AALIYAH

 

Friday, July 16th 2038

17:41

 

THE GUN RUBBED wrong in my hand. It promised to take everything and give everything, and it was all a fucking lie.

I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to remind myself of the us that was in that glance, behind those sunglasses. Those eyes, big brown shitstorms of all the mistakes Aaliyah Monroe could have avoided if she were the type to follow logic. I could fill this fucking moleskin with everything I didn’t want, though, so I’ll spare you, whoever you are.

“’Liyah, it’s just us here. Just. Us. Isn’t nothin’ you can do ta convince me you gon’ kill the fatha of yo’ chil’ while he half-nayki in bed. You aren—ain’t no killer,” he finished, lamely.

“Thurgood, what the hell are you thinking? What the hell am I doing here? What the hell is our son doing here?” I felt my fingers trembling against the trigger—calm down—I moved my index to the outside of the trigger guard as not to blow his head off his shoulders.

“You know you ain’ gotta call me that,” he said with a laugh to the woman now aiming one of his own triple-barreled contraptions at the thinnest target in the room.

“You just aimed at my dick, didn’t you?”

“I just aimed at your dick, yes.”

He scooted about the bed, his sunglasses making his grin all the more grotesque, somehow. “Kettle, you ain’t eva hel’ a piece this long in yo’ life, jus’ give i’ ’ere,” he said, reaching out. He stopped at an awkward angle when I stepped forward. Blind as he was, he always knew how to find me. The weight of the gun was cold and dead, and everything else I’d taught myself how to be at this point in my life—but, eh, here we are.

“Where’s our fucking son, Colin.” I didn’t so much ask as order, taking a few steps forward with the pistol growing more embedded in my hand than I think you ever were to the things you threw away.

So, Aaliyah, how the hell did you get yourself wrapped up into Colin’s dumb shit?

Maybe you always were.

Maybe, it’d eat up a decent amount of time to scribble in this little moleskin you found under the bed, tell the story of you to whoever ultimately finds your bullet-holed bones; of who you are.

Tell them why you fucking matter.

For the sake of your interest, it’d make the most sense to start with Colin.

So, naturally, as everything else in my life is fucking bonkers currently, I’ll start with momma instead.

 

 

THEY JUST WOULDN’T stop shooting at us.

We wouldn’t stop shooting at us. We’d made our voices known in one way or another. We’d told them to strip away the guns, strip away everything, to make Biology II and Trig the only things that killed us on the daily. It’s as if they didn’t know how to stop.

No, that’s dumb.

They knew, because we fucking told them. We told them with our goddamned words. They made a few adjustments, bump stocks were stripped away, and it helped. It grew in its reach, stood up to a crawl at one point, stumbling over and knocking shit off the wall, but ultimately, we got complacent. Enough of the world thought eventually that we’d just get over it. We weren’t surprised, though, were we? We were the first generation to know what it felt like to be hunted and under a camera the whole time.

PS4 was pretty dope, though.

So, we did what any game could and bit back at the dogs. When we did, we were something to fear.

There was the insanity of a few short years separating us from having any real power to do anything about it. A boot over your neck, your body tied to the floor and the passersby sighing at your inability to just stand up. It’s a hell of a place to be.

TL;DR? Our generation fell somewhere during Kill the Poor, between Holiday in Cambodia and Anarchy for Sale, all parts dead or dying.

“Ma, you don’t have to worry. I’m safe, I’ll always be safe, I promise.”

I’d stood at the foot of my bed when I’d said it. Busted for trying to join the rest of my boxcar brethren in ‘sneaking’ me out, George’s fucking car constantly set to ear-hemorrhaging death rattle. I’d dressed neck to toe in black with a stocking cap in my hand meant to slide over my clump of afro, with its too-easy-to-identify hot pink line running from the front to the centre and ending in a blue starburst.

Fifteen years old in 2018 was a tough time to call yourself safe.

A hell of a year.

A hell of a year filled with too many bad hairstyle choices, too many spins of my Bad Religion Spotify playlist, too many things we wish we could hold on to if we weren’t tricked into seeing them as absurd.

It was the year Daddy died, not so much on a cross but during a bout of throwing his life away yet again. Much as I’d like to save you from the cliché of me—and we can at least circumvent the deets—it is important to mention he wasn’t around all that much. Mom said he gave me more weapons than I’d like to use; she wasn’t a very reliable source, though.

Mom, like her mother, and her mother, and hers, and hers, and hers and hers all the way back to Eve, had been carrying that old tale. This misguided, miseducated, miseverythinged notion that by saving me from his darkness, only giving me those light-shimmered lies of who he’d been, in brief, staccato moments of teddy bears and belated birthday wishes, that I could have him, and he could have me back in a way he never earned.

