes far beyond any connection I have with anyone else.

“You would think you go downhill, but I learned to go uphill for water,” she said. “We all need water but if you drink the wrong water, the water will drink you. That’s what they said to me right before they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming.”

“Why Wyoming?”

I realized as I said it that I’m just asking because the two words sound fun together. Why and Wyoming.

“Why Wyoming,” Mom said.

I could tell she liked it, too. Like talking like this is exactly what she wanted. Which made me both happy and sad because it’s like adults, if you really watch them and really listen to them, they don’t like to talk like adults. Kids want to talk like adults and adults want to talk like kids. They want to sing and rhyme while we want to know about the Black people the white people enslave so they can sing over smoothies.

“There’s more open land the further west you go,” Mom said. “If you want to do whatever you want to do, it’s harder to get away with it around here because everything’s so packed together, but out there, if you want to throw a teenage girl into the middle of a forest and not have to worry about her running out and telling some gas station attendant or some cop that she’s been kidnapped, then there are places in Wyoming where you can do that. There are these quote unquote ranches that rich people own and they go on forever and because we don’t buy our meat from our own ranchers anymore the ranchers are going broke, so they lease their land out to these ex-soldiers because we don’t even use our own soldiers anymore and so the old soldiers need money, too. It’s all about money, Zora. Follow the yellow brick road. That was something one of the soldiers told me one night when I was—when I was feeling lost.”

Looking at Mom, I nearly cried. I can actually feel the water in my eyes gathering and it makes me feel good even though I’m clearly sad because the tears might mean I’m not a psychopath. I don’t want to hide the truth from Mom. I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to grab her by the hand and run her over to MJ’s and tell both of them to stop being such children with their stupid secrets and just hug under the sun and start working together to save the world because that’s what dad would have wanted. But instead I asked this question:

“What did they mean when they said the water will drink you?”

When Mom clinked her spoon against the side of her glass, it sounded to me like a church bell.

“How do you know these things?” she said.

“What things?” I said.

She studied the black seeds that clung to the sides of her glass, not looking at me, running the spoon around the glass.

“That was how I got out,” she said. “I disobeyed. I did what they told me to do for ten days, and even though they actually gave me a water filter and showed me how to use it, I just went into this river next to this field of flowers one day and just started drinking the bad water and screaming at the sky. And so I got giardia and puked my guts out. I nearly died. I drank the water that drinks you. Except I knew I was doing it.”

“Did you want to die?”

Mom looked up from the seeds and licked her spoon like I was onto the biggest secret of her life. The truth. Like by asking the question that dodged the question I somehow got to the real question, which scared me, because I didn’t mean to do it.

“No,” she said. “I did not want to die.”

“Then why did you do it?” I said.

“Because I wanted to see if somebody a thousand miles away still wanted me to live.”

• • •

I saw a Black man die on TV tonight.

It had nothing to do with the virus.

Or maybe it had everything to do with the virus.

Aria said homeless people are more desperate than ever now because everyone’s terrified of touching their hands and breathing their breath. This man’s name was Thomas Church. He lived in Chicago. One second we were watching some movie from the 80s about some white guy going back in time to the 50s because it was Mom’s favorite movie as a kid and the next thing we know, we were clicking over to the news where they were showing these riots in Chicago where people were kicking out the windows of a McDonald’s and burning a police station to the ground and Mom said, “America, what in the hell is going on?”

They showed a video from three weeks ago—that some hacker group just leaked to the Internet—of four white cops from the neck down. All you could see were their white arms and their belts, and their guns dangling like dicks. The cops were walking around this corner in the middle of the day, and I got sick to my stomach before I saw anything because Aria is always showing me these videos of Black people getting killed and I almost ran out of the room because I knew it was coming, but then I thought about MJ and Delphi and how I was part of the problem if I was trying to banish the truth so I just dug my fingernails into my palm and leaned against Mom, watching as they approached this Black guy in blue jeans, a dirty white shirt, and a red head wrap who was just walking down the street.

They said something to him and the news bleeps out the “fuck” in his “fuck you,” and that was when one of the cops screamed at him to “get on the ground right now!”

Thomas Church just kept walking and all the cops for no good reason started screaming together and that was when Thomas Church turned around just to look at them, and you could see this baffled and tired smile. Maybe the smile was what scared the cops. Or maybe Thomas Church turned around too fast. Maybe the way his hands dangled made it look like he was about to reach into his pockets, but he didn’t have anything in his hands at all when they all started shooting. His body flew back around and he grabbed his stomach and then just fell to the ground, and you could see the blood blooming in his shirt like some kind of flower, but it was not a flower. It was another Black person dead.

When Mom switched back to the movie, I got upset.

“Go back,” I said.

“No,” she said.

“I want to see what’s happening,” I said.

“The country is falling apart,” she said. “That’s what’s happening.”

“That could’ve been Royal,” I said.

“Who’s Royal?” Zach said.

Mom looked stricken. Like our little drive to the Black side of town was a secret between the two of us just like Delphi was a secret between Dad and MJ and the future was a secret America didn’t dare share with the world. Mom turned off the TV and said she needed a walk. So while Zach and I watched the riots, I told him all about his grandfather, the racist, who sent his mom to the wilderness where she nearly committed suicide when she was our age just because she loved a Black boy.

• • •

Dear Dad,

It’s me. Zora. Are you out there? I just prayed for you to come back. I counted to ten and heard a bird on eight. Was that you? Are you a blue jay or a cardinal? I don’t know the difference between one bird song and another. I know what a woodpecker sounds like and I know from my biology teacher that they’re now studying the skulls and brains of woodpeckers to see how they can hammer their heads at trees all day and not get concussions and that they think woodpeckers strangle themselves inside to make their brains swell so the brains don’t knock against their skulls when they’re pecking, and they’re apparently trying to use this knowledge to build better football helmets so our football players don’t get concussions and that’s pretty much the state of America right now. Everyone’s dying of a virus, and we’re spending all of our money on football players and actors while Black people are getting blown away in the streets.

In other news, Mom’s on a date with Pastor Gary. I felt like you should know. If you’re getting this, you probably already know. Did she pray to you and ask? Did she ever tell you about Royal? How did you die? If it was suicide, can you please give me a bird song within the next seven seconds?

Okay.

I guess that answers that.

I met your friend. Zach calls him Buck which is I guess what you called him but I call him MJ. I asked him to tell me your middle name and he knew it right away so I guess that means he knew you, but I don’t know if I should trust him and I’m not about to ask the birds to give me another one of their oh so trustworthy answers. I just wish you were here. Things are so weird without you. I’m almost sixteen. Sometimes, when Mom’s not looking, I’ll pull out the cork from one of her wine bottles. I like the smell of the red more than the white. I’m not going to lie. I actually took a sip tonight right after she left for her date with Pastor Gary, and you know what I thought to myself? THIS IS THE BLOOD OF CHRIST. I am so programmed, Dad. I actually thought that. This is the blood of Baby Jesus. How many people become alcoholics because they think they’re becoming Jesus every time they drink? Speaking of Jesus, Zach and MJ say you used to belong to this group called “The Order of Melchizedek” and that you were basically Christians who believed that Christianity had been hijacked by evil people? I looked it up online and there’s so much weird stuff, but MJ said the fake Christians killed you. Is that true? If you actually try to live like Jesus, will they kill you? Should I just become a librarian or a cook?

Zach is getting really good at archery. He weaponizes his farts which is definitely not cool and the Kagels are building a gazebo which is not so cool, either. I don’t care if people want to have a gazebo, but when the world is ending and you only have so much time, why would you spend your final days building a gazebo? Gazebos are so weird. It’s like this building with a roof but no walls. The Kagels have a house with a roof and walls. They have a porch with a screen and a roof. They have OUTSIDE like everyone else does, which is, of course, space without roof or wall. But they feel like they need a small ten-foot building with a roof and no walls just so they can put a couple metal chairs, a small table, and a hammock out there that they’ll never use.

Okay, birds!

I HEAR YOU.

So yeah. I will admit: The hammock is pretty cool. Everyone is getting hammocks because of the virus and the mosquitoes can be bad, so maybe that’s the whole purpose of the Kagels’ gazebo. Maybe I don’t figure anything out unless I write about it. Like how many people stand at their windows watching their neighbors hammer and sand away at a gazebo and just build up nothing but hatred for them when, if they just wrote about their hatred, they would realize, ah ha! I want a gazebo, too, so I can swing outside in the breeze rather than stand at a window like a prisoner transforming the gloom in her room into doom for innocent people.

I think I’m going crazy, Dad. I keep seeing this Black guy named Thomas Church dying on TV like the TV is on instant replay in my head forever and I do not want Pastor Gary in our family. I think he’s a fake Christian. He’s always telling people not to feel guilty about making money which, I guess, is fine, but now I can just see it: WRITING IS ACTUALLY THE DEVIL! I need to stop. If I keep writing I’m going to start figuring out why I should love Pastor Gary and worship money and forget about Black people and why I should forget you but I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU.

SILENCE IS GOD.

Why, in my dream last night, did I run naked in the rain down a black road to a tiny stained-glass church where Aria and Pastor Gary made me eat a heart of fish gills and scabs?

• • •

Yesterday, in English, Caleb Entwistle asked Miss Moorefield why schools don’t require you to read the Bible. Miss Moorefield said it was because there’s a separation of church and state and we were all in a public-school system that was funded (“underfunded,” she said under her breath) by the state. Caleb then said his dad said we should be reading the Bible because the Bible’s the only book that acknowledges that the world comes to an end.

“The world is not coming to an end,” Miss Moorefield says. “But I think we can all see that some very serious changes are coming.”

She made a motion like a symphony conductor with her hand, like a Zoom classroom was a sign of the change, and Caleb got us totally off track by talking about his Dad’s theories, but then last night we went back to MJ’s and right there, in that bomb shelter of his, Zach was talking about how we were in the middle of the “fifth extinction.”

“It’s the sixth extinction,” Ethan said and then went nuts, listing all these animals that are just disappearing from the face of the earth.

“Have you ever heard of a Panamanian golden frog?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Well they’re gone,” he said. “And so is the great auk and the koala bear.”

“The koala bear is not extinct,” I said. “I saw one on TV the other night.”

The koala bear is my spirit animal, according to Aria, so I took it personally when Ethan said the koala bear was extinct, and I want to make a joke about how none of us are koalafied to talk about any of this, but this is serious because I know what Ethan is talking about. On that very TV show where I saw the koala bear dying in a forest fire they made this big deal about saving this one koala bear but how the species was “functionally extinct.”

“The world is coming to an end,” Ethan said.

That’s when MJ said almost exactly what Miss Moorefield said:

“The world is not coming to an end,” he said. “But we are about to see some changes.”

I got really upset when he said that. They made a joke out of me because I clenched my fists together and leaned forward, and showed my teeth and got all red in the face. They said I looked like a dragon. Like I was doing a dragon yoga pose. Which isn’t even a thing. But it’s not funny.

“Do all adults watch the same TV shows so they can know what to say to keep kids blind?” I said. “Where do you guys get these lines?”

“I’m telling you the truth,” MJ said.

“How do I know?”

“This,” he said.

Then, with two hands, he did pretty much the exact same motion as Miss Moorefield. Her little one-handed symphony-orchestration “let’s speed it up” gesture was exactly what MJ did, except he did it with two hands, but they were both pointing at the exact same thing: a computer screen.

“So when do humans go extinct?” I said.

This was the question I’d been wanting to ask from the very beginning, but I was afraid. Why did thinking about koala bears disappearing change things? Why didn’t I care about the Panamanian golden frog or the great aux and why do people call Great Danes great danes? What makes an aux or a dane great? Is there an average dane or an average aux?

“We can see about fifty years out right now,” MJ said. “That’s why you guys are here. When your dad asked me to take care of you, he didn’t say, ‘Show them Delphi, Buck, or ‘Buck, teach them the code.’ That’s not how the conversation went. What he said was, ‘Please promise me you will take care of my family if anything happens to me. He knew something was about to happen to him and he knew everything you guys are talking about right now. The changes are coming and I feel like taking care of you means NOT talking to you like everyone else does. I’m trying to show you the truth here so you guys can do something about it because I agree with what you’re saying. The adults have their heads up their asses and anyone who is trying to extract that noggin from that tookus is getting gagged or disappearing right along with the golden frog.”

“So show me how it works,” I said.

