She parked and got out, just as the boy and his girl broke their embrace. She intercepted them as they walked back toward the pink car.
“You in there when it happened?” she asked the boy without any preamble, her phone already out to record. “I’d love to hear about it.”
The kid slowed, a thought line appearing between his eyebrows. He wasn’t just black but black-black, like a lava-sand beach. Light disappeared into him. Good-looking, of course, but then you had to be to get hired at Boost Yer Game. Youth, health, and blackness were a lot of what they sold—to a mostly white, suburban clientele. He was still wearing the store uniform; apparently the cops hadn’t let him change.
“Yeah. I was in there. I was the closest person to the action who didn’t get shot. Not counting Mr. Kellaway.”
The three girls eyed Lanternglass with a mix of wariness and curiosity. The girlfriend, the prettiest of them—snub nose, slim neck, and bobbed, straightened hair—said, “Why you askin’?”
“I’m with the paper. St. Possenti Digest. I’d love to know what it was like—to be three steps away from a bullet. The inside story. How you made it out,” she said, answering the girl but looking at the boy while she spoke.
“My picture in the paper?” he asked.
“You bet. People will be asking you for your autograph.”
He grinned, but the girlfriend said, “It’s a hundred dollars,” and stepped in front of him, as if to physically block Lanternglass from getting any closer.
“If I had a hundred dollars in my purse, I could afford a babysitter. But I can’t, which means I’ve only got about a half an hour before I have to pick my girl up from town summer camp.”
“Shit,” his girl said. “You want to know his story, you can watch all about it on Dateline. I bet they’re good for a grand.”
Lanternglass figured a girl with a brand-new pink Audi probably had a higher limit on her credit card than she did. She thought the girlfriend was bringing up money as a pose, a bit of spontaneous performance art. Maybe the boyfriend was from the Black & Blue and the girlfriend was from the Boulevards, and now she was trying to impress him by acting like she was street.
“I’m not sure Dateline will be calling,” Lanternglass said. “But if they do, don’t you want them to talk to your guy instead of one of a hundred other people who were in the mall today? The person who gets their story out first is usually the only person who gets their story out. Besides”—and now she fixed the girlfriend with a direct stare—“I’d really like to talk to both of you. I’d like to know how you felt when you heard about the shooting, knowing your boyfriend was in the building, not knowing if you’d ever see him again.”
That softened her. She glanced at her boy, Okello, who had not said anything about money and who attended to Lanternglass with calm interest.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” he said. “You don’t have to pay me.”
“Can I record you?” Lanternglass asked, gesturing with her smartphone.
He nodded.
“What’s your name?” she asked, because it was a good place to start, even if she already knew the answer.
“Okello Fisher. Like Othello but with a k.”
In Aisha Lanternglass’s mind, Colson died again. He died three or four times every day, even now. Facedown in his own blood. If he had not bled to death, he might’ve drowned in it.
“What kind of name is Okello?” Lanternglass asked.
He rolled his shoulders in an easy shrug. “My mom’s big into African history. She made me a cake with num-num berries for my tenth birthday, bought me a tribal drum. I’m like, damn, what’s wrong with chocolate cake and PlayStation?”
She liked him already, knew he was going to give her good quotes. The girl’s name was Sarah. To keep everyone happy, Aisha got the friends’ names, too, Katie and Madison. Boulevard names, all three.
“When’s the first you knew something was wrong?”
“Prolly when I saw the gun,” he told her.
“You saw the shooter?”
“Mall only opened a few minutes before. I went up to the food court to grab Frappuccinos for Irving and myself. Irving and I have the morning at BYG. I don’t know why he works there—his family is pretty well-off. I guess his mom wants him to experience what it’s like to have a job.” Doubt flickered in his big, sensitive eyes, and he said, “You better not print I said that. Irving’s cool. They’ve had me over for dinner.”
“I won’t publish anything you don’t want me to publish.”
“Anyway, there’s a hoop in the BYG, and we play HORSE. Loser has to pay for the winner’s Frappuccino, but the winner has to go get them.”
“When’s the last time you paid for his drink?” the girlfriend, Sarah, asked him with a certain teasing pride.
“Irving’s okay. I have to pay sometimes. He’s not too good from the left side, though. So—yeah, usually he pays and I go get them.”
“I won’t publish you said that either,” Lanternglass promised. “I don’t want to give away your secret winning strategy.”
He grinned again, and Lanternglass liked him even more. She thought again that he was from the Black & Blue, not because he sounded street but because he didn’t. He spoke effortlessly, yet with a certain care in his phrasing. Lanternglass was familiar with the impulse to choose words with some precision. It flowed from the anxious certainty that a single verbal slip would make you sound like you slung drugs on the corner. Lanternglass had spent a year studying journalism in London, doing some of the things Colson never got to do, and while she was there, she’d read an essay about the English class system. Englishmen, she read, were branded on their tongue. You knew whether someone was posh or trash the moment he opened his mouth and spoke. It was even more true of being black in America. A person would make up his mind about you as soon as you said hello, just from the way you said it.
Okello continued, “I was walking back to Boost Yer Game when she went by. We passed each other on the big flight of stairs in the central atrium. I was going down, and she was going up. I had to look at her twice because she was fooling with something high up on her leg. Like, I thought she was messing with a stocking at first. Only it was a holster. A thigh holster. She pulled it off just as I went by. She’d been crying, too. Even though she had sunglasses on, I could tell from the mascara streaks under her eyes.”
“How would you describe her?”
“Petite. Blond. Real pretty. I think her name was Becki. Or Betty? No. Kinda sure it was Becki.”
“How do you know her name?”
“She worked at Devotion Diamonds, same place she shot up. The whole mall has an employee-appreciation event on the last Saturday morning of every month, before opening. Rog Lewis—he runs the store—gave her an award once. Employee of the Month or something. She killed him first. At least I think that’s what happened. He shouted right before the first shot. I know he’s dead. I saw them wheel him out.”
“Go back. She passed you on the stairs. She had a gun. Then what?”