SAFIYA

JANUARY 18, 2022

Truth: The simplest explanation is usually the right one.

Truth: Sometimes the truth is a lot more complicated than the facts lead you to believe.

I don’t know how long I waited. Just me and him. I stood there so he wouldn’t be alone anymore. There was no way for me to identify him. I didn’t touch the body; I couldn’t see his face. But every part of me knew it was Jawad.

I should’ve called the police right away. The second I saw that shoe. But I needed a minute. A moment of quiet. To tell Jawad that I’d heard him. That he wasn’t alone, not anymore. To say a prayer for him: We belong to God and to him we shall return.

I finally dialed 911, my voice barely a scratch, hardly believing any of this was real.

Jawad had been alone that whole time. Missing. Gone. It wasn’t fair. How did a person get so lost? Forgotten by everyone but their parents? How could one human being do that to another?

I’m so sorry, Jawad. You deserved so much more than this. You deserved a whole life.

I paced but didn’t get too close to the culvert—still, probably closer than I should have. I wasn’t thinking. Not really. Not about the crime scene or evidence. Or what I was going to do or what I was going to tell my parents. All I kept imagining, as the light faded and as the sirens screamed out in the distance, drawing closer, was that he must’ve been so cold. He didn’t even have a coat on. Did the killer take his coat? And Jawad wasn’t wearing the right shoes for winter. Why didn’t he have the right shoes? He looked so small there in that pipe, by himself. So alone.

I turned away from his body, sadness and anger twisting my insides. I kicked through small piles of soggy clumped leaves. Brown and wet and rotten. My toe connected with something, and a pair of glasses arced through the air.

A pair of green plastic glasses.

My mind raced back to the night when Nate confronted me outside the school. When Richard pushed him and he stumbled and his glasses fell off into a pool of light. They weren’t the new green glasses he’d been parading around on his YouTube channel. They were his old black ones. Where were his green glasses?

I thought my heart had frozen in my chest, but it jumped back to life with a jolt. Bile rose to my throat. I doubled over. When I lifted back up, I felt dizzy, unable to stand straight. I stumbled a couple steps to where the glasses had landed. I had an impulse to reach down and pocket them. The police had already made it clear they wanted to protect Nate. They’d ignored Jawad’s parents. They’d ignored everything I’d told them. What if they ignored the glasses, too? I couldn’t let them do that. Jawad had died all alone. Someone had to be on his side now.

But what would happen if they found out I’d taken evidence from a murder scene? I mean, this was evidence, right? A real clue? I could get arrested for taking the glasses, for interfering with a criminal investigation. My insides twisted at the thought of explaining to my parents. I still had the ripped page from the Nietzsche book I’d taken from Nate’s locker. How was I going to explain that? Instead of reaching down to pick up the glasses, I pulled my phone from my pocket and took a bunch of shots at different angles and zoomed in to get a snap of the words and numbers inside the frame. If these were Nate’s, I was going to find out.

The sirens were in the park now. But I couldn’t quite tell where they were coming from. I left the glasses in the damp grass and turned back to face the culvert. Stared at his shoes. The muddied exposed part of his sock. The slightly frayed cuff of his jeans. Then I walked away, up the sloped embankment to wait. My breath caught in my chest. My lungs seized. Jawad was dead. This was real.

The police cars and ambulances drove up behind me from a dirt access road that I thought was closed off, their tires kicking up mud. The narrow road ran behind the golf course that was to the south of the park and then along the east side. I honestly had no idea how to get to it, but I also didn’t spend time at the golf course. First one police car, then others, skidded to a stop not far from me, sirens blaring. A voice on a loudspeaker told me to stop and put my hands up. I didn’t react at first. I couldn’t move. My mind was stuck. My body, frozen. The voice from the car yelled at me again. First, I was confused: Why was I getting screamed at? Then I slowly raised my hands; they felt like lead. I took a small step back, stumbled a little before righting myself. Police surged out of their cars, and an officer started yelling at me. I lifted my head to face them, but tears blurred my vision. All the sounds muffled in my ears. I couldn’t hear what the man was yelling; all I saw was a white man with a gun. My brain froze. I was terrified, my eyes fixating on the words Serve & Protect on the cop cars; I knew right then that they didn’t apply to me. Another cop, a Black woman, her hair pulled back in a low, tight bun, turned to look at me. Then said something to the man with the gun. He nodded and started to lower it, but he still looked angry. All the cops did. Even though he lowered the gun, it didn’t make me feel any less terrified. Last year, Chicago cops had killed a thirteen-year-old brown boy who had his empty hands up, just like me.

They sat me on the back edge of an ambulance, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I heard one of the EMTs saying something about shock, but it was kind of a blur, and it took me a second to understand they were talking about me. One detective and then another came to interview me. I explained what I could. The same explanation I would have to give to my parents: I was on a walk. Clearing my head after what had happened to our store. That was the truth. Part of it, anyway. The whole truth was much more complicated than that.

I stood and inched closer to the embankment as they gently removed the body. My limbs were numb. My mind blank, erased. I moved closer, as close as the yellow crime-scene tape would let me. I’d already trampled on the murder scene, a cop complained. I wanted to scream, The only reason I stepped anywhere near the crime scene is because the police ignored the crime. A missing Muslim boy, a refugee, an Iraqi, wasn’t worth too many news cycles. Wasn’t worth the full investigation. And now Jawad was dead. They didn’t say it was him, of course; not to me, anyway. Something about notifying the parents to identify him. They talked around me like I wasn’t there. A part of me felt like I wasn’t.

They placed his body on the stretcher, their gloved hands gentle like his cold skin could bruise. My veins filled with ice. Every part of me felt locked, dazed. I shivered, even with the blanket around me. I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t turn away. His face looked so soft. So young. Sometimes my mom says that when she looks at me, she can see my face as a baby in my face now. I wondered if that’s what Jawad’s parents would see. Like he’d never had a chance to grow up, like he would always be a baby. Their baby. I wiped my dripping nose with the back of my coat sleeve.

That’s when I caught a glint of blue and silver as the EMTs lofted a gray blanket, air buffeting it before it came to settle on his body. A flash from his belt loop. A key chain. A small silver hand of Fatima, a blue-and-white stone in its center. An amulet to ward off evil. To protect him. My mind paused, trying to grasp at a moment vaguely reminiscent of this one. Not about the body or the murder. But him, Jawad. Goose bumps popped up all over my skin—my body remembered, even if my mind didn’t have the words yet. That key chain had once belonged to me.

My mother screamed my name from across the field as my parents hurried up the path. She looked frantic, her normally perfect high bun now low and loose at the back of her neck, wisps of hair flying around her face. My dad’s face was a stone. I put my hand up in a half wave, then turned back to the culvert when I heard one of the detectives say something about the glasses. I’d pointed them out to the woman officer right away. It seemed like hours ago. It seemed like a minute ago.

“The kid wear glasses?” a tan-skinned detective in a dark-blue suit asked the Black officer, the one I’d told.

She shrugged. “Let me check his school ID again. She”—the officer tilted her head in my direction—“inadvertently kicked them.”

“Fantastic.” The detective sighed.

My parents appeared at my side, out of breath and gray faced. My mother threw her arms around me, and my dad rubbed my back.

“Beta. Beta. Are you okay?” my mom whispered.

I straightened up, my breath hitching. “Those glasses…,” I muttered under my breath.

“Sorry?” my dad said.

I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking, but I pointed to the detective with the glasses in his gloved hand. I raised my voice. “I know who those belong to.”