“Show her,” MJ said, and then got up and stood with his back against the safe while Zach took over the computer and typed really fast like he was showing off for Ethan. Or for me. I watched the screen like an idiot. I felt like I do sometimes when I close my eyes and see all these shapes morphing. Like what was that semicolon and that parentheses and that x and why would someone just quote the letter “F”? In English, you quote words, but in coding you quote symbols and the margins sometimes look like a flock of geese, like an arrowhead moving across the sky, and somehow my brother was a natural at this thing that is so far from natural. He could make the geese fly. MJ was wearing this black shirt with a white tree that was growing up and down, the root system not so much a mirror of the branches as like the outline of a face with a beard.

“What do you want to know?” Zach said.

“Show her the war,” Ethan said.

“What war?” I said.

“America is at war in like seventy different countries right now,” he said. “Nobody knows that, but Baby does and Baby says there’s going to be a big attack right here in three years.”

Zach was pointing to a green dot in the middle of the graph on the right side of the screen.

“Where’s right here and why are you calling the computer Baby?” I said.

“Right here is America and I call it Baby because it was Dad’s baby.”

“That’s really broad,” I said.

I wanted to see an image, a movie of the war that hadn’t even happened. I looked at the green dot and the flock of geese and felt like such a spoiled brat. I didn’t admit it, but here was my thought: Show me the trailer. I want to see a preview of the war, like that’s the way the world works. I hated that my brother knew more than me. I decided right then that I was going to get Aria to teach me about computers. If Delphi was my dad’s baby, then I needed to get to know my new sister.

“What do you want Baby to show you?” Zach said.

“What exactly can Baby show me?”

“Baby knows everything,” Zach said.

“That’s not true,” MJ said.

The old man on MJ’s shirt whose hair was a tree and whose roots were his shoulders and whose eyes were like sprouted seeds looked back at me like some wizard who speaks for MJ’s heart. I looked into MJ’s actual eyes and could see that they were blue like the ocean.

“Baby makes really good guesses,” he said. “But Baby makes mistakes and when the government took Baby offline, it changed everything. When people were relying on Baby for their crop data and their weather data and their migration data, Baby was giving projections. Good projections. When we removed all of Baby’s data because someone got scared about all the sharing, the data started to change and the news started to get even worse. But that doesn’t mean Baby’s god. What it does mean, is that what we know matters, so we better keep going in the knowing direction.”

“What does Baby say is going to happen next week?” I asked.

“Where?” Zach said.

“Here,” I said.

“America?”

“Orchard Chase,” I said.

“Orchard Chase,” Zach said.

“What does that even mean?” Ethan said. “Orchard Chase.”

“It means rich people chased away all the orchards,” I said, “and named the neighborhood after all the trees they chased away.”

“Baby says someone in our neighborhood is going to die on Tuesday,” Zach said.

Zach didn’t look like a psychopath when he said that. He looked confused and then like he’d just seen the last koala take its last breath in the burning branches of the last tree in Australia. And he wasn’t looking at Ethan and he wasn’t looking at MJ. He was looking at me. His big sister. Like for the first time this wasn’t all a game and like what was happening on TV was about to happen at home.

• • •

I told Aria everything. We were sitting in the front yard a little less than six feet away from each other eating pistachio ice cream and playing with this new deepfake app that lets you turn your face into a celebrity’s face and after two hours of being everyone we wanted to be, we got tired of it. But I didn’t want them to go home so I opened my mouth.

“Someone in this neighborhood is going to die,” I said.

“Everyone’s going to die,” they said.

“I mean this week,” I said.

“How do you know?” they said.

They frowned and I looked down at their pants, which I try not to do, but I don’t like not telling the truth and that’s just where my eyes went, so at first I half-lied and pretended like I’d just found this new app that tells the future.

“Show me,” they said.

“You can’t download it and only one person has it and my dad invented it and that’s why he’s dead,” I said.

“You need to start over,” they said.

I could hear Mom inside mumbling something to Zach about how his room smelled like a dead fish. I could feel it coming, her coming outside and telling Aria it was time to go home, so I suggested we take a walk. We left our ice cream bowls in the grass and suddenly I was looking at every gold lit window in Orchard Chase wondering which light was about to go out. Will it be a Kagel? A Jessup? A Box?

“Can you keep a secret?” I said.

“Look who you’re talking to,” they said. “That’s all I did for five years.”

Aria said that when they were ten they snuck into their mom’s underwear drawer and stole some panties. And then a dress. And then some tights and some makeup. And every night before bed they would put on their mom’s stuff and try to pray away being who they were, like there was nothing worse in the world than being sentenced to a life as an American man.

“Please let me be a girl,” they would say. “Please let me be a girl.”

When Aria’s mom found her things buried behind a bunch of sweaters in Aria’s closet, she actually didn’t get mad. Aria’s mom has a brother who’s gay and drove a car off a bridge in Georgia and nearly died because he was so afraid of telling his parents the truth. He ended up living, but was paralyzed, so Aria’s mom was like, “I don’t want you to end up like Uncle Greg. You can tell the truth.” So Aria’s the perfect person to tell a secret.

They were a secret.

We were walking by MJ’s and could see him in his kitchen window doing dishes or washing down his counter or whatever. I told Aria everything as we watched MJ scrub and because I knew MJ was dying and someone in the neighborhood would die that week, I just didn’t care about getting caught. It was life or death. Everything was life or death. We knocked on his door.

“This is Aria,” I said. “They can keep a secret.”

MJ smiled like he didn’t care about secrets and the more I think about it, the more I realize he’s never once made us swear not to tell anyone about Delphi or Dad. It’s almost like he wants us to do the opposite of keep secrets now that he knows he’s going to die.

“Come on in,” he said.

As he was moving the carpet and the coffee table, Aria asked if they could play his sax.

“Be my guest,” he said.

“They are your guest,” I said.

“This is how I’m going to die,” Aria said. “I’m going to get sick from playing a stranger’s sax.”

They smiled a crazy smile.

“Theydies and gentlemen,” I said. “Aria Kyle.”

They stuck out their tongue and then started playing that song we’d heard those girls singing in the window. MJ stood up on top of the door in the floor like he was a soldier or a baseball fan standing still for the Star Spangled Banner. Aria started low, like in this sad slow place where everyone’s alone and staring out of windows in fifty-story buildings on rainy days while nothing happens on the streets. I noticed MJ had a bottle of whiskey called Defiant behind his bar and a set of red glasses, blue glasses, and clear ones, too, and that his basement smelled like carpet and that carpet smelled like fake hair or fake hay, like this fried stuff human beings use to replace all the fur that’s gone from the earth. As Aria went higher, I closed my eyes and saw the sun coming out for those people in those windows in that city and felt heat blooming in my cheeks and heard birds hanging out on the bleached green head of the Statue of Liberty and this huge boat full of a trans marching band was coming into the harbor of Ellis Island wearing silk rags and a million silver bracelets and necklaces, blowing on horns and hitting drums and dancing like fools. The birds were happy and the Statue of Liberty turned the edges of her green mouth into a tiny bit of a smile, and I could see from Lady Liberty all the way back into the city where I was one of those people in one of those lonely windows watching the boat come in and I knew that I didn’t know how to play a sax like Aria and I couldn’t do what Zach could do on the computer or with a bow and arrow, and because I didn’t trust Pastor Gary, I’d never really bothered to get good at tennis, so as Aria was fluttering out those final notes, I made a big decision. Before I died, I was going to be the one to solve the mystery of my dad’s murder.

• • •

Dear Dad,

Mom’s coughing and wearing a mask inside the house. Pretty much every city in America is on fire. Aria snuck out last night and went to Washington and got tear gassed for breaking through barricades and giving the finger to riot cops and they weren’t wearing a mask and I wish I was with them. I hate Orchard Chase.

Where are you?

I saw this devil face on MIMI. It was a kid my age in Eugene, Oregon, using his skateboard to break the glass of this fast food restaurant and you could see the flames from some other building in the glass as it was breaking and it was like watching lava form and fall as it fell and then his friend gets close to his face as he’s holding his fist in the air in front of the next pane of glass and you can see him with his goatee and his wild eyes smile with the reflected flames of the world across the street just raging over his shoulders and I noticed I was smiling, too. What is wrong with the world?

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?

AM I JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE?

A MIRROR FOR IDIOTS?

Over a hundred and fifty thousand people have died in America. MJ says someone’s going to die in our neighborhood on Tuesday. Zach and I went over to his house last night to learn more about Delphi but we ended up just watching all these people going crazy on TV after a cop hit an old man in the head with the butt of his gun. MJ got tired and said he didn’t really feel like turning on the computer which made me even sadder because I feel like your invention is our only hope. Everyone is lying about everything. The Republicans are saying the planet is fine and the Democrats are calling the President and anyone who talks to him a Russian and the Black people are saying they’re tired of being tortured and killed and used as scientific guinea pigs and Aria says it’s all the fault of capitalism and Pastor Gary says it’s all because of people like Aria and brain dead liberals and piss-colored Muslims and that the Rapture is coming and MJ says you used to belong to this group called The Eleven who believed that rather than studying Christ in the Bible we should act like him instead? Is that true? Can I be the twelfth?

I don’t know what to believe, Dad. MJ looked really tired last night like an old groggy hound dog. We finally went down into the cellar and he showed me The Book of The Eleven. He said The Eleven refers to a sect of the Order of Melchizedek and the eleven disciples without Judas and all the men and women who have arrived on earth after Christ with Christ consciousness and how we kill Jesus over and over and over again, every generation. He said he used to think you were crazy because you were the best mathematician he knew, and you also believed in God. He said some things have to be believed to be seen. He said you gave him the book and that you said that “Christ consciousness is the truth virus and it always returns with its twin, the lie virus, and the liars will always kill the truth-tellers until the truth steals the grassfire from the lie.”

Were you part of a cult, Dad?

Was Jesus a cult leader?

Is America a cult?

Is everyone in a cult?

I asked Miss Moorefield and she did her Miss Moorefield thing. She said, “What do you think, Zora?” So I asked MJ and he was actually honest. Zach was punching the punching bag in MJ’s basement and MJ said, “Zach! Stop!” And he made us both sit down and looked at us with those hound dog eyes. “Everyone drinks the Kool-Aid.”

“What’s the Kool-Aid?” I asked.

MJ really did look like an old, sick hound dog getting its old, sick belly scratched so nicely that it actually was starting to cry which nearly made me laugh even though he was talking about death and cults.

“You two are just like your dad,” he said. “You want to know the answers. And there’s a cult for that, but there’s also always been a cult for people who want other people to spoon-feed them THE ANSWER. That’s where the Kool-Aid line comes from. Around the time your dad and I were babies, there was this guy named Jim Jones who basically thought he was Jesus and convinced thousands of Americans to believe he had all the answers. Even one of the men our community believed to have the mark of the Eleven started to follow him, but even he got led astray by this devil named Jones. Jones knew how to talk the talk. He even hypnotized the president at the time, Jimmy Carter. Just as America was starting to pull back the curtain on all the lies that still hypnotize us to this day, Jones made his move and killed the truth-telling wing of American Christianity. He prophesied a great reckoning. He fell into trances and wore dark glasses like Elvis Presley. Jones spoke of floods and visions of doom. He told his people that America was sick and that it was time to head south and leave America and build the promised land in the wilderness in the middle of this country called Guyana and when a friend of President Carter showed up, a congressman named Leo Ryan, Jones’s followers were so hypnotized on fear, that they killed Ryan and then killed themselves by drinking a punch laced with a poison called cyanide. The punch wasn’t actually Kool-Aid. Even that is a lie. But there are truths in the lies. We all drink the Kool-Aid of our cults and some cults are built on a commitment to truths and others are built on a commitment to one Truth and that one single white column of Truth is what your dad called THE GREAT LIE. Your dad referred to Jim Jones as the Judas of American Christianity, the great betrayer who used the truths to sell the lie. Your dad wasn’t scared of the doubting Thomas, but he wanted to banish the Judas. That’s why he formed The Eleven. He wanted to reunite Christianity with the truth-tellers. But it turns out you can’t just get rid of Judas. Wherever there’s a man in debt, there’s a Judas.”

MJ started to cough after he said that, like telling the truth makes you sick and tired, like he was trying to tell us everything before he died. It was like everyone was waking up and dying at the same time. Like the virus was the cup of coffee for the human race making us open our eyes really wide just before we close them. So here I am in our house with the windows open at one in the morning listening to the wind breathe in trees that look like brains on brain stems and the lightning bugs constellating the branches look like all the great lonely ideas of the world and I feel like you, Dad, had the greatest idea ever. How do I keep from drinking the Kool-Aid, Dad? Tell me what to do. NO. Don’t tell me what to do. Help me to see, Dad. Help me take care of Mom and Zach. Help me find out who killed you.

