“Yeah. First time I did it, I was scared to death. Like you. But then after that, each time was easier.”
I glance in the rearview mirror. Michaela’s shoving a blue ball in her mouth and babbling around the ball at her brother, who is trying to coax it away from her, his face very close to hers, his voice low and serious: “No, don’t put that in your mouth, Kayla; it’s nasty and done been on the floor.” Michaela grins and spits the ball in his hand and begins clapping and saying: “Nasty, that’s nasty.” Jojo looks like he’s paying all his attention to Michaela, but I know he’s not. There’s something about the way he leans, about how he says the same thing to Michaela, again, “That floor was nasty,” that makes me realize he’s listening to what we’re saying, even as he’s trying to look like he’s not. Me and Misty already talked about it when I picked her up: we’re not going to refer to it by name, not going to use any words that hint to what’s in the bag, what we’re sneaking north with us: meth, crystal, crank. We’d talk around it, avoid it like a bad customer in the bar who’s too drunk for more, who smells like sweet alcohol fermenting and diesel, yet keeps grabbing my hand when I walk by, saying something fucked up to me like: One more, you sweet Black bitch. And when we have to call it some other name, we’re going to call it the most embarrassing thing we can so Jojo will lose all interest.
“If we get pulled over and they find those goddamn tampons, Misty, I’m going to kill you.”
I figure that will make Jojo stop listening. Never mind the fact that the statement doesn’t make any sense. He’s a boy, and periods are one of those things about the human body he most likes to ignore: kidney stones, pimples, boils. Cancer.
“Jojo, I need the atlas.”
I’m right. He jerks when I say this before rooting around for the book and handing it over the seat to me, trying to find my eyes in the rearview mirror. When his brown don’t find my black, Misty takes it from him. He shrinks back into the backseat, still looking at the floor. Michaela calls him, “Jojo,” and he leans toward her again.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“I’m looking,” Misty mumbles.
I look for mile markers. We stopped at Carlotta and Fred’s just north of Hattiesburg, in north Forrest County.
“Mendenhall. We’re in Mendenhall,” Misty says. There’s a stoplight ahead of us, so I slow. She’s not looking at the atlas.
“How you know that?”
Misty points up, and there’s a billboard. Mendenhall, it reads, Home of Mississippi’s Most Beautiful Courthouse.
“I want to see it.”
The light turns green. I step on the gas.
“I don’t.”
“Why not? What if it’s really pretty?”
In the backseat, Jojo is moving his mouth around like he’s chewing something. He looks away from Michaela and up to me, and his eyes dark as mine. I was smaller when I was his age, weedier, more delicate at my joints and bones. He looks like Given, but he never jokes. Sometimes, when Jojo’s playing with Michaela or sitting in Mama’s room rubbing her hands or helping her turn over in the bed, I look at him and see a hungry girl.
“I bet it has big columns and everything. Probably even bigger than Beauvoir,” Misty says.
“No,” I say, and leave it at that.
Michael never used to write me anything about the violence in jail, those things that happened in the dead of night in dark corners and locked rooms: the stabbings and the hangings and the overdoses and the beatings. But I told him he had to tell me. In a letter, I said: If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I imagine the worst. So in the next letter, he told me about somebody getting jumped in the showers, beaten purple and black. In the one after, he told me how his cellmate started messing with one of the female guards, how they snuck around and have sex in the jail, hunching like rodents. Bent on procreating. And in the next letter, he told me about the guards beating an eighteen-year-old boy who had been convicted of kidnapping and strangling a five-year-old girl in a trailer park. They heard him screaming and then nothing, and then got word he bled to death like a pig in his cell. That, I want to say to Misty, is your pretty courthouse. But I don’t say anything. I watch the road roll out before me like a big black ribbon and I think about Michael’s last letter before he told me he was coming home: This ain’t no place for no man. Black or White. Don’t make no difference. This a place for the dead.
*
Michaela’s sick. She was quiet for the first hour after we left the house, but then she started coughing, and the tail end of the cough caught in her throat and she gagged. For the past thirty minutes, she’s been crying and fighting with her seat belt, trying to get out. I hand a palmful of napkins to Jojo, and every other time I look in the rearview mirror, I see him bending over her, frowning, wiping at her drooling mouth. The napkins soak in seconds. We were supposed to drive the rest of the way today and stay with Michael and Bishop’s lawyer in the next town over from the jail, but all her crying is making me feel like someone is squeezing my brain, tighter and tighter. I can’t breathe. Then she coughs and gags again, and I look back and the front of her is orange and mauve. She’s thrown up all her puffy Cheetos, digested soggy, all her little careful bites of her ham sandwich. The meat has turned what isn’t yellow pink. Jojo is holding napkins in both hands, frozen. He looks scared. Michaela cries harder.
“We gotta stop,” I say as I pull over on the shoulder of the road.
“Oh shit,” Misty says, and waves her hand in front of her mouth like she’s shooing away gnats. “That smell is going to make me throw up.”
I want to slap her, even though the smell of the stomach acid, harsh and intense in the small car, makes me feel queasy, too. Want to yell at her: Bitch, how you work around all them drunks and can’t stand a little throw-up? But I don’t. Once we’re on the side of the road, and I’m swiping globs of the vomit away with the napkins I snatched from Jojo, the queasiness turns flips and somersaults in my stomach like a kid on a trampoline. Jojo doesn’t look scared anymore. He puts both hands in the vomit cascading down Michaela’s front and unbuckles her chest harness. She pauses in her frantic straining, her little chest pushed out against the belt again to give a thank-you cry before she starts pulling at the lap buckle, anxious for him to undo that, too, to free her. He’s frowning. He unbuckles the last buckle and pulls her out, and before I even have a moment to admonish him, to say his name sharply, say “Jojo,” Michaela is smashed to his chest and her little arms are around his neck again, the length of her laid along him, shaking, mewling, him breathing: “It’s all right, Kayla, it’s all right, Kayla, Jojo got you, Jojo got you, I got you, shhh.”