I just about spring out my chair, then repeat to myself the mantra: calm, calm. “No, I ain’t done no drugs.”
He already has an idea, though, starts down the path of asking me about Marcus, Mama, Daddy. Says something about familial histories of erratic behavior or some shit and this is everything Marsha told me it might be, but I still want to crawl out my skin, shed it and return to only bones.
He takes a second to go to his table and take a sip of water. I look out at the jury again, hoping the faces might cement some sort of hope for me, but they’re still just a mesh of blank stares.
“Ms. Johnson.” I snap back into the room, the click of the court reporter on the keyboard. “Did you believe it to be wrong to have sexual relations with members of the police force?” The question is innocent enough, not even worth being asked.
“Of course it ain’t right.” I’m still thinking about Marcus, about getting him out the moment I exit this wooden trap.
“So why did you participate?”
“I told you, I didn’t have no choice.”
“You couldn’t have gotten up and left that party? You couldn’t have refused a ride from Officer Carlisle?”
The tremors start in my fingertips, right beneath the nails, and spread inward. Not up, not down, but inside. Vibrations to the rib cage. I wonder if this is what Trevor felt when they took him.
“I mean, I could’ve, but they didn’t give me no choice—”
“So they forced you to stay? Did Officer Carlisle use handcuffs on you, put you in the back of the car and lock the doors?”
“No.” I start tapping my hands on the podium, then scratching, like the wood might take all the tremors and make me hollow.
“Were you angry that you never received monetary payment for these acts?”
I stare at him. His glasses are slipping down his nose from the sweat.
“I guess.”
“Did you believe accusing these men of violent acts would result in payment of some sort?”
“What?”
“Did you believe that these accusations would make you money?”
The whole room stills, no one dares to tap a foot or brush a piece of hair behind their ear, thinking they might disturb the fragility of it: the moment they all expect me to crumble.
“No.” One word. One word. One word.
He takes a minute to turn around and survey the rest of the courtroom before coming back to look at me, a trick Marsha says they all use. I wonder if she’s included in “they.”
“You were underage at the time of the events in question, correct?”
“I was seventeen.”
“You understand that would make this statutory rape, yes?”
Marsha’s told me enough about it. “Yes.”
“Did you notify these men of your age prior to intercourse?”
This is the question Marsha and I hoped he wouldn’t ask, hoped he might skim over.
“They knew.”
“So you told them?”
“Not exactly, but they knew. I’m telling you they knew.”
He smiles, this soft smile that reminds me of these interviews I watched with Marsha when we were preparing where he talks about battered women, how he wants to keep us safe. He looks at me not like I’m the battered woman, though, but like I’m the little girl standing by watching. Like I’m confused. “How would they know, Ms. Johnson?”
The tremors have made their way outward now and every limb is shaking. I’m rocking in my chair, its legs squeaking on the platform.
“Because they saw me. I was lying there and they looked me in my eyes and they knew. They knew and they kept them eyes open the whole time, staring at me while they had sex with me, like that only made it better. Because they looked at me and they saw how small I was. I was a child.”
Creak on the floor, splinter in my tap-tap fingernail, rigid shake, eyes blurred, Oakland sky so bright inside my throat. I might not have been Soraya, too small to stand up on the shallow end of the pool, but I was still small. I felt so small.
“But you never told them your age?” He knows this is it, the last question.
Fingernails deep inside my skin, blood trickle. “I was a child. I was a child.”
And even though Trevor and Marcus and Alé and Mama are out there somewhere, even though there are so many reasons why I gotta say it all, why I gotta let it erupt from my lungs, I’m not thinking about none of them. All I can think about is the way my fingernails stay pressed into the skin even when it breaks, even when I start to bleed. When everything turns to chaos, when I’m sitting in a room full of faces I can’t distinguish, when my body doesn’t feel like mine no more, I still got these nails. Still got a reminder that I can exist broken, like Trevor facedown in his own crusted blood, still finding a way to get air into his body. That these nails are a miracle. Don’t need nobody to make them pretty, to trim them, sharpen them. All they gotta be is what they are: mine.
“Thank you, Ms. Johnson.”
He says something about how I can step down, a juror sneezes somewhere in the corner of my vision. Everything keeps on moving, colliding, a wood room where I set myself free like the sky that one night when stars showed themselves over the freeway, before I went back to the apartment that would never really be mine again.
I was a child.
Every moment passes like water through a clogged drain, barely getting through. Marsha took me home straight from the courthouse, dropped me off without a single word the whole ride, not that I would have heard her if she had spoken.
Somehow, I exited that courtroom with a different body than the one I had when I walked under its ornate wood ceiling, sat on those benches so many before me sweated into. This new body has a chain of holes from the throat to the stomach, where I have tried to bury myself in carvings. This new body got scars more permanent than any tattoo and calls them glorious. This new body got too many memories to hold up inside.
I’m sitting in the center of an apartment that don’t nobody really own and hollering. Like Dee finally infected me, like Mama crawled up inside me to massage my jaw open. And the sun has set—left me in the dark seeing only a glitter of pool out the window—and risen again. Over and over. Maybe three times before the knock. It comes when the sky is just starting to pastel. When my mouth has found its close.
I don’t move, but she doesn’t wait for me to. Alé opens the door like it’s hers, marches in with a large bag that she swings onto the counter and then beelines right for me on the floor, kneeling, pooling me into her until we are a singular body and I can smell every scent she’s ever carried. Every spice. Her mama’s crochet blankets. The skate park.
She loosens her grip a little and I can see her skin, where I get a peek of what must be her newest tattoo, on the back of her neck: a pair of shoes, colored lavender with a K in the sole of one of them.
She fully lets go of me now, so I can finally look at her eyes, which are spilling. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Alé cry like this and I can’t help but lean forward and kiss her cheek, taste the salt, trail up to the corner of her eye with my lips. She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt. The warmth got hold of my chest, other side of what they say about the heart; when it’s not breaking, you might just get lucky enough to have it feel full, blood pulsing.
Her hands find my waist and a series of thoughts flash across her face, an internal debate surfacing in mouth quivers. When Alé touches me this time, we are on the floor, we are without barriers. My mouth is already so close.