Love,

12

• • •

Dear Dad,

Aria is dead. The “patriots” ran over them. I’m in shock. Or maybe I think I’m in shock because I can’t feel anything except this awful hollow strangeness. They ran Aria down last night in the street and crushed them. They were sending me video the whole time. I watched everything on MIMI. Me. Me. Me. WE. SHIT. I don’t know what to say. We have people working on our roof right now because there’s a leak and mold (DEATH) in the bathroom and they’ve been pounding all day and I feel like the whole world is collapsing and Mom is coughing in between all the hammering and I just can’t believe that Aria is dead.

How did you know?

This is Tuesday, Dad. How did Baby know what was coming? Aria didn’t even know they were going to Washington until they killed those Black people after Baby made the prediction in MJ’s bunker. They say the president is in a bunker.

I wonder if he has a Baby.

Aria went back to the White House and just started filming everything. They captured this moment where a Black FBI cop in a red shirt got arrested for being a terrorist but then called the cops “Dumb motherfuckers” and said, “Go ahead, dumb motherfuckers. Put your hands in my pockets. Get a good deep feel of that. Yeah. You like that? Dig into that wallet and read what it says to the little young lady here.”

Aria didn’t say anything about being a theydy and not a lady.

They just filmed.

“FBI!” the Black guy said. “FBI!”

And then you can see Aria’s white hand giving him a high-five as the cops take off the handcuffs from the cop. Ten minutes later Aria was live streaming all this smoke and ash in front of the White House and was smiling like that devil faced guy out in Oregon.

“We are being digitally remastered!” someone screamed.

“I love you, Zora!” they screamed.

I sent them a billion balloon hearts.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” they’re all chanting.

And it was like, at that moment, right before they died, I finally understood what THEY means. I never really understood it before, Dad. After you died, everyone started calling themselves “they” and “them” but I didn’t understand, so I would just be like “she” and “her” when they would ask for my pronouns in class. I thought it was stupid when Luke changed their name and became Aria and I used to roll my eyes when they would make a big deal of telling substitute teachers to ask us about our pronouns. I thought it was all an act. I wasn’t any better than Pastor Gary. I didn’t think Aria was the devil like PG, but I thought it was all a performance. But then I saw Aria with all these other people, all these strangers, and I was like, “Oh, my god. They are all together. THEY ARE ALL TOGETHER. MEN AND WOMEN. BLACK AND WHITE. THEY. THEY. THEY.”

Aria stuck out their tongue at me through their mask. They were wearing their red and white “High on Stress” shirt and I wanted to tell them to cover up in black like all the protest coaches on MIMI were saying, but I didn’t want to seem like a mom so I didn’t say anything. I looked over at my closet right at my black hoodie. I wanted to steal Mom’s car right then and drive up to DC. I wanted to change my name. Aria once said that I was just like this girl Keviny who was named after her dad, Kevin, except I was like the feminine of Zorro. This is how ridiculous and selfish I am. I was thinking of sewing together a black eye mask and changing my name to Zorax as I was watching Aria die. Five minutes before they die I’m searching Google for Zorax and thinking, “No, that sounds like some kind of robotic dinosaur.” What is wrong with me, Dad? This was what I was doing five minutes before Aria died. I was searching for a new name instead of being out there with THEM.

US.

Am I the psychopath? Am I in shock? What do you call it when you feel like you’re a million miles away from everything that’s right in front of you?

They started to run. I felt like I was watching a hurricane of faces. Like The Wizard of Oz but for real. Or maybe it was more like a river or a tsunami. It was like a wave of masked faces running away from the White House. You could hear them coughing and cussing and howling. You could hear their feet like they were this huge ancient army brought back to earth out of a time warp. Aria turned the camera on themselves at one point and you could see in their eyes that they were so much angrier than they were afraid and in that second I could see all the shields and the helmets of the American cops and I could see the white cloud of gas and I could see that there were all these other faces that were more scared than angry. There was this woman who looked like she was too old to run. Her face was so white and she had no hair and I wondered if someone had taken off her wig or her hat or her bandanna and she was wearing a tie-dyed mask and I wondered if she was one of the last hippies.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Aria yelled.

I heard gunshots.

“Are those real bullets?” someone asked.

“They’re rubber, but they’re dangerous,” someone else said.

And it was MJ in the caption.

He was watching with me.

I liked his comment just to let him know that I could see him.

Did he know what was coming? He said you could see all of this coming, Dad. He said that you said that our country was being hijacked by fake Christians. He said real Christians aren’t afraid to die and that you can tell the fake ones by the way they use hate, money, and fear to stay alive and sell war to the poor. Right before the riot the president held the Bible upside down. An hour later and Aria is running behind this guy in a black shirt and a black mask and I hear one of those shots and I see hear this roar like a mechanical lion and see light sweep over all the masked faces and Aria goes down and makes this awful sound like a horse and their phone flies out of their hand and you can see everything for a second, like the edge of the black truck and a spin of colors, like a rainbow of confusion and chaos, but there’s not really any blue or red or green. It’s mostly dark gray and white and gold and then the phone falls to the ground and everything goes still for like a second and then it goes black.

How did you see it coming?

I AM SO SCARED.

I miss THEM.

I MISS YOU.

Love,

Zorax

• • •

Dear Dad,

Remember your funeral? Everybody came and nobody talked about the truth. Who started the lie? I remember Zach picking grass by the graveside and throwing it up in the air and the wind catching it while Mom stared down the street of the neighborhood nearby and only now am I wondering if she was wondering what her life might have been like if she’d ended up with Royal. Is that awful to say? Did you know about him?

Nobody came to Aria’s funeral except me, their parents, their brother, Alex, and the minister who basically said nothing. Mom told me I couldn’t go cuz of the virus, but she’s now quarantined in her room because she thinks she might have caught it from someone in Pastor Gary’s study group. I’m sitting here in my room listening to her cough and staring at my phone knowing I will never hear Aria play sax again.

I said to MJ last night, “Now we have something in common.”

He said, “What’s that?”

And I said, “We both lost our best friend.”

Then I had this thought as I was looking at all the labels on his soup cans. What if? What if I’d never walked out the window? What if I’d never met MJ and therefore never said anything to Aria about this secret world that was being hidden from all of us? Did Aria go to Washington to scream at the White House because they suddenly knew there was this whole world of secrets and suddenly wanted all the secrets to come out? What if neither one of us had ever heard about Delphi? Did MJ basically kill Aria the moment he reached out to Zach because if he hadn’t reached out to Zach, I never would’ve followed Zach to MJ and been blown away by Delphi and felt the need to show Delphi to Aria?

It’s like this idea we learned about in physics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The more you look at something or study something the more it changes as a result of the look, the light coming in or whatever. I brought this up to MJ who said, “I’ll say to you guys exactly what your dad said to me, “Run. Run like everyone else.”

He just sat there, arms crossed while Zach was basically in a trance looking into the future through the code on the screen. As my eyes were going back and forth between the soup cans and the code, I felt that you were giving me the choice: hate or love. Ads or truth. Propaganda or vision. Pictures of vegetables or this weird thing that might actually wake people up to the fact that we need to start planting our own vegetables. A can of Campbell’s tomato soup seemed like the devil and why am I thinking about the devil so much?

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what your dad told me,” MJ said. “Because, Zora, I don’t know either. Most of the people who have claimed to know all the answers have gotten the human race in a lot of trouble like that Kool-Aid guy, Jones. I’m not trying to tell you I have the answers. What I’m telling you is that I made your father a promise before they killed him and the promise was that I would take care of you guys. If you feel like I’m not doing that by telling you the truth, you are more than free to leave, but I did see some of this coming. When I asked your dad if he thought the good outweighed the bad on this thing, I’ll tell you exactly what he said. He said, “Buck, if we keep this thing to ourselves and keep using it to kill people, we’re going to end up like all those science fiction movies we watched when we were kids. But if we open it up to the public so they can use it to teach and build, we can save the human race.”

“So why don’t you just post it online?” I said.

“That was exactly what got your father killed,” he said.

Zach stopped typing. I stared at the tomato soup like you were in the soup can trapped behind the cursive of the letters and the image of the squashed tomatoes and like you were screaming at me to wake up. You were telling me that we all become soup. We all become the ad. The ad is like Aria’s high school picture framed on top of their coffin and this bullshit minister who says nothing about exactly who Aria was and how they fought to be free of the lies and how they got free before they died and gave their life for what?

“What did Dad want to build with the truth?” I said.

“Your dad wanted to build the new world,” MJ said. “He wanted to work with the Iraqis, not kill them. He did work with the Iraqis. That was part of the problem. They loved him. One in particular. They were risking their lives to help him.”

Did you fall in love with an Iraqi, Dad? I want to finish what you started. If they kill me, you’ll know it because I’ll be with you. Zach, if they kill me and you find this, don’t give up. Keep going. We all become soup, but we’re not soup yet. Right now we are so much more.

Love,

Zora

• • •

Lightning bugs look like jewels in the grass, like Easter eggs for aliens. Summer air feels like wet wool blankets. When the wind blows it feels like Aria’s breath and the lightning bugs are the coals and like all Aria wanted was to start a fire. A good fire. I was outside taking a walk with one single lightning bug named Aria pulsing in my hand when I ran into Nicole with the Black guy who was singing in the street back when Aria was still alive.

“I’m sorry about Aria,” Nicole said.

“How did you hear?” I said.

“Everybody knows.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt a billion things all at once and at the same time felt nothing at all. Like I was two people. I let the lightning bug go. Nicole saw me do it but she didn’t know what to say either. We watched it for a second as it flew toward the trees like a glow-in-the-dark heartbeat with wings.

Aria never had a hard time talking once they became Aria, but I sometimes struggle. I don’t always know what to say. I wanted to ask how Nicole knew Hubba Hubba, the guy who had been singing in the street, but if I really wanted to ask, I would’ve asked. I wanted to tell her that Aria died for the two of them so they could walk a white racist neighborhood street together without getting shot, but if I really wanted to tell them that, I would’ve told them. I wanted to ask Hubba Hubba what his name was, but I didn’t, and maybe it’s because I’m in shock or maybe I’m trying to learn how to keep a secret because I feel like the more people I tell about Delphi, the more people will die.

“My name’s Jabar,” the Black guy said, as if he could feel the question.

“Zora,” I said.

“Zora has the coolest name in the neighborhood,” Nicole said.

“I’ve met a Zara,” Jabar said. “But never a Zora.”

“Zara’s just a crazy Sara,” I said.

Jabar has a kind face. He has this little gap between his front teeth. It felt strange to see him talking after seeing him lost in singing, especially because I never would’ve seen him if it weren’t for Aria. I don’t know why I said what I said about Zara being crazy Sara. What’s the difference between a lightning bug and a firefly?

“My sister went up to the protest,” Jabar said.

“Is she okay?” I said.

“They gassed her and our minister,” Jabar said. “She said there were all these Black people pouring milk in their eyes like they were trying to turn white in front of the White House. But she came back talking about it like she’d just seen Beyonce. Like maybe we all need to go get gassed.”

Jabar turned to Nicole. Nicole shook her head and clutched her arms to her stomach.

She started to cry.

“I was Aria’s babysitter,” she said. “Back when she—when they—were Luke.”

“I liked Luke,” I said. “But I liked Aria better.”

“I know,” Nicole said. “But I’m just thinking about what a bad babysitter I was. Here was this boy who was going through all this hell and I couldn’t even see it cuz I was always on my phone.”

“What if there was a machine that could help you see all the hell before it came?”

“I’d buy it,” Jabar said.

“Buy me some new brakes first,” Nicole said.

They went one way and I went the other, walking toward MJ’s, but instead of stopping, I kept going past his white truck and followed the chalk graffiti until I got out to the road, and even though the whole city was on curfew, I didn’t care. Running across the median and into the empty parking lot of the Food Lion, I walked over the little tufts of weeds sprouting through the cement. For a second I just stood there surrounded by the broken pavement and the plywood in the windows of all the stores with graffiti, thinking about how sick and racist America is. Overhead I heard something. When I looked up, I saw a drone from who knows where, and I remembered Edgar Allan Poe and how uncanny everything had become, and I thought about how when Poe was alive there were Indians who called these lands the Shawanoa and how all this cement and plywood and graffiti used to be teepees and fires and if I were an Indian I would use my bow and arrow to shoot down that drone and maybe that’s why Zach is studying archery. To take down all the drones. But I don’t have a bow and arrow. Instead I just walked past the spray-painted faces on the plywood that protects the windows that protects all the fruit sitting still in the dark and as I was looking at the purple spray-painted word, “Amerikkka,” I sang this line from Sea of Love and I gave the bird to the drone, but I was really singing to Aria, telling them how much I loved them, and my bird was just a candle to that rock star in the sky named Aria Kyle.