I don’t know why I’m setting it up as something that spurred the woman I never was. You’ll have likely assumed that all sadness can do to a woman is break her. We are only visible by our scars, flesh proud and preaching on the atrocities of the heroes in all stories.

My father was never any of those things. After his absence I may have hurt, but only in the childish way anyone does after a supposedly broken heart before you learn that, at most, it leaves thin cracks to pick at.

I appreciated the name he gave me. Momma told the story often enough, like a sticky salve to numb certain welts, even after my body had built immunity to it.

“He can’t dance, he thought he coul’ and it was fuckin’ adorable, he slipped up behin’ me an’ ma girls while Rock the Boat was playin’. Usually I’da not given him a second look but maybe it was my exhaustion at all the busted dudes who tried and failed. Or, I have a weakness for big cuddly teddy bear niggas that try to look hard wit’ their Timbs laced up to the top.”

The name was supposed to be a gift, but it was just their story, lacquered over my bones. Just narcissism.

It’s probably the only beautiful thing he’s ever given me, though.

There was a likeness we shared, and probably always will in being both too big, and having too-black-to-love-but-bold-enough-to-leave skin tone.

“I luh’ you, so much, ’Liyah, I jus’ want you to be safe, I can’ keep you safe if you keep chasin’ down dis shit,” Momma said to me, as if it were something a teenager could comprehend.

“I love you too.” It came out more like code, like everything we weren’t supposed to say without sacrificing something else, like blood in my throat, thicker than warmth could allow. I promised her that night, after she begged and pleaded and did everything short of holding me back, that I wouldn’t risk the part of him she hadn’t lost.

Of course, twenty minutes after she was done dealing with the sight of me—and an additional fifteen minutes after I texted George to turn his damn engine off—I still went. I was a bit of a bastard in that way (and don’t read too much into ‘bastard’; we all have the ones we lose to themselves, mine just happened to be my daddy).

If I’m being real, going that night to protest half-peacefully was mostly to do with making a tangible display of the fucks we no longer had to give, but if I’m also being real? My first girlfriend, Becks, maybe had something to do with it.

Six months of dating meant we were still filled with all the fire of a new couple, but made the mistake of thinking that we’d got to know each other. We stayed up late, talking about how we’d change the world. Stories we unlocked every time we played our game. We knew each other’s middle names. We knew the best parts of each other and only a fraction of the worst. We knew filters, and how they trick you with forever. We knew how much we loved to learn something new about ourselves, together.

We weren’t exactly the prophetic anarchists our playlists had promised we could be, but we did aim to make noise. The thing is they talked, and talked, and talked so much about the importance of the future, of our votes and our vast numbers and our anything-but-lives to live. So, we decided the best way to be heard was by whispering an absolution to the one thing they supposedly cared about.

Us.

Just us.

Our target was the Gospel Gut Mac’s Mess-’Em-Up Gun Shop out on Wabash. The plan was simple enough: we would break in, take what our nigh-voting-age arms could carry, and lay it out in front of the shop. Afterwards, Frank, who shook the whole drive, and shivered the whole time we’d moved the stores stock out front, would call the news station, and 911, in that order.

The cameras did what they were supposed to, and captured us. The nearest news station was closer than the nearest police station, but even knowing that, we made sure to give them a thirty-minute buffer. We used the ignorance they thought we had and slapped on our buffawed, befuddled, be-ohshitdon’tcallourparents-ed faces before lining up behind the weapons. Those of us untouched by melanin held in each of their hands a rifle. They were empty, of course; we needed them to see how easy it was to seize their means, to take back the production of things that killed. I, and the only other POC with us, Felicity, held our hands flat and filled with bullets.

Neither the reporters, nor the cameramen, nor anyone that wasn’t us dared cross the weapons sprawled out in front of us, nearly twenty feet long and filling the parking lot. We chanted our chants as they tried to call out their questions.

Stop killing us!

Why are you doing this?

Stop killing us!

Are you affiliated with any of the local street organisations?

Books not bullets!

What are you hoping to accomplish here?

That last question almost caught me. This, sat on my tongue ready to pounce, but I swallowed it back. The police arrived in record time for the street we’d been on, and immediately tried to take care of the press when they arrived. It, thankfully, hadn’t worked. Local news hadn’t been much of an ally before, but it seemed if you give them a meaty enough story to bite, they’ll fall in line like any well-trained carnivore.

