Chapter 22 Mekhi #2
“Yeah, but you not from that world. You from… what? Libraries and debate clubs?” I said finally.
“Don’t play me, Mekhi,” she said, but there wasn’t anger in her words.
“My family is one generation from the hood, and I still got family there. I know what sirens sound like when they approaching the block. I know what it feels like to wake up at family’s house and have to push a dresser against the door ’cause folks arguing outside. Don’t do me.”
“That why you study this?” I asked, meaning what the museum showcased.
“Partly,” she said. “And for my cousin—”
She stopped, her mouth closing, her eyes filling. I waited. I don’t know why I waited; patience in conversations wasn’t my style. But something about the way she looked told me that if I moved too fast, she’d stay forever quiet, and I’d never hear it.
I wanted to hear it. To know it. To know her.
“Mariah has… had an older sister. Marissa got snatched when I was thirteen,” she said, eyes going somewhere I couldn’t go with her.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, Farrah.”
It was an out, because I felt like she might need one. My little thug kept going, though.
“Didn’t nobody take it serious ’cause she was sixteen and… you know how they label black girls. ‘Fast,’ they said. ‘Lil fast tail probably off with some boy,’ they thought. People got a way of blaming girls for whatever happens to them. Anyway, they found her two weeks later.”
“Damn,” I said, useless with that tiny word. “I’m sorry.”
“I couldn’t do anything, but I needed to do something. I went to the library. Checked out books with ugly covers, so I could read about why people do ugly things.” Her jaw tightened.
I swallowed, choosing my next words carefully because I could see the weight of guilt all over her. I knew that weight. “You were a kid, Farrah. You know you couldn’t have done anything, right?”
“No, maybe not,” she said, with a quick, hard shake of her head.
“But I wanted to know… for another time. I wanted to learn what the silences and whispers meant, all that bullshit that surrounded us when she died. I wanted to be able to translate it, so I’d understand another time.
You ever feel like that, Mekhi? Like you learned a language too late? ” she asked, eyes searching mine.
“All the time,” I said, before I could pretend otherwise. “I learned money first. Then contracts. Then people.”
She tilted her head. “In that order?”
“Yeah. That last one should’ve been first, so I didn’t spend so much time not understanding.”
“That tracks, though,” she said, smiling. “You look like a calculator with eyes, sometimes. I can see your brain computing.”
“Cute,” I said. “And you like some glasses with lip gloss, looking all deep into everything.”
She laughed, the sound too sweet for the room we sat in. “A’ight, since we in here being fake detectives, I’ma let you ask me something. Real. Not one of your little smart-ass questions.”
I drummed my fingers on the table, looking at her. Shorty was beyond pretty. I’d known it, even when I hadn’t wanted to admit it. “What do you do when you can’t sleep?” I asked. I don’t know why that was what came out.
Her smile surprised me, and then it softened. “I go to the kitchen,” she said.
“The freezer?” I asked, expecting a reply about ice cream. Women loved ice cream when shit was going on.
“Uh-uh. I make cocoa. It calms me down,” she said instead.
I nodded. It made sense—that shit seeped from her pores, and I was here for it.
“I think it tricks my body into believing it’s safe.”
My eyes drilled into hers. “You know you safe now, right?”
She shrugged. “So you tell me.”
I didn’t like that. I needed her to know it, to believe it. Protecting her had become a priority, and it felt like a privilege. Before I could say anything, though, she spoke.
“What about you?”
My answer was automatic. “I count exits,” I said.
I’d started after my father died during a break-in, when we ended up moving from one seedy place to another, including another one that was broken into. I always needed to know how to get out.
She looked around the little room as if to check for me. “How many in here?”
“One door,” I said, pointing. “One vent big enough for a cat, maybe. If you count the mirror, there’s probably a hallway on the other side. If I had to, the table got weight. I could use it to—”
“Damn,” she murmured. “You do that everywhere?”
“Yeah.”
“When you start?”
“When I got tired of being scared,” I said.
Her lips pressed together for a moment, then another soft question. “How old was that?”
“Too young,” I said.
She nodded and left it alone.
“Okay,” she said, lifting her chin. “My turn. You ever been in love?”
It took me a second to register the question, but when I did, I smiled. Such a girl question. Now, answering it… suddenly, the overhead light felt hotter. She watched me, trying to look patient and casual, but failing.
“Nah,” I said.
She clicked her tongue. “Cap.”
“I ain’t lying,” I insisted. “I’ve fucked. I’ve been, um, attached once. But I haven’t been in love.”