• • •

Dear Dad,

During the storm last night our power went out twice. The first time I was in Mom’s room and she was telling me to get out because she thinks she might be dying of the virus, and then there was a click and a flash and everything went dark and her fan and the A/C went off, and it was just Zach down the hall yelling, “Come on!”

When he knocked on the door, Mom said, “No, no, honey, no,” but he came in anyway because we’re not going to let her die alone. If the hospitals are too afraid to take care of people, what kind of world is this to hang around for? If Mom dies, we’re dying, too. Does that make us like Jim Jones? Is love a kind of Kool-Aid?

“Just stay six feet away and keep your masks on,” Mom said.

I couldn’t even see Zach’s face.

Mom coughed one of her “productive” coughs and said, “Are you sure you want to know this?”

“I want to know the truth before we all die,” I said.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“It means tell us what happened to Dad,” I said.

Mom took a deep breath and then it seemed like the breath breathed back, like her exhale was traveling down a gravel road and coming to a really slow stop, with pauses and scratches.

“I have a couple candles in my top drawer,” she said. “There’s a lighter in there, too, and some pot. We’re not smoking the pot. But that’s what that is. Go ahead and light a candle.”

I opened the drawer and felt around. I’m not going to even say half of what I was thinking, but let’s just say there was more than just a couple candles and a bag of pot in there. I lit this blue one and put it by Mom so her face looked like it was glowing. Zach crawled into bed with her like a baby and she inched up the headboard like a snake afraid of a puppy.

Grabbing her mask and her glasses from the nightstand, she said, “I just want to see you.”

I wanted to cry watching Zach trying not to touch her. He’s not a psychopath. All he wanted to do was touch his mom before she died. He turned his head toward me with this look like, “Are you going to be my mom now?”

I tried to tell him with my eyes two things at once:

One: “Yes, I will be.”

And two: “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine.”

Is that why the world is the way it is? The lie of hope and the lie of fear?

I heard someone’s front door open or close down the street. I wondered if it was Aria’s parents or Nicole or the Kagels. I wondered what MJ was doing in the dark? Did he play his saxophone when he was all alone? Mom kept a picture of all of us together by the bed. You probably know this, or if you don’t, now you do. And if I’m just talking to myself, or if I’m dead and the police are reading this, here’s the truth of my life: I lived in Orchard Chase with a wonderful mom who had the virus and tonight she’s still alive and she once fell in love with a Black boy named Royal and she keeps a picture of Zachary, Zora, John, and Nina Box by her bed and she keeps candles and pot and other stuff in her underwear drawer because I guess sometimes adults need to have imagination time, too.

“What have you found out about your dad?” Mom said.

“Why do you have to start with a question?” I said. “Why can’t you just tell us the truth?”

“Are people talking about him on the internet?”

“Mom!” Zach said. “Just tell us. Buck was his best friend.”

Mom looked startled to hear this, like Zach had just slapped her across the face. I could smell the earth coming into the room, like the first traces of heat and night air were starting to replace the A/C. I stood like a guard over Mom’s body. I wanted to get in the bed, but for some reason, it felt important that I stand.

“What do you mean Buck was his best friend?”

“They were in the war together,” I said. “Now quit asking questions, young lady, and tell us the truth.”

“Look who’s taking over,” Mom said.

“You told me about Royal,” I said. “So now tell me about Dad.”

How is it that you can go fifteen years not knowing anything about the most important person in your life? Why do people wait until they’re dying to tell the truth? Mom stared into that little blue part of the flame at the bottom that resembles the thumbnail before you get to the white sunrise of the part you always have to cut. It’s right above the wick, where there’s no flame at all. The magic part. I felt that she was looking at you.

“Your father told me everything,” Mom said. “He told me about a chaplain named Oren or Owen and he told me about the device and the burn pits and all these people in DC who were terrified about the Chinese getting their hands on our quantum whatever, but he never mentioned a man named Buck.”

“What if he didn’t tell you everything?” I said.

“Buck knows Dad’s middle name,” Zach said.

“Any creep from the internet can find out anything about anyone. Do I need to call the police on him?”

“What exactly did Dad tell you about the device?” I said.

Mom took off her mask and then put it back on. Immediately I knew that Buck was telling us the truth. They call this a ‘tell’ in poker or a ‘reveal.’ She pulled down the mask, showed us her lips and then she put the mask back on and it was like a diaper for her mind, something to keep the truth from leaking out. I got chills on my arms.

“Delphi,” she said.

She didn’t say it like a question. She said it like an answer. Like we’d tortured it out of her. Like her own children had put her up against a wall in the dark and confronted her at death’s doorstep. Reaching over to the nightstand, she pulled the candle closer so we could see more of her face, or so she could see more of us, or maybe so she could be closer to you.

Mom said she thought you were going crazy. She said for the last year of your life, she knew you were keeping a secret, but read the whole thing wrong, and just as she was saying that, she paused, like she was about to say something and just hung there in midair on this thought breath so I gave her this look that said, “Don’t keep doing it. This is what everyone in the world is doing and has been doing for a million years. Don’t do this. Just tell the truth.”

“Okay,” she finally said. “You two want to know?”

You remember how you used to let us curl up on you and how you used to read us Where The Wild Things Are? What if Max’s mom followed him through the forest door in his bedroom wall and they went to where the wild things are together? Why are adults so afraid of telling the truth, even though children’s stories are pretty much all about kids discovering these scary truths on their own? I saw this girl from Alabama crying about how she wanted to kill her parents and leave America the other night because her family and her state was so full of racists and liars and thieves and I thought, “Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over again? When will parents grow up and just start telling their kids the truth?” I don’t blame you for not telling us everything when we could barely speak, but it’s ridiculous that we have to come to Mom when she’s dying just to find out who we are.

“Your dad saw a lot of things he wasn’t prepared to see in the war,” Mom said. “The war forced him to grow up fast. He didn’t have any choice. They put him over there in this country that didn’t even do anything to us and they told his men to pretty much kill anything that moved and start developing technologies to discover where the next thing that moves is coming from. So they did. The way he always explained it to me was, “If you’re on time you’re late. The military wants to solve problems before they become problems, which creates problems of its own.” Does that make sense?”

“Mom,” Zach said. “We know what it is and how it works. Buck showed us everything. But who killed Dad?”

Suddenly the power came back on and we were blinded by light and Zach made this big show of putting a pillow over his head. I know he was trying to be funny, but doing that right after asking what he did was weird. I know he was only being melodramatic about how bright the light was, but for me it was like I was looking at you again and seeing them put a pillow over your head and suffocate you.

Whoever they are.

What was also strange was the way Mom squinted and looked really old in the light. Everything had been on when I walked in earlier, but the lights made it seem like her face was trying to do what Zach was doing—bunch up and hide. Like I could see wrinkles and veins I’d never seen before. Like squinting gives you this sharper vision if you do it, but also makes you look like someone who’s seen too much.

“The last day of your dad’s life was just like every other that year he came home,” Mom said. “At least at first.”

She said you woke up before her and made the coffee and made it extra strong—cowboy coffee—like you always did. I didn’t remember that, but I do remember you making us chocolate chip pancakes and bacon and how you would drink pomegranate juice and water and how Mom would only drink water and we got orange juice. She said the one thing she remembers as being different about that morning was how, just before you went into your “office” (the garage), you sat with your coffee and Zach in your lap. Mom asked Zach if he remembered you saying something to him or singing him some song and, of course, Zach pretended like he remembered everything. He nodded all solemnly and I had to bite my tongue because I knew he was just playing along, but then I nearly started to cry because I do that all the time and everyone does that all the time and I think sometimes the reason we lie is because we love each other and we want the good things to keep coming.

“He looked like he was in a trance,” Mom said. “He started to play with you, which he always did at night when the work was done, but he did it that morning. He started tickling you and putting you in these holds to see if you could squirm out, and you did, Zach. You got out and you ran away and he ran after you upstairs, but he stopped in the middle of the stairway. I could hear it. He just stopped and seemed to stand there.”

Mom said the moment only lasted a few seconds, but that it plays back in her head all the time now, like it’s now a part of every pause she takes. She was cleaning up and looking out the window and I was at the table with a Harry Potter book. She said she could only hear the pause. She heard you climb three or four steps and then stop. And because you stopped she stopped.

“That’s how you’ll know love,” she said. “When you love someone, you feel what they feel. You won’t always feel what they feel, but there will be moments where it will be like lightning and you’ll know it.”

Mom looked at me like she was telling me everything she knew about love right then and there because she was dying and this was her last chance. The candle was still lit on the nightstand and Zach was making fists. I wanted her to take her mask off and I wanted her to keep it on. I wondered if this was going to be the moment that was forever a part of every pause in my life—Mom in bed talking about you and love and lightning while lightning was flashing all over the night outside like a million cameras. I wanted to rip off her mask and suck the virus right out of her like snake venom, but I know life’s not like that, so I didn’t do it. But I thought it and I don’t know why I’m telling you when I don’t know if you’re still out there, but maybe you really are still stuck in the middle of the stairs and if I go stand there on the third, fourth, or fifth step, you will whisper everything, because Mom doesn’t know who killed you. All she knows is that you acted differently that morning and then, when you went out to the garage to work, she did what she always did—gave you space. Silence. She said she took us to the park and called you from a bench by the playground because it was starting to rain and she was thinking of bringing us home early and picking up a couple movies.

But you didn’t answer.

So she let us play a little longer and then took us to the grocery store, even though we didn’t need to go to the grocery store because she wanted to give you as much space as possible, but what if she’d driven home instead when the rain started and I tried to pretend like it was just a coincidence that it was storming outside as she was talking about the rain, but Delphi doesn’t believe in coincidences, does it? It doesn’t believe in anything, does it? It just tells the truth about all the Kool-Aid drinkers walking around in their Kool-Aid circles.

When we got home from the park, Mom said Zach started playing on top of your body in the garage because he didn’t understand. He thought he could wake you up. What I remember is seeing a baseball near your hand and the way Mom swept all the groceries off the counter as we waited for the ambulance and how there were all these cherry tomatoes with their busted seeds all over the floor and maybe that’s why MJ’s tomato soup always seems so alive to me. Whenever I think about you, I think about those tomatoes we didn’t need, all that stuff Mom bought just so she could give you space.

“I don’t know who did it,” Mom said. “But whoever can kill one person like that without a trace can definitely do it to someone else. I didn’t want to put you guys in danger. Buck—or MJ—or whoever he is—he never reached out to me. I told my doctor everything and asked if I should get a second autopsy because your dad used to always talk about people watching him on the computer and his computer always shutting down at the weirdest times because of the work he was doing, but he never mentioned any names. The only thing he ever mentioned was this one guy who gave him the creeps.”

“Who?” I said.

If life were a movie, the power would’ve gone out again right then with the way Mom looked at me before telling me about this man.

“His name was Christian,” Mom said.

“His name was Christian?”

“I’m sure that’s not his real name. But that’s what your dad called him because that’s what he called himself: Christian Bibb.”

She coughed like the truth was killing her. Even with the mask, the candle flame went out when she coughed right into it. I could smell the smoke, but I also felt like I could smell her cough, her sickness, and I think Zach could, too, because he looked up at me and cringed.

“Christian, or whoever he was,” Mom said, “reached out to your dad after he came back from the war. They were threatening to stop-loss your dad but Dad made it known that if they forced him back, he would not go quietly.”

“What is stop-loss?” Zach said.

“It’s kind of what it sounds like,” Mom said. “They’re trying to stop from losing and they were losing, so they were forcing all the soldiers against their will to extend their service. I think your dad had seen more than most men, and they knew it, so I think they probably came up with an agreement: he wouldn’t have to go back if he didn’t talk about what he’d seen. But he’d seen too much, and I will never forget his head hitting the pillow a couple months before he died, and the air just going out of his body like he was smoking a cigarette and letting go of all that smoke, and then he turned to me and said: ‘I think they’re watching me.’ He was right here.”

