They come out of the blue darkness in a swarm. I am surprised by how many of them there are, how fast they move. They are large, real men, bulky in their vests. I can’t tell what is them and what is only the moving dark around them. Their long, black-clad arms are made longer by the guns they hold, and they yell in an untidy chorus, telling us to be still, to get down, to be on the ground.
My heart swells. I am frozen, both jubilant and sick with dizzy terror. I willed them to come, and they did. I willed a way out, and the way came creeping up from behind us, through the woods, past the rusty shed. They came as Kai sang, “Jai Kali, Jai Kalika!” as if my own name was the signal.
We will have to move, now. I have a vague idea that the police get to keep crime houses for themselves. Too bad on Dwayne, but River’s dad took a bust for pot, and he only got six months. Dwayne’s done two years before, for B and E, and before that he did some stints in juvie. Six months is nothing—but it’s very long in Kai time. She’s rarely single for half that, and by the time he’s out, we’ll be other people and long gone.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dwayne is yelling, his hands up.
“Get down,” yells the closest cop.
Dwayne is sliding off the sofa to the ground, but Kai clutches me and screams something so close to my ear that the word is lost in the outsize, blasting sound of it. She jerks me backward, into the house. Outside I hear the cops yelling in protest. She locks the door, then runs for the master bedroom, pulling me along.
“Stop,” I say, but she keeps pulling.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Tick got arrested once in the Dairy Queen, and that was the end of Kai and Tick. When the cops came in, she put her hands flat on the table, one on each side of her Peanut Buster Parfait.
She said, “Keep still, they don’t want us,” to me, and she was right.
But now she slams the bedroom door and locks it. She runs to the bedside table and pulls the stash of Hervé’s pills out of the drawer. I forgot about the pills she stole, still tucked in her bedside table. Her fingerprints are all over the Baggie.
“I don’t think you should—” I say, but she’s already running for the bathroom.
I stand rooted, listening to a fearsome banging, then a crash; someone has kicked down the back door. In the bathroom, I hear the toilet flushing. Kai is going to get in trouble. I run to the window. It is dark in here, but light has flooded the back porch, and I can see Dwayne has been rolled to his belly. His hands are bound in silver. I hear my black army crashing around inside the house, men moving from room to room, yelling “Clear!” in firm, decisive voices.
The toilet is flushing again, and I hear Kai cussing at it. I hear wood splintering, and I back up, away from the window, away from the locked door. I press myself against the wall. Kai runs out of the bathroom to me, wraps her arm around me.
“It’s okay,” she says, but it isn’t.
The door is forced open. Men run at us, armed and yelling. Now hands are pulling us apart. A man shoves Kai to the ground, and this is wrong. I am being pulled back, away from my mother. I resist, dig in my heels, and I find myself lifted. I become a podgy sack of thrashing, mad potatoes.
They are doing it wrong. When I biked down to the Dandy Mart and called 911 from the pay phone, I told the operator to leave us out of it. What is your emergency? she asked, and I told her the emergency was Dwayne. My mom’s new boyfriend grows so much pot. Thirty-two Laraby Lane, in Paulding. He tends it, and he sells it for his job. Him, not us. My mom and me only just moved here. These men don’t seem to know that. They only know Kai ran when they said stop. As I am carried bodily from the room, I see my mother crying. She is being handcuffed, and I did this. I made this be.
I yell “No! No!” to an army that is by all rights mine, but the army doesn’t listen. They don’t know I was named for the blue-skinned goddess of destruction. They don’t know I am the force that set them into motion. No one knows. They see only the shortest girl in sixth grade, a roly-poly, too small to be taken seriously.
“Baby?” Kai is yelling. She does not know, either. “Don’t worry. Just go with them. Baby? It’s okay.”
I go limp and am toted off to my own roach spray–smelling bedroom. It is not okay. I called them, and now they are taking my mother. I have split the planet called Me and Kai in two, when I only ever wanted a way out of here, for both of us, together.
A lady policeman sits with me, waiting for DFCS. At eleven, I don’t understand the difference between River’s dad, who had pet plants named Lydia and Jilly, and Dwayne, a longtime petty criminal with a basement greenhouse full of seedlings and mature plants growing tall back in our woods.
The yard outside my window is a sea of red and blue lights. I called them, and they came and took my mother. Kai is fingerprinted and regressed back into Karen Vauss, a girl from Alabama with a juvie sheet and no visible employment history. She is charged with obstruction and destroying evidence.
I am taken to a temporary shelter. It is loud and even scarier than middle school. My hands are fists. I keep them fists, in case.
“Why did you run?” I ask Kai, crying on the phone.