She didn’t look triumphant about getting that out of me, like I expected. She just looked thoughtful. “That girl at the ballpark?”
I just looked at her. She gave me a half smile.
“You scared of it?”
“Maybe scared of the consequences. Love makes niggas do sloppy things. I don’t like sloppy.”
“Mm.” She tapped the table with her nails. “You think love is sloppy. Have you seen real love?”
“Have you?” I shot back.
“Yes. I come from it,” she said, no hesitation.
“Yeah? Well, must be nice, Little Thug,” I muttered.
“The good thing is, you don’t have to come from love to have it, Mekhi,” she asserted.
We just stared at each other, left that loaded statement sitting right there.
“How you learn to stop?” she asked quietly, suddenly.
I frowned. “Stop what?”
“Whatever had you in these rooms.”
“I ain’t want death or jail,” I said. “And I had somebody older and smarter telling me to run while I still had free legs when I got the opportunity.”
“That somebody still around?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Carlos Morales.
“You thank him?”
“Every month when he invoices me.”
She smiled at that. “All about that bottom line. All that matters, huh?”
Looking down into her beautiful face, I murmured, “Not all.”
“Tell me what else matters,” she invited softly.
I wasn’t falling for that shit. “Business. Contracts. Financing. Real estate. Got my mentor that youth center he wanted to build, with his name on a plaque,” I confirmed.
That made her sit up, her face bright. “You’re behind the Morales Center? That’s yours?”
“It’s not mine. It’s the community’s. I just wrote checks till the doors opened and folks started showing up.”
“I’m guessing you don’t talk about it much.”
“I don’t need to.”
“You should. People need your story as much as they need the services.”
“Representation matters,” I said, all high pitched.
She glared at me. “It does.”
We left the interrogation room and slid into the next space, where the walls were painted a deep navy blue and lit up with timelines of cases solved by advances in forensic science. Strands of fake DNA twisted in a suspended sculpture overhead. Farrah’s steps slowed, awestruck again.
“You want one of these?” I asked, gesturing at a glass case with a lab coat folded neatly beneath a plaque.
“One of what? A lab coat? Hell, yeah. Dr. Gray loading” she laughed.
“I meant a milestone with your name,” I said, pointing at the plaque. “Do you wanna discover something? Teach something that makes people do better?”
She went quiet. “Yeah. But not for me.” she said finally.
“For who, then?”
“The kids I want to help. I want to find a way that makes adults stop making children endure trauma until they repeat it.”
“You could,” I said. “Figure it out. Then, I could donate—”
She held up a hand. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
Assume she’d share with me, that I’d be in her future? Yeah, I had slipped up with that one. But all she said was, “Offer to fix it with money or a phone call. I ain’t a project.”
I nodded. “Damn.” That little word again.
She glanced at me and softened. “I ain’t saying I don’t want help. I just… want my hands on the steering wheel.”
“You like control,” I said.
“Control is a fantasy.”
I shook my head. “Nah. I gotta have it.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You the oldest?” she asked.
“Yeah, and the one who got had to learn too much too early.” I didn’t know why I revealed that. I sped right on past it. “You the oldest?”
“Only,” she said, and it explained a hundred things at once about my bougie little thug. She shook her head at my smirk. “I am not spoiled.”
“What y’all be saying? ‘Oh, Farrah, please!” I teased. “Your parents good?”
“My parents great.”
“They know you here?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Farrah grinned. “They know I’m safe.”
“That ain’t what I asked.”
“You mean do they know I’m with you? No, they do not know I’m with who I shouldn’t be with.”
It was my turn to smile. “Who that?”
She side-eyed me. “Don’t do too much.”
“I’m just trying to figure out if I’m the person you shouldn’t be with.”
She paused, tilted that head, spilling curls everywhere and looked at me. “You ain’t bad,” she said solemnly before smiling again. “You just annoying.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll take annoying.”
“You already did,” she muttered, and I decided not to ask what she meant. “Wait ‘til I tell my professor about this place.”
“You do anything that ain’t about school?”
“I cook,” she said. “Like, for real. Not just pasta and sauce. I can season my ass off.”
“That wagon? Ain’t that much seasoning in the world.”
“Mekhi!” she protested, but she grinned.
“What’s your best dish?”
“Shrimp and grits, if I got the good Irish butter and quality seafood,” she said. “Oxtails when I got patience. My MiMi taught me that.”
My mouth watered. “I cook, too,” I reminded her.
She snorted. “Top Ramen don’t count.”