Mom put her hand on the blank space in the bed. Zach looked at the pillow in his lap like it was you. I looked over into the closet, hoping you might walk out.

“He never told me what he was working on in the garage,” Mom said. “But that night he said, ‘The reason I never talk about what I’m doing out there is because if you know it and betray any trace that you do, you could get in trouble, too.’ And I said, ‘If you get in trouble, I’m in trouble. Do you get that?’ And he looked at this ceiling and that fan and I looked at the lines in his face and the way he had his hands over his chest like he was already in the coffin. That’s when he said that he’d gotten an email from this Christian figure who had claimed to be a journalist and started interviewing him over email in this really smooth way, and the next thing your dad knew he was telling Christian the truth about everything he’d seen. I suggested we look him up online and so we checked out his name and there he was. Christian Bibb. The man had credentials with some magazine we’d never heard of, but we were never big readers, so how did we know what was real and what wasn’t? He seemed to have all kinds of followers on Twitter, so I told your dad not to worry and that maybe this was good news. Maybe the truth was about to come out. After your dad died, I tried to find Bibb because I thought maybe he could help me find out what happened, but he was gone without a trace. His Twitter profile just disappeared. Couldn’t find him anywhere.”

“Buck says Delphi can find anything that’s ever been erased,” Zach said.

“What if Bibb comes after you?” Mom said.

“Then we’ll all be together with Dad soon,” I said.

“You’re not afraid to die, are you?” Mom said.

“I’m afraid of not living,” I said. “Let’s find out what happened.”

We all looked up at the fan light, the blades turning like the ghost of a helicopter over the spot where you used to sleep. I don’t pretend to know for sure what anyone is ever thinking at any time, but I was doing this 3-2-1 countdown, waiting for the lights to go out again, thinking, if they go out, it will mean “No,” and if they don’t, it will mean, “Yes,” as in, “Yes, let’s find out the truth.” They didn’t go out, Dad. They didn’t go out until we were all asleep. When I woke up in the dark all the clocks were flashing midnight. And so here I am, using my “phone” as a light. I am still alive. Mom is still alive. Zach is still alive. MJ is still alive. Zach, if anything happens to me, PLEASE FIND CHRISTIAN BIBB.

Time to go out where the wild things are.

Love,

Zora

• • •

Aria’s MIMI page was blowing up with people posting pictures from DC and videos from our street RIGHT NOW. I was looking out the window. It was like a parade that got lost. They are everywhere in black and someone just took a picture of me taking a picture of them. Nicole was watching in her driveway as the protesters marched from the road blowing bubbles and holding upside down flags and they have pictures of Aria on their shirts and banners saying things like, “RIP Aria” and “No Justice, No Peace” and they’re chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” and a big Black woman with dreads wearing a tie-dyed mask and a shirt with a glittery gold fist on the front was pointing to the middle of the crowd like it’s her orchestra and someone just started dropping this beat and everyone started dancing except these other people who began setting up this weird shape, half of it in the middle of the road, the other half spilling onto Aria’s lawn and Aria’s mom was on her knees crying in the grass and I just wanted to do something to make her feel better.

“What’s her name?” shouted the Black woman.

“Aria Kyle!” they shouted.

“What’s her name?”

I shouted Aria’s name from my window and the crowd yelled back like it was the greatest thing ever and Mom screamed from across the hall and someone posted on Aria’s MIMI page: “Come on out!” and Zach just yelled, “What’s going on?” and I don’t want to get gassed and I don’t want to die and a lot of the people aren’t wearing masks, but I am not going to just sit in my room as the revolution marches down my street.

• • •

OMG. Olebria Buncombe just interviewed me. She has this amazing hair and it was sparkling with sweat and glitter, but I didn’t ask to touch it. Aria’s mom brought us lemonade and two blue folding chairs and without a mask we all just hugged and then Olebria said she’s been waiting for me. She’s this international documentary filmmaker who is traveling all over the country capturing “the summer America wakes up.” She’s done movies about Malcom X, the American prison system, Edward Snowden, Guantanamo Bay, and was even nominated for an Oscar for “Black Kids Trip,” which was this really raw look into how five Black teenagers in New York used psychedelics to wake up. I saw it last year, and it made me want to laugh and cry and make movies so it’s really strange to suddenly be one of the kids in her work.

Olebria has a beautiful light-skinned partner named Nichelle who wears a sugar-skull mask and gave me a bottle of water and asked me to sign a waiver about the virus. Olebria said Nichelle is the one “who presses all her buttons” and that they got married on the first day it became legal and that what’s happening today is nothing but an extension of a civil rights movement that has been going on in America “since America became America” and that Aria is the “transfrontier” of the movement. Nichelle wrapped Olebria’s hair in a red, green, and yellow cloth and gave me a contract for a dollar to say whatever it was I was about to say and to grant Olebria permission to use my words. I told Nichelle she could keep the dollar and she just smiled and took a toke off a blue raspberry vape.

“You know who that is?” Olebria said.

She pointed into the crowd at a woman with a glittery gold fist on her shirt.

I shook my head.

“That is Destane Church,” she said. “That is Thomas Church’s sister. Do you know who Thomas Church was?”

I got a chill, a feeling of wind coming through and like it was just for me and like I could feel my dad all around. I told Olebria I saw it all on TV, but that made me feel so white and privileged. How had I not even thought Thomas had a sister and a mother and a father and who knows how many brothers and friends? I wanted to tell Olebria that my dad was dead and that my mom was sick, but it felt selfish to turn the story back to me, so instead I just closed my eyes for a second as the wind rang the wind chimes from the Kagels’ gazebo.

“What’s she like?” I said.

“So funny you ask that question,” Olebria said. “That woman has not slept for seventy-two hours but she is not tired. She is waking up to her destiny and it is so painful and beautiful to see. Just last night we were driving down here and she starts crying in the Uber. Girl just starts bawling as she’s talking to the driver and the driver doesn’t know what’s going on or what to say and I’m putting my hand on her shoulder, but I’m thinking this is about Thomas, but, of course, this is all about so much more. We are all just figuring out what is going on, but Destane just went silent, and baby, I’m going to confess something to you: I am shrewd. Now I say that word knowing that is not my word. That is a word that comes down from your people, from Shakespeare and the taming of shrews, all these nasty women who raise their voices. For the entirety of history, men have been trying to unflame the inflamed voices of the shrews, so the shrews gotta get shrewd. Now I don’t even know what the right word is for who I am or where I’m at in my journey, but baby, I started filming from the backseat and you know what Destane says to that driver? She says to him exactly what you just said to me. She goes silent and stares out the window at the road like all we’ve been doing is chewing up road and she can’t stomach another inch of cement. And then she turns away from the road and looks right at that driver, who is Black, and that’s not an accident, and then she says to him: “What is it like to be you?” Do you hear me? That was her thought. She wanted to know what it was like to live in his skin and walk in his shoes. I’m talking shrewd beyond shrewd. I’m talking keeping the camera out here on someone else all the time.”

I nodded. Olebria wasn’t filming me at this point, and I couldn’t quite tell if this made her more or less brilliant, but I liked it. She was warming me up to be real, but she was also actually trying to be real herself. I looked over at Destane, knowing now that she hadn’t slept in three days, and I suddenly wondered what it was like to be her, like empathy was the good virus. What does Orchard Chase looked like to the eyes of a Black woman whose brother has just been murdered? What does she think of our sagging porches and American flags and manicured lawns? Does it all seem like a wall to her—like how do I get through to people who never see the cops on their block? She was looking into the windows of our house like she could feel my mom’s cough and all of our secrets, everything that happened in the garage. As if I know. I totally watched her close her eyes and I couldn’t tell if she was falling asleep or falling into prayer.

Then someone started reciting a poem.

“That’s Salman,” Olebria said. “Everybody calls him Sal. Every place we go, Sal grounds us with a poem, and they are all his.”

Sal is seriously cute. He didn’t look much older than me. He has beautiful marble green eyes that explode when he’s reading poetry. His whole face exploded on every pause. I wondered if he was from Iraq. I liked that I wasn’t the only person there who wasn’t Black. We listened to his poem like it was the prayer Destane was closing her eyes for, like this was all some kind of service. Sal went off about how there was a church in the wild and how you can find its god in secret smiles and how lone wolves are bullshit and how we we’re all together in the drift, and how we’re all drifting far from the shore where we pray to a god after hanging her fur, and when he was done, he came over and I thanked him for the inspiration and looked into his eyes way too long.

“Thank you for crossing the street,” he said. “It takes courage to come out.”

“It’s nothing compared to Aria,” I said.

“So don’t compare,” he said. “Just do everything you can do while you’re the one who’s alive, right?”

Those marble eyes exploded. I felt like he was traveling right into me.

Then I remembered that Olebria was filming.

“You were Aria Kyle’s best friend?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“What were they like?”

I felt that wind come back around and tickle the chimes. I suddenly wanted a mask to cover my witchy nose. I had my back to the Kyle house and Aria’s mom was standing right next to me in her patchouli and her body odor that smelled like cumin. It was so strange to be inside this fence they’d set up that encompassed the whole yard and half of the road and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to see all of these people from Aria’s MIMI page suddenly sitting and chanting in the grass with lemonade and vape pens, everybody filming everything and flooding the internet with the hashtag #RIPAriaKyle.

“Aria loved music,” I said. “That’s why they chose that name. It means a song you sing by yourself. We used to love to sing together and make lip-syncing videos, but Aria could actually sing and play the guitar and the piano and the saxophone. They could play anything.”

Just as I was thinking about telling Olebria about the last time I’d heard Aria play, I saw Zach and Ethan walking by the fence and they both had boxing gloves on and they were both looking at us like they wanted to join and they were definitely walking toward MJ’s and Zach even stopped and waved with that red glove, but because I was on camera I didn’t wave back and because I didn’t want to get MJ in trouble, I didn’t tell the story about Aria playing sax.

Are you out there, Dad? Why did I dodge what I wanted to say? Why didn’t I tell the truth? I saw a drone flying overhead. I read the other day that a drone messed up and without a command killed someone in Africa. Olebria and I both looked up. I don’t know if she caught it on camera, but you could definitely hear the buzz. It actually sounded like an old film reel. I wondered if it was one of ours.

“How old are you, Zora?” Olebria asked.

“Fifteen,” I said.

“What do you think about America?”

“I think we’re the bad guys,” I said. “But we don’t know it and that’s why it’s complicated. We’re all either asleep or pretending to be asleep and it’s hard to wake up people who are pretending to be asleep.”

I didn’t want to lie, but I was lying by not talking about what was right in front of me. I wanted to tell Olebria everything about Delphi but I kept seeing the name “Christian Bibb” flashing in my brain like a warning sign. If they could kill my dad, whoever they are, they could kill me and Olebria and everyone in the yard, too, just like they did in Tulsa or with the smallpox blankets or the Sand Creek Massacre that we learned about in history where the Americans killed all of these innocent Indian women and children.

“What do you think it’s going to take to wake America up?” Olebria asked, her eyes like pineapple rings sinking in syrup. When she asked me that question, I felt like I was about to have a panic attack because I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Destane was lying in the grass pretending to be her brother dead in the streets of Chicago, and I felt so overwhelmed seeing all these other people who were in my neighborhood wanting to make something happen, and they were here because they had a feeling and I had a feeling, too, but I felt like I was failing the test. I couldn’t tell the truth about what was happening right here, right now. The whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me Goddess. I looked across the street at our house and my bedroom window where just weeks ago I was sitting on my bed watching that bee on the outside of my room watch that bee on the inside and I felt like both of them—

I couldn’t get in and I couldn’t get out.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It makes scared to say this, but I feel like it’s the truth: we’re going to need more Arias.”

“Tell me what you mean by that,” Olebria said.

Toast barked from inside the Kagels’ house. It was like Toast knew. Nicole was filming us from her driveway like she was making a movie of us making a movie and it made me sick to my stomach just thinking about how everyone was lost making all these different movies and how maybe none of them would ever get at the whole truth unless someone actually had the courage to say what we’re all so afraid to say. I thought about Thomas Church and that weird smile before he died, like he was just sick of lying and living and like death was better than faking it for another step. I looked over my right shoulder at MJ’s white truck. I didn’t want to throw MJ, Zach, and Ethan under the bus and I didn’t want to mention my dad’s name, but I didn’t want to lie either, and I could barely breathe because I was thinking about the moment I saw my dad in the garage and how I tried to turn the lights on and off like lightning because my stupid little kid mind thought you could wake the dead in the same way you could turn on a light. You just flip the switch.