I just wanted to be heard in all the ways no one has time for, and other drugs they couldn’t load us up with. It wasn’t exactly a take-to-the-streets-with-your-pitchforks-and-pain rebellion, but there was a message beneath all the romance.

That message was nearly lost, though, when one by one we lost the twenty of us who’d gathered through the night. The revolution, it seemed, only took a few appeals to parental authority to dismantle. It was when the standoff had reached three hours that the first domino fell. Patrick Bradley’s dad had seen us, who told Lisa Fogworth’s uncle, who—well, dominos.

One by one we were turned back to the children they wanted us to be. As each of us tapered off, in some fucked-up equilibrium, another local media outlet would find their way to us. By the third hour, when it was just Becks and I left, hand in hand, the major networks started to spill in.

In the end, though, under the tenderly livid but maternally sound threat of excommunication by her mother, Becks folded too.

Becks, the last one holding a rifle in one hand—holding mine in the other—let both free, before crossing the picket line of guns and ammunition.

The hardest thing about that moment? As they drew my first love, my first punk, my first kiss behind the Saint Nitchell Mance Recreation Centre (while snorting back a viscous ball of amber snot I’d coughed up at the worst imaginable time). The hardest thing was to remember all the YouTube videos I’d watched on making myself cry on demand a week before.

You know what, how about you try it? Try to force yourself, right now, to cry. First, however, you’ll have to imagine a few things, dear reader.

You must imagine that second-year senior George Ravinski called each of our parents at the appropriate time, selected in relation to their driving speed and distance from the gun shop to ensure the best staggering effect.

You have to imagine that a month prior, Greg, Thomas, Jacqulyn, who were down for the cause enough to bleach and blacken their hair like the good ol’ untroublesome White youth Mac would speak in length with, made entry and exit a breeze.

You also need to embrace a reality in which Tammy Jean made her way into the CEO of Stronghold LLC’s home, or more importantly his rolodex and media contacts. This was thanks to her mother playing golf with the wife of his second cousin’s polo instructor, who’d been tennis companions with insert-other-white-privilege-nepotism-shit-here.

You need to imagine that I hadn’t fought Becks tooth and nail to be the last of us standing in the end. You need to imagine a world where I didn’t tell any of them I was ready to die.

“Put the bullets down!”

You need to imagine a world where, okay, I’m not telling you I wanted to die, but I saw the gain if shit hit the fan on my body over one of theirs. I hadn’t told them about my father, how he was gunned down by a police officer while running, unarmed, after buying a pack of cigs for some seventeen-year-old. I didn’t mention how I couldn’t bring myself to see him at the funeral, when I’d seen him so little elsewhere in my life. I didn’t say how his story didn’t have enough bite, or enough merit to be much of anything on its own.

Shit ain’t easy, right?

I let the bullets spill from my hand, all except one, which I held up between thumb and forefinger.

“Fuck you! You want us dead so bad, don’t you? You want us dead so fucking bad, how about I just do it for you!?”

As I raised the bullet to my lips, I glanced to Becks, who as expected grew her eyes twice as large as I’d ever seen them. It was off book, far from the derivative shit Ronald ‘Well, I am in AP English, Aaliyah’ Vickston came up with. I closed my eyes then, just in case, so I at least had something beautiful in her, saved to crop on the wallpaper of my eyelids if they’d never open again after.

I could have told them, or even just Becks, at any of our twenty meetings, about the research I’d done, about discovering just how likely I’d be to pass a bullet and what it could do to me. I could have told them that I wasn’t so much being brave, just confident in the medical professionals who’d discussed the topic online thanks to the unabashed ignorance of the few who had done so for far less meaningful reasons.

“Aaliyah, don’t!”

I could have told them that every tear was spilled not from panic but from a lease on my poppa’s bones. That the last thing he gave me was something to pick at inside, an emptiness in me, a maddening frustration at the world we’d never stay alive long enough to inherit.

“Crazy ass bitch.”

I could have told them all the steps it took to become their Bullet Bitch.

It had to ring true, though. The problem with a movement is that you have to do something truly fucking dumb to get people to move in the first place. The truth was there, in the margins, in the things that led me there, but everything else was just a show. They wouldn’t see our calls, they wouldn’t see our blog posts. They wouldn’t see the empty caps, the still-packaged gowns. They would only see what we shoved down their throats, even as they complained about our immature tactics the entire while.

Granted, in the end even that didn’t do much. It got me in front of a few TV screens, and a full ride scholarship, and a less-than-regal moniker. Eventually, everything about that night faded away into upvotes. It did remind a few people, though, that we wanted our lives back, and maybe that much made it worthwhile.