“Yo, I cannot believe this bitch here!” Pri says.
“She will listen to me. She will not arrest Kasim. And Dray won’t be there for her to arrest him,” I say softly, trying to satisfy Donna.
“Fabiola! Do not talk to the detective. Do not talk to cops. Do not talk to lawyers. That’s just how it is out here. That’s code. No more snitching!” Chantal says. Her voice is louder and harder.
I shrink. I am small. I am nothing now. Where have you taken me, Papa Legba? What is this gate you have opened? I try to make sense of everything Chantal was trying to explain to me back in the house. If Kasim is selling for Dray, he will still get hit with the charge, as she said. And the cops will only get to Dray if Kasim snitches.
The houses are bigger here—the lights on their lawns, walkways, and porches are brighter. The Christmas decorations are on the roofs and all over the wide and tall trees that tower over the curving roads. This must be the place where dreams rest their heads. I want to press my forehead against the window to get a better view of the houses, but it’s dark and I’m still shrunken in my seat.
Until lights pour into the car—spinning blue and red siren lights from the police cars and ambulances. My insides sink.
“What’s the kid’s name, Donna? The one throwing the party,” Chantal asks as she slows down the car.
“Bryan Messner. Is this Buckingham Road?” Donna asks.
Chantal looks up at her phone that’s stuck to the dashboard. “Yep. Shit. It’s hot out here. Cops are all over the place.”
“We can’t be anywhere around this party with all these cops, Chant,” Pri says. “Let’s just go home.”
Chantal parks the car far away from the swirling lights in the distance. “No, hold up. If Kasim is still there and nothing went down, we’ll take him home with us. Let’s just wait it out,” she says.
But I don’t want to wait it out. I want to run out of the car and toward those lights, so I unlock the door. But Chantal grabs my arm. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Why don’t I go?” Donna asks.
“So they could be like, ‘That’s the bitch who sold me the bad pills’?” Pri says. “See? We can’t even get into the party, so now what?”
“I’m calling Dray,” Donna says.
“So he could figure out that your cousin set him up?” Pri says. “And find out that we went to Q behind his back.”
I’m tired of listening to them talk. So I open the car door, step out, and slam it shut behind me.
“Fab, where you going?” I hear, but I keep going.
Everything in my body feels tight and heavy as I walk away from the car, as if my skin and bones know that something is not right. I hear a car door slam shut behind me.
“All right, look,” Chantal says when she reaches me. “We’re gonna pretend we’re going to the party. Okay? Don’t ask for Kasim. Don’t even mention his name. Let him see us first so that he’s surprised and it looks like a coincidence that we’re there.”
I agree, and we walk down the street arm in arm—like a united front. This is how me and my mother would walk the streets of Port-au-Prince at night. If anybody wanted to take on one of us, they’d have to take on both of us. But we are not in Port-au-Prince. We are in Grosse Pointe Park. The air is lighter here, like how the air is freer in the rich hills of Petionville. But this dark free air feels dangerous, as if it knows we’re not supposed to be here, that we don’t belong here.
I want to say sorry to Chantal. I want to ask her why, with all that money, they never bought a house here. I want to ask her why, with her all her brains, is she selling drugs. I want to talk, to sing, to take my mind off what I may have done to Kasim. But we’re getting closer to the swirling lights. They hurt our eyes, so we both raise our hands to shield our faces.
There are people everywhere. We come closer to a car with the word POLICE stretched out wide across its side in big blue letters. A cop is approaching us. My stomach tightens and I squeeze Chantal’s hand.
“Young ladies, you can’t come here,” the cop says.
“We’re going to Bryan’s party,” Chantal explains. Her voice and words are different again. I’m not sure if she is answering the cop or asking for permission.
“Party’s over. You live around here?”
“Yeah. Over on Three Mile Drive. We walked here.”
“Three Mile Drive, huh?” He looks us up and down as if we are dirty. “Let me see some ID.”
“Okay,” Chantal says, and digs into her jean pocket. “It’s my high school ID from University Liggett. I don’t have anything with my address on it. Did something happen over there?” Chantal says with her soft, easy voice.
The police officer looks at the ID card and then at Chantal and back at the card. He hands her the ID and motions for us to turn back around. “Go home, girls. Party’s over and there’s nothing for you to see here.”