“I guess what I mean is that more people will probably have to die.”

Olebria sat up straight and folded her arms and nodded. She made pistols out of both hands, stretched out both arms, and fired finger shots in both directions.

“You are amazing,” she said.

But I didn’t feel amazing.

I felt like a coward and a liar.

Olebria stood up and unscrewed her go-pro from her tripod.

“Invisible people die in this country every day,” she said. “But nobody ever sees the death and nobody ever sees the funeral unless you’re the mama of Emmett Till and you’re so furious at the machine that you throw open the casket and show the bloated face of your lynched baby boy. Because if you don’t do that, every day, they just going to go back to watching old white men talking about old white men and the old white corporations using the news to sell boner pills and fossil fuels. If you don’t open the casket or throw a rock through that black glass that’s all they will see. We are not here to kill people, but we are here to film funerals, baby. That is what we are doing, Zora. We are here to remember the dead. This is the summer of funerals. If you die at the hands of the cops, we are coming to your town and we are going to have a funeral. Where there’s a body, there will be bodies. And there will be cameras. We are not going back to your regular programming of old white men jacking off old white men. We are going to have funerals until we have a wake.”

Just as she was saying this and putting her go-pro into this hard-shell case with a sticker of the word “OBEY” on it, I heard the sirens. I have never in my life seen anything like what I saw next. I looked over at the protesters and at Destane and it was so uncanny. I swear to god. They were all smiling like Thomas Church right before he died. Olebria took her camera right back out. Like none of them were afraid of death.

“Here comes the sandman trying to put everybody back to sleep,” she said.

• • •

Dear Dad,

It’s the sixty-eighth day. I know it’s weird for me to write to you like this, but I’m scared and I feel like you’re with me when I talk to you. I feel like I should be over there at the Kyles’, but it was the most surreal thing in the world to be sitting in the grass looking across the street at your own house and know Mom was alone and dying. I kept thinking about her and you and the way I turned the light switch on and off when we found you in the garage and how I don’t want to come home and find Mom in her bed and having nothing but a light switch left.

What is wrong with me? The cops are out there and I’m in here and Zach’s over at MJ’s boxing with Ethan and looking into the future and Mom’s just lying in the dark talking about how she can’t breathe. When I go in to see her, the room smells like old person smell, that minty menthol eucalyptus that I hate, but Mom says she can’t smell anything else and she can’t taste any of her food so I don’t tell her that the smell makes me scared, and she keeps a picture of you near her bed, Dad, and Pastor Gary hasn’t been by once. He takes her on a date, she gets sick, and then he disappears, but you will always be with us.

Do you remember the time you took me to Hershey Park and I ate all those Kisses and vomited upside down on the Super Duper Looper? That’s how I feel. What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you sit here quietly in the dark writing to dead people while Mom sleeps and her humidifier makes that robot breathing sound? Would you be boxing in the basement with Ethan and MJ? What do you think about the police? Is America the bad guy?

I actually met Destane Church, the sister of this man the cops killed. Every day, all day, all you see on the Internet are these videos of cops killing Black people. St. Louis, New York, Albuquerque, LA, New Orleans, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Orlando—but it all started in Chicago with Destane’s brother.

“I don’t think that all cop movies are copaganda,” Destane said to me, “but I do think our country is the sickest country in the world and I think the way America uses guns and violence to solve all its problems is why we have so many problems.”

She’s like you, Dad. She woke up. She is fully woke. But I don’t think I am. There was so much I wanted to say when Olebria was interviewing me, but I think woke people flow and I couldn’t even say your name. I couldn’t even talk about what was on my mind. Destane says that she wants to take the movement to Rwanda and Iraq but Olebria wants to keep it here in the US and I actually told her about you when she mentioned Iraq. I said, “My dad was in the war, but he’s dead.”

That’s all I said. That’s all I could say. And she said, “This is what happens with a police state. Cops in camo, cops in blue, if your skin is black, they’re coming for you.”

I told her you were different, that you were one of the good guys who worked on computers. I didn’t say anything about Delphi or MJ, but I told her that you left the army because they wouldn’t let you tell the truth about what you saw and I feel like every time I tell some half-truth or half-lie I become a little more white and every time I just tell the whole truth I become a little more…NO!

I’m not going to say it.

I am not Black.

And I never will be.

And I don’t care about all the white slave masters painted on our money.

I mean I do.

I care that they’re there with their eyes hovering over the pyramids.

I hate it.

I hate it.

I hate it.

But I don’t want to hate you and I don’t want to hate Mom or Zach and I don’t want to hate myself and I don’t feel like I’m doing anybody any good just sitting here in my room with this journal that Mom gave me so I wouldn’t tell the actual truth of what I was feeling online and embarrass poor Pastor Gary. I mean what would you do if you could see the blue of the cops right outside your bedroom window and the sister of a man who was killed by the cops was sitting like Gandhi on the lawn of your best friend who is dead because they wanted to wake the world up to the same thing you wanted to wake the world up to?

What would you do, Dad?

If I hear a strange sound, I will know it’s you, and I will stay here with Mom. If you give me a night bird, a siren, a gunshot, a firecracker, a whistle, a scream, or a bark from Toast, I will know that you need me to stay here with Mom, but when I was sitting in the grass with Destane looking over here at our house, it was surreal. It was like I was looking at an image of invisibility and silence. All the curtains were drawn and the garage door was up and I knew Mom was sleeping inside and that’s why I’m here, but I felt like one of those people from TV who has a rope around her body and goes a thousand feet down into a cave. A spelunker. I still feel it, that rope. That connection to Destane and Olebria. Or is it the ghost of Mom’s umbilical cord? Was the rope pulling me into the house or out into the grass? Give me a sign. Give me a sound. Anything. They’re singing on Aria’s lawn. They’re chanting their name. If you give me any sound other than Aria’s name, I will stay with Mom. If you make Toast bark, I will put on my mask and wet a washcloth and cool Mom’s head until sunrise and die in her arms. If you give me a siren, I will stay silent forever and become a dentist. I’m giving you ten seconds, Dad. If you give me a firecracker, I will just watch Corgi videos on MIMI until I fall asleep like I’ve been doing for the last three years. I’m giving you eleven seconds, Dad.

Eleven.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

• • •

I can’t believe I’m in jail. I guess this is what happens when you finally talk to the people who are telling the truth. I used to be so blind. I used to think that my dad was a light switch, my brother was an arrow, Mom was a knock on the door, and I was the front window of our house, always looking out. If I die tonight, whoever you are, I want you to know what happened and why.

I joined the revolution.

Aria Kyle was my best friend. They told us in history class about how when kings and queens die their people say, “Long live the king!” or “Long live the queen!” because the king may die, but the kingdom never does. Aria may be dead, but when I put on my mask and my backpack and went back across the grass and gave the peace sign to the cops, that was me saying “Long live Aria!”

“Baby came back,” Destane said to me.

“I’m tired of being a spectator,” I said.

“I hear that,” Sal said.

There he was again, the poet with those green eyes and he gave me a high five and we laced our fingers together and held for probably no more than two seconds, but it felt like forever.

God.

Why did that feel so powerful just to touch someone? I don’t want to sanitize my hands. I want to do it again. I am so sick of being the girl at the window. Who am I to say anything, but I think this is what is wrong with America. Everyone is either looking out a window or just looking into their “phone.” Everything is just a reality TV show and everyone’s running their own channel and the only reason they’re tuning into other channels is so they can get more people to tune into their channels. We had this guy named Hunter in our freshman class who got sent home from school because he wore this T-shirt that said, “Well, it ain’t gonna suck itself.” I’m not going to sit here and defend stupid white bro shirts, because I don’t think Hunter was trying to talk about anything except blowjobs, but I think most people are just out to prove that T-shirt wrong and I do not want to be one of those self-licking ice cream cones and I don’t think Sal or Destane are those kind of people so if Destane can go three days without sleep and scream at the cops from Aria’s lawn, so can I.

I stepped into the scene. I stayed close to Sal. When we got back inside the barriers, I noticed the numbers had grown. Someone was wearing a shirt that said “11:11.” Some people from the neighborhood had decided to join and new ones kept coming from out of nowhere, just marching down the street with air horns, sand shakers, bubbles, and signs. I nearly cried when Mr. Kagel came out of his house with Toast and told Olebria that they were free to expand the barriers across his front lawn and that he would keep Toast inside overnight and that Mrs. Kagel was making “coffee and biscuits for those who risk it.” Olebria ran to Mr. Kagel and hugged him while Toast went nuts and tied them up with the leash like, for a second, you could see these walls come down as a white man was tied to a Black woman and a dog was jumping for joy.

“This is a nice neighborhood you live in,” Sal said.

“For some reason I’ve always wanted to leave and go to Colorado,” I said.

“Oregon for me,” he said.

“Why Oregon?”

“West coast but not the glitz of California or the three hundred days of rain every year in Washington,” he said.

“In between,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “In between the states of exactly.”

I felt a chill. The guy in the “11:11” shirt smiled right at me for no reason. I wanted to press pause on the world and look back into Sal’s green eyes a little longer. He wore a black leather necklace with some strange silver shape like an 8. Everything was moving so fast. The cops did not look as happy as Toast to see the barriers come down and then go back up in a new place. It was like we had them hypnotized with their own device. Cops love putting up walls and telling people where to go, but Olebria and Destane brought their own walls and put them up before the cops arrived and so the cops became like dogs with treats and the walls were the treats. We moved the barriers and the cops moved with them. You could see them shaking their heads and getting voices in their earpieces and talking to the sheriff or the FBI or whoever and they started shouting through the microphone on top of their cruiser about the curfew, like that was the final trick they had left, but that’s when Olebria told me about the next move.

“I take it you know about Win Jessup,” she said.

I looked around for Sal to tell me the answer, but he was gone. I wanted to pretend like I got the reference but I feel like that is the problem with America in a nutshell: everyone pretending to get it, whatever it is, just so they look like they get it when, in reality, nobody gets it except people like Destane Church, and even she probably only gets half of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”

Olebria smiled and took a deep breath at the same time, like here is how you handle white people trying to wake up. You take a deep yoga breath through the nose, you close your eyes, you smile, and you start over.

“You’ve heard of the Civil War?”

I nodded and bit my lip, saw all these flashes of black and white photographs with the backs of Blacks blistered from whips.

“You know about the Union and the Confederacy and how your hometown went back and forth between the two sides seventy-four times, right?”

“I actually didn’t know that,” I said.

“Well, that’s the truth and that’s the truth on top of the truth,” she said. “Winners forget history and losers remember it. That’s the way history works. What we keep learning from history is that we’re never learning anything from history because guess who keeps writing it? The people who keep forgetting it. The quote unquote winners. That’s what my next movie is about, this one right here. We’re going to win and we’re not going to forget, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Winston Jessup was a general. People in your town love him for reasons I still don’t quite get, but there are postcards of a painting of this one-armed slave-master named Win in all your gift shops and there are prints of that painting in the offices of your doctors and lawyers and barbers. There he is, like an old Jesus or Santa on a diet. He’s everywhere. Win Jessup, the poor one-armed racist with his kind smile riding Bixby, his favorite horse, through the streets of your historic downtown. And in that picture there are white children running alongside old Bixby and old General Jessup, but in the most famous painting the artist has also feathered in a few Black children doing the same innocent thing. Running along like they’re following a goddamn ice cream truck. Most people hardly recognize the detail, but when you’re Black and you’re sitting in your doctor’s office and you think you might be dying of cancer and you look up on the wall in the twenty-first century and you see a painting of a man who kept your people in chains getting worshiped by the children because some white savior painter who likes to reenact the Civil War on the weekends thought that just might be a nice feel-good touch? Well, how do you think that woman feels as she’s staring death in the eyes in the quiet corner of a white doctor’s office that is taking money she doesn’t have to kill the cancer white people gave her in the first place by telling her the only place she could live was on the factory side of town? Hmmm? How do you think the old downtown shoeshine man whose daughter now runs a dog-walking service feels when she walks the dogs of rich white people past the copper statue of General Winston Jessup? You know the statue I’m talking about? The one right across the mall from the new microbrewery that just happens to be owned by a bunch of white people who used to own the orchards before the town plowed the apples because it’s now cheaper to grow America’s apples in China? Well, I got my secret leakers, baby. I got my Virginia people, and surprise, surprise, some of them are white. And my people tell me these things. You may not know about that statue, but I do, and tonight that statue is coming down, baby. Tonight, old Win’s going to lose.”

