Jade’s car barely fit the definition. Patched and re-patched, the small green Dart was older than Jade. Hardly anybody had working cars back in Mercedes’s old neighborhood. “Climb in, Mercedes,” Jade said.
They had talked and texted, but it was the first time Mercedes had seen Jade since Callie’s shooting. Mercedes wondered if Callie’s shooting would be a dividing line in her own life: the time before and the time after. But with Callie in a coma, Mercedes felt time stood still. Callie was a broken stoplight: no yellow, red, or green. “Mercy, you doing okay since—?” Jade asked.
Mercedes clutched onto the door but hesitated, stuck on Jade’s unfinished question and on the inevitability of what had happened. Her mom kept saying that Callie getting shot made no sense, but Mercedes knew enough of the streets to know that her mother was wrong. She suspected her dad knew too, but neither said a word. “Mercy?”
The cold wind shot through her. Mercedes pulled her blue and white Atlanta Dream hoodie tighter but couldn’t make her feet move. The door handle dug into her skin like a knife.
Mercedes heard the driver’s-side door open and Jade’s tiny sneakers smack against the pavement, the sounds made louder by the empty parking lot. Mercedes wondered if her teammates on the bus were laughing and busting each other like always, or were they quiet, worrying about Mercedes? Did they even care about her? Was she just a three-point machine?
“Mercy, can you get in the car?” Jade whispered with the same fragile tone she had on the phone, the same tone it seemed everybody used to speak to her lately. Mercedes felt Jade’s hand fall gently on her shoulder as it had a hundred times before. Mercedes waited for the warm tingling she always felt, but instead a burning sensation overcame her. She jerked away from Jade.
Mercedes collapsed onto the ground in tears.
“Mercy?” Jade whispered, but Mercedes couldn’t respond. Every ounce of energy served her worry, her sorrow, but also her memory. Images of Callie flashed through her mind, setting off a memory tug-of-war. Every time Mercedes recalled her sister laughing, the sound quickly became replaced by the beeping machines and hospital clatter. Every image of her smile fell victim to the image of the complicated medical devices keeping Callie alive.
“What can I do?” Jade whispered as she reached out and grabbed Mercedes’s hands to help her up. Mercedes batted Jade’s arms away like they were two pythons primed to crush her.
“Don’t touch me!” Mercedes leapt to her feet, but Jade grabbed onto her. Mercedes fought against her, but Jade just held on tighter until Mercedes collapsed into her arms. Slowly, Jade helped Mercedes get seated in the car and strapped the seat belt across her. When the seat belt clicked, Mercedes startled. Wasn’t that the same sound as a trigger being pulled?
“Where to?” Jade asked, but Mercedes didn’t answer. She pressed her face against the glass, watching the buildings pass by like something out of a movie. It’s not a movie, Mercedes thought, or a dream. It’s a real-life nightmare. Just like the ones she continued to have almost every night. Images of bullets and dead bodies haunted her nights like ghosts.
When they arrived at Mercedes’s house, Jade parked against the curb. “What are all those cars?” Jade asked Mercedes as she looked through the cracked windshield. Mercedes knew the answer.
“People with questions,” Mercedes said, her jaw set tight. “Get me out of here.”
“Where do you want to go?” Jade pushed down on the gas and began driving.
Mercedes paused and then dug her hand like claws into the car seat. “I want to see it.”
Jade pressed down her long black hair. “It?”
Mercedes pulled at the frayed fabric of the Dart. “The corner where Callie was shot.”
Jade stopped the car, shook her head, and drove fast in the opposite direction.