Nobody filmed Olebria when she gave me that speech. If I die—or if she does, too—I feel like people should know: Olebria Buncombe is not just one of those people who gives speeches when the cameras are on and then wilts into a dry shriveled profiteering asshole who does nothing but check her Twitter feed when the cameras turn off. Either she cares, or she’s the best faker I’ve ever met. She was shaking as she was talking to me about a man who has been dead since the time of Edgar Allan Poe. And just like the barrier between the Kyles and Kagels was coming down, it was so weird to feel like the one between Olebria and me was also coming down because I was starting to shake and remember all the times Mom would take Zach and me to the downtown mall for lunch and how I would always see the pennies in the fountain and the white columns of the old courthouse and I would even see the statue, but I never actually saw it. I feel like people are looking for things but never AT things. How many times have I walked past Black people walking past the statue of Win Jessup and felt absolutely nothing, my mind nothing but a hurricane of WHITE NOISE?

So an hour before the city curfew, we all began to march downtown. And why were we marching? Well, first off: I can’t speak for WE. I am not Destane Church. I am not Aria’s mom or dad. I am not Nicole and Jabar, my neighbor and her Black boyfriend who left their son with his grandmother to march with us. I am not Edie, whose name used to be Eddie. Edie is now a trans Black beauty who used to like every word Aria posted from their home in Richmond where their father told them—Edie—that they were an “abomination.” I am not Olebria Buncombe, who has given her life to making movies about invisible people. But I am someone who is starting to see all the people and things that used to be invisible.

That’s the revolution.

We were marching to wake sleeping people up to invisible people. I was marching to stay awake. I was marching for that mom that wanted to say something in that doctor’s office before she died. I looked across the street at our house with all the lights off except for this faint green glow out of my window which was nothing more than the faded light from Mom’s room and I knew: I was marching for her and my dad and the way he died trying to wake people up.

“THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” we shouted as we passed the house with the dead armadillo on the porch where my brother was inside, down in a basement trying to cook up a wakeup potion of his own with another old person who was trying to wake up before he died and I started to cry, just thinking about all the people who are frantically trying to wake up in their own ways in offices and in basements and diners and barber shops, all the people like me who stand at windows watching people pass by and doing superstitious little counting tricks to determine whether or not to open their doors and walk out and join the march. I think most people are good and are just one little superstitious sign away from making the right choice: head of a slavemaster or tail of an eagle.

Eagle we march.

Master we stay.

“You ever heard of John Henry?” Olebria said to me as we turned down the road toward downtown, our group like a Chinese New Year snake of people slithering out of the suburbs. And that guy in the “11:11” shirt just kept smiling his stoned hippie smile and I loved it. Olebria was wearing her golden mask down around her neck so people could hear her. She and Destane both wore black backpacks covered in patches of fists.

“The name sounds familiar,” I said.

The media followed us, including this white woman in a pink mask named Marcy Pentz. Marcy wore a laminated badge from our local WYVY affiliate. She kept walking right next to Olebria and me as we talked. The camera made me feel like I really needed to listen and watch what I said and it makes me feel weird to remember that Marcy had a Black cameraman and never even told us his name.

“John Henry had a hammer,” Olebria said.

She bit her lip, smiled, and shook her finger at me and then at Marcy’s camera like that little finger was a little hammer or like she was a schoolteacher and the world was a child.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I remember.”

Even though I didn’t.

WHY DO WE LIE?

“Oh yeah is right,” Olebria said. “John Henry carried a hammer of his own because he saw the storm a ‘coming after the Civil War. This storm of right now. You hear me? Back then, just like right now, people could feel this train a ‘coming. Back then, rich white people weren’t trying to replace slaves with poor white people. They were doing then exactly what they’re doing now. Baby, they don’t care about you and your neighbors. Rich white people after the Civil War weren’t trying to give the new slave jobs to poor white folks. They were trying to replace the slaves with machines. During slavery, down here in the South they were saying labor and capital is the same old thing. When they were forced to acknowledge that labor referred to human beings, they changed their story and said capital just needs more machines. And why? So they didn’t have to pay the poor white people who wanted the jobs that were now available because master got rid of slavery. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln regularly put the editors of newspapers in prison? They don’t tell you about that, do they? History ain’t simple, Zora. These rich capitalists with their steam drills come to this mountain right here in Virginia’s old backyard, what y’all now call West Virginia like it’s some kind of redheaded cowboy stepchild, and, so the story goes, John Henry brought him a hammer to that mountain and said to the Bill Gates of his time: hold up with your drill, sir. Hold the press that you’re trying to oppress. I’m going to make me some money if you just give me a fair chance. And that, baby, is why I brought what I brought.”

I heard the heavy jingle when Olebria patted her back. It sounded like she had more than one hammer in there. A yellow Humvee passed by and some white guy with a long beard leaned out and yelled the “n” word.

“You get that?” Olebria said.

Marcy nodded. Her cameraman actually stepped out from behind his camera and didn’t so much look at me as the night, like he was looking for God in the blotched-out stars of this old slave state.

“I am so sorry,” Marcy said to him, which made me feel better.

“Not surprised,” the man said.

“Don’t apologize,” Olebria said. “Organize.”

“Didn’t John Henry die?” I said.

“We all die,” Olebria said. “Death is the great equalizer. But they’re a lot of people who think their shit doesn’t stink and that somehow they can sit out that last dance. For fifty years this country has been under the illusion that it will not die and, surprise, surprise, the illusion comes to us from the machine men out in California who keep telling us they’re just a few years away from giving us the great opiate Christianity used to smoke up every Sunday: life everlasting. Give yourself to the machine, if you’ve got enough credit on your credit card, and we will upload you and your grandma and grandpa into the great white cloud. Well, I got a hammer for the cloud and I got a hammer for Win Jessup, but tonight we’re going to start with Mr. Jessup and the dark slave he rode to the grave, his favorite horse, Mister Dixie Bixby.”

It was after 9:30 when we all turned onto the mall. I felt like I was back on the freshman basketball team coming out of the locker room to play a game in front of the crowd. I had a bad case of the butterflies. I found Sal and stood next to him. Destane held up her “phone” and we all held up ours in response, which kinda felt religious. Like mirroring and echoing is really what religion is all about. Union. Communion. Everybody together. I wondered if Sal was a Muslim or if I was just being ridiculously stereotypical. I wanted to ask him about religion and how old he was and what his necklace meant and if he would read me more poetry, but I didn’t want to seem like an idiot, so like an idiot I stayed silent.

We marched with our “phones” held up high. They wanted us to film everything like video was the new hammer. We were almost at curfew. As we were marching from the direction of the old Episcopal church, the cops came at us from the direction of the old Presbyterian church. I wanted to say something to Marcy’s Black cameraman about capturing the steeples and the crosses and the way the blue lights were throbbing on the churches, but I didn’t want them to put my big witchy nose on TV and I didn’t feel like it was my place to say anything, being white. I didn’t feel like giving orders to a Black man was “the right thing.” What did feel right was just being there and walking silently by Sal and Olebria’s side and holding my “phone” up like a fist.

Almost all the shops on the mall had already covered their windows with plywood. The ice cream shop had a mural of a white boy and a Black boy arm in arm under a bleeding sun. The Daily Grind coffee shop’s plywood looked like a yearbook page with names and poetry from all the people in our town who supported the movement, as well as the names of the dead. On the two panels protecting the windows of our bookstore were spray-painted red, white, and blue images of two books: Invisible Man and Underground Railroad.

In the doorway to that bookstore was a hat poking out of a sleeping bag, a homeless man looking like a caterpillar in a blue cocoon. I don’t think the camera captured him and if they did I know they’ll crush the whole night down into ten seconds and will never show a moment like that, but right there in the doorway to the bookstore under the image of the words, Invisible Man, was an invisible man. And then dead ahead of us was the brewery and the courthouse and the statue of Win Jessup riding atop Bixby. Talk about invisible. At the very center of my hometown’s downtown was a tribute to a slave-master and a traitor. Between the white steeples of the two wealthiest churches stood a statue of a white supremacist on a horse. My whole life I never even saw it. I looked at it a hundred times. When I was a little girl, before my dad died, I ate a cheeseburger once at that brewery while a bluegrass concert went on in the grass of the courthouse lawn and when a bunch of kids started dancing in front of the band that was playing at the top of the courthouse steps, I begged my mom and dad to let me go and dance to the music and they said I could so I ran past the statue and through the totally white crowd toward the white columns and the white band and the white kids, all of us blind to that statue that was the same strange green color as the Statue of Liberty.

That was what I saw as a child: that color. That bleachy worn-down green you sometimes find on the copper of an old penny. I didn’t see white supremacy. I didn’t see the history of millions of Black bodies broken by the whips of white men like Win Jessup. I didn’t feel the pain of a cancerous old Black woman dying in the waiting room of a white doctor’s office just a block away. I didn’t feel anything, really. I just saw that weird blue green that told me the thing was old like the Statue of Liberty so I ran past it and danced.

“Hammer time!” Olebria said.

We moved like a dance team. We tossed the hammers the way you sometimes see football players toss the ball at the end of the game when there’s no time left on the clock and they’re terrified of being tackled and losing so they keep tossing the ball back down the field like a hot potato and it’s so crazy and unpredictable that you wonder why they don’t play like that the whole game. I think we tossed those hammers like they were on fire because we wanted everyone to have a chance to take a chip out of Win Jessup and because the faster you tossed and climbed the harder it was for the cops or the cameras to nail any one person. The idea seemed to be that WE were doing this and you would have to take us all down on camera in front of all those witnesses at the brewery, and someone tossed me a hammer just like the kind my dad used to keep out in the garage and I didn’t feel like I could make the jump up to the narrow ledge of the pedestal upon which the horse stood, so I just started whacking its hooves and it felt good! I kept having to tell myself: it’s not real. You are not killing a horse. And we did not just break off the actual stump of an actual amputee. And Olebria did not just nail an old man in the eye. You are not killing Win Jessup. You are not killing Bixby. This is real, but it is not real. Stone is real, but it’s not flesh and blood. Win Jessup is already dead. And so is Aria and I felt like I was hitting the man who ran over their body.

“John Henry had a hammer!” Olebria shouted in a voice that sounded like it was from another time.

“This is what democracy looks like!” chanted the people who wouldn’t let the cops break through their circle.

Win Jessup’s face was gone. There was something cheap and white and fake underneath the copper. He now looked like the headless horseman from that story about Sleepy Hollow. I jammed a shard into my pocket and kept going.

“Please step back from the statue!” the cops shouted.

An old man from the brewery told the cops to shoot us. A girl in a black and white striped shirt told us all to go back to Africa and eat bananas. I gave her the finger and she screamed back at me about how I must really like that big Black dick and just as I was about to say something stupid, I saw Mr. Kyle and he smiled and raised his hands in victory like I was scoring a goal in soccer, but instead of waving, I just held my hammer high for a second and then took that shard of copper and whatever out of my pocket and threw it as hard as I could at the bitch in the black and white striped shirt, but I ended up throwing it through the brewery window instead and all the drinkers made this sound like they were cattle mooing at me, and I heard Olebria say, “Oh, shit, we done it now. Here they come. Here they come!”

When I think back on what happened next, I feel awful because I feel like it’s all my fault. Almost all of the people tearing down that statue of Win Jessup were Black, but it was a white girl who threw that shard at the cops. Everyone else seemed like they were trained at protesting, like protesting itself is a kind of art form, but nobody had ever taken to teaching me the basics in high school. They taught me the Pythagorean theorem instead. Nobody ever told me anything about civil disobedience except in English when we talked about Thoreau and Walden. Nobody ever taught me about chants or how to hammer or why we were hammering or how we weren’t supposed to talk to the spectators because once you start talking to them it’s like they taught us in theater: you break down the fourth wall. The audience becomes the play.

Anything can happen.

That circle we’d formed was our wall. On one side was our stage and our people and Win Jessup and Bixby. The name of the play was tear down Win and the horse he rode in on. But when I threw that piece of Bixby’s hoof into that window, I changed the story. My whole life, I’ve been the girl at the window, the one who watches. All I’ve ever wanted to do was to be like Aria and be out there in the open, doing what everyone else was always just talking about. But I never knew what my thing was until Aria died. That was when I felt like it was my time to finish what they started.

Once that black glass shattered, everything went crazy. I could see faces on the other side. People looking like they’d been caught. I heard a popping sound and saw the white smoke start to grow like the ghost of the Confederate army had been set loose on the town. Someone threw a glass at us and it broke over my head and covered me in beer and I licked at it and it tasted weird and reminded me of Luke and how we kissed before he became Aria and how he was always stealing his parents’ beer and doing anything he could just to avoid the world and I looked for faces in the crowd, but the white gas suddenly shrouded everything, and the blue lights were flashing in the fog and I don’t know if it was the tear gas or my fear that I was about to die like Aria, but I couldn’t breathe so I took off my mask and I ran toward the courthouse steps. I was about halfway there when I heard Destane scream.

“No! No! No!” was all she said.

I used to think seeing my dad’s dead body when I was eight years old was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, but hearing Destane crying out in that gassy fog with that headless horseman towering over the scene and me halfway between the screams and the white columns of the courthouse was worse because it was all my fault and to do anything about it was to run back into air you couldn’t breathe and to run away from the thing you started was cowardly and evil so that’s why I did what I did.

I didn’t mean to make things worse. But just running away and being the girl in the window watching everything from afar seemed like evil. I didn’t want to go back to who I was and I knew I couldn’t breathe if I ran into the fog, so I guess you could say I tried to do both. I ran back in, picked up a piece of that statue and threw it clear into the window of a cop car. I ran back out to try to catch my breath but I felt like I was choking on ashes and if all I had was one more breath, I was going to use it to throw another stone, but when I got back into the fog I saw a huge cop with a gas mask. I saw his hate-filled eyes and his baton coming down on Destane’s back. Destane clenched her eyes, looking around blindly like there was nothing left on earth except that fog and that half face of that white cop. I’d be lying if I said I felt anything clearly in that moment, but seeing her on her knees made me go berserk. It didn’t seem fair that what happened to her brother was happening to her, and the reason I did what I did is because I knew it was all my fault.

I felt it.

I was nothing but feeling and fear, like an animal. People were howling like the wolves will when the last glaciers melt and the earth sinks in its own steam. I swear I didn’t think about what I was doing. I just saw that cop bent over Destane like I’d seen cops do a million times on TV and I just went for it. I ran at him like a bull. I felt the cop’s body spin and felt it hit the ground hard like a bass note and I heard someone beyond the fog make a sound that was half laugh and half shock, like a big long OOOOOOO. I tried to keep running clear out of the fog because I knew what I’d done. I still couldn’t breathe, but then this other cop grabbed me and whipped me around so I was still trapped in the gas and when he put his foot on my back and cuffed my wrists I told him in a hissy voice that didn’t even sound like my own that I couldn’t breathe.

I thought I was dying.

“You’re choking her!” I heard Olebria say.

I could see Destane spitting onto the bricks next to me. We made eye contact. She was on all fours and looked like a boxer trying to get up for one more round, her hair down over her face, her mask on the ground. She shook her head at me and mouthed something, but everyone was screaming so loud I couldn’t make out what she was trying to tell me.

“Play stupid games, get dumb prizes,” I heard someone say in a southern voice.

I heard Sal tell someone to get the fuck off him and I wanted to fly to him. I think Destane was telling me to relax, but I couldn’t. It was like my body was on autopilot. I didn’t even know if I was going through convulsions, getting hit, vomiting, or just throwing a tantrum because I’d gotten caught. I probably looked like I was break-dancing to those idiots at the brewery who were taking video and throwing their beer on us, but I wasn’t dancing. I was dying. I couldn’t breathe.

I tasted pennies. I smelled apples and found a brick to stare at as my breath started to leave me. It was one of a million bricks that made up the walk of that mall, but for some reason I fixed on that one and all the sounds went soft. I couldn’t even feel the cop’s foot on my back anymore. Something inside of my body took me out of my body. I was in a trance, my body telling me to go there to that strange trance place to spare me the pain in the last seconds of life. Just focus on the lines, this voice seemed to say, and I surrendered to that voice or that feeling or whatever it was, looking at those lines like they were the branches you find in the palm of your hand.

How many shoes and bare feet in the summer had run over that brick on the way to hear some band or some preacher on the courthouse steps? How many nervous girls clicked their heels on that one brick while walking with some boy? And was that deep line—that dent—that little chip in the middle—was that the Grand Canyon? I have never in my life dreamed so hard while still awake. My mind was telling me to start flying through that canyon like an eagle, to dive down into that line and I felt my father up ahead, flying low over the river in that red canyon, and everything was going to be all right, and then came a wind like God, and if I die tonight, I will be okay, because I have seen that brick and I have felt that wind as it swept that fog down the mall like a sick blanket—like those smallpox blankets we gave the Native Americans—was just being lifted. It was the kind of wind you usually feel in October or November when, one day, with all the leaves still hanging on the trees, you think to yourself that winter will never come, but then that wind hits and unfastens all the crisp brown leaves from the trees in one day and the next thing you know fall is gone and you’re surrounded by the skeletons of summer and the chill of winter.

“Look, America! Look!” I heard Olebria say.

I came out of the canyon, like that wind had come up out of that one brick line, all the way from the lands my people once stole, like the whole story was buried in that one line of that one brick. When I heard Olebria’s voice I knew I was still alive and I needed to take a deep breath, but she was probably filming everything, so that’s why, after getting that one precious breath, I screamed that question with everything I had:

“What’s their name?”

Only two people heard me, but Olebria was one of them. I was looking right at her.

“Aria Kyle!” she called out.

The cool wind was blowing all around us. All the drinkers behind the flower boxed fence of the brewery stood like the wind had stolen their voices and frozen their bodies. As the cops took Destane and me away, with that wind at our back, she cocked her head to the stars over the mall.

“What’s his name?”

“Thomas Church!” they said.

With Win Jessup’s face in pieces all over those bricks, they marched me and Destane toward the strobing blue wall of cop cars at the end of the downtown mall, the white steeple of the Presbyterian church where we used to go when my dad was still alive towering over it all like the sail of some ghostly slave ship lost in a storm.

“You have the right to remain silent,” this big old goateed cop told me. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand that?”

“Do you understand the name Aria Kyle?” I said.

“Keep talking,” he said.

I kept spitting and my eyes kept burning. The cop’s short Black woman partner walked in front of us. He pushed me down the mall with his baton at my back and he was being very creepy with that baton, letting it slide down my waist and back up, over and over, but I didn’t want to say anything that could be used against me in a court of law.

“You are in big trouble, young lady,” he said.

When we got to the cars, in spite of my tears, I saw his face and his uniform good and clear. His last name was Dennis. I remember that from his badge. His face looked sweaty and stubbled, like a billion ants were coming out of his skin to gobble him up. But, of course, life isn’t a cartoon you can just command. The army of ants stayed still.

“You’re the one who’s in trouble,” I said. “We got you all on camera.”

“You got yourself on camera,” he said. “Congratulations. You just filmed yourself committing a felony. What are you doing with these people anyway?”

“These people?”

“Don’t say another word,” Destane said.

They gave us blue masks. They put me in one car and Destane in another. With sirens blaring, Officer Dennis and his partner drove me down the empty street that ran along the dividing line between the white side and the Black side of town. They turned into the fenced-in back lot of a big pale building where they carded into a special garage. They marched me down a hallway of white tiles and white bricks and made me give my information to a blond woman with a black mask behind a long desk and a long wall of scratched up Plexiglas like the kind protecting the secretary at the high school who takes your tardy passes. They took my backpack.

“What am I going to find in here?” Officer Dennis said.

Before I had a chance to answer, he disappeared down the hallway with my journal, so I just sat there in an orange chair and stared at a poster of the FBI’s most wanted. Most of the suspects were men. One of them was named Leslie and another named Nikolay and one of them wore a red hoodie and another, a star-spangled neck gaiter and an orange beard and a backwards cap that made him look like a movie star. But there were women, too, and I could see that one of them was on the list for kidnapping.

“Baby,” the woman behind the glass said, “you need a glass of water?”

Thirty minutes later Officer Dennis came back and took me to a white room. He returned my backpack but said they were holding onto my phone.

“The President’s calling y’all terrorists,” he said. “We going to find the names of terrorists in your phone?”

“You are insane,” I said. “I’m a kid. That was a statue, not the World Trade Center. Wake up.”

“Let me tell you something about kids,” he said.

I kept wishing for magic powers to turn Officer Dennis’s stubble into hungry bugs, but I am not some YA wonder woman. I am not Harriet Potter. I’m just a kid.

“Kids go to jail all the time,” Officer Dennis said. “Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen. Hell, I heard about them putting away a twelve-year-old last year charged as an adult for murdering some guy down in Texas.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” I said.

“Just giving you food for thought,” he said. “We don’t know what we’re going to do with you just yet, but it is not looking good with the President declaring y’all terrorists.”

“I am not a terrorist!” I yelled.

I wished I’d said, “We are not terrorists.” Officer Dennis smiled, like he knew I was just a selfish little white privileged punk. His smile revealed a chipped lower front tooth. His nose was a lot redder than the rest of his face. On his left forearm, he had a tattoo of a dragon, a scroll with ancient letters spilling out of its mouth instead of fire. One of the words on the scroll was “power.”

“You want a soda?”

I didn’t know what to say. The taste in my mouth was awful. I actually did want a soda.

“Do you have Dr. Pepper?”

“How ‘bout Coke?”

Standing over me, he made his eyes real big like he was looking over glasses. I told him okay. He brought me back a Coke and then left me alone, so I just stared at that Coke: that red they use in everything to hypnotize you into wanting something bad. We talked about this in English, the way colors work in stories and ads and the way fast food always uses red in the same way as stories like The Scarlet Letter. It’s all about a bad desire. That’s why they use it with the devil, too. Red is the color of blood and flesh. That red Coke was the only thing with any color in that tiny white room and I guess I owed my special red drink, which was really black inside, to Officer Dennis.

“I’m not going to drink you,” I said, half hoping I was Harriet Potter and that the can would turn into a vessel of magic acid that would break down all doors if I just dared to throw it. I started thinking about Sal and how stupid I was to join the protest and how maybe the only reason I did it was because I had this crush on this person I didn’t even know. Like I was just another American idiot begging for a scarlet letter.

“I’m not going to drink you,” I said, as if talking to Sal and the cop and the entire world. You can check the camera. I talked to that Coke. I told Mister Coke things I would never say to my mother. If I die in here, they’ll probably destroy this journal and destroy the camera and say I committed suicide like Jeffrey Epstein. But if this journal does make it out and I don’t, I want the world to know two things:

1. I did not kill myself. I would never do that to my mom or my brother or the memory of Aria and my father. You do not get the easy way out with me. I am done watching from windows. I am going to spend my life getting justice for the deaths of my father and Aria.

2. The second thing I want people to know is THIS IS ALL MY FAULT. My final thoughts on earth were not of a stupid Coke can hypnotizing me into drinking a cold soda that would probably have been just fine. I know I can be ridiculous, but this second thing is not ridiculous. Somewhere, in another room, sits Destane Church, the sister of Thomas Church. My guess is that they haven’t taken off her cuffs. My guess is that she doesn’t get a Coke and access to her backpack and her pen and her journal. My guess is that they probably treat Destane the same way they treated her brother. Thomas Church was an unarmed Black man who was gunned down on the streets of Chicago. Destane came to my town to make sure the world never forgot her brother and the history of what white people have been doing to Black people in America since the very beginning. When my mother was my age, her father had people who used to serve in the military kidnap her in the middle of the night and drop her in the Wyoming wilderness to repent for the fact that she loved a Black man. She nearly killed herself before caving in. This is how America works. You have your own daughters kidnapped by soldiers so they’ll stay away from Black people. You gun down people like Thomas Church because you don’t want them to touch your daughters. You kill white men like my father who try to just tell the truth about our wars with dark people. You gas the Blacks who just want to remove a statue of a slavemaster so they don’t have to be constantly reminded of their grandparents being tortured. Destane Church did not throw a stone at the cops or the strangers who were calling us names as we were tearing down that stupid statue of Win Jessup. The white girl threw the stone. The white girl picked up a piece of a fake hoof and threw it into that window. That’s why the riot started. Why didn’t I drink my Coke? Because I wanted to prove to myself that I could resist. Because clearly I can’t resist. If they come in here tonight and turn out the lights and hang me from the ceiling, I want the world to know: Destane Church is innocent. What happened tonight you can hang on a white girl.

WTF

Zora Box