“Ella?”
Tears stream down her face. She’s not moving.
“Ella, what’s wrong?”
I put a hand to her shoulder. Hurt shoots back and forth between my ears. My eyes shut, and all of a sudden, all I see is fire. People in the streets chanting, people throwing bricks, the scritch of handcuffs closing over wrists. I take my hand back. My palm feels like I touched the stove. But nothing in the kitchen moves. I don’t smell any sulfur in the air or feel the ground change beneath me like it always does before one of Ella’s attacks.
“Ella?”
“Something bad is gonna happen.” Her voice is leaden when she says it. That’s the last thing she says to me before she vanishes.
“Kev?”
I turn and Mama’s standing in the entrance to the kitchen. The news about the shooting fills the room. “Where’s Ella?”
But now Mama’s watching the TV and maybe she sees whatever it is that Ella saw, because she’s frozen too. And she stands there for a long time, and I don’t know what to do, so I start crying, and that’s what breaks Mama out of her standing nightmare. All of a sudden, she’s got me wrapped up in her arms, so tight and so warm it feels like I’m melting into her.
“Don’t worry about your sister,” Mama tells me, and she’s got that same certainty in her voice as when she’s praying over us. “Just… try not to be angry. She’s just angry, and she needs to go be with herself for a little bit.”
“She coming back?” I manage when I finally stop crying.
Mama doesn’t answer.
I want to tell Mama about how things were getting better after Ella’s last attack, how I’ve been studying on the side and maybe getting closer to finding out how Ella could do the things she could do and that I’m gonna keep doing that once I get to college and get my degree. I want to tell Mama that we’re healing, that we’re fixing what we can fix and that nothing’s been broken beyond repair and that the only way we can keep whatever’s eating Ella’s insides from devouring her is to stay together. But more sobs come, and I try to get my brain to move toward a solution, figure out what I can build to get her back, to get at whatever’s hurting her, but I can’t think of nothing.
The Bx19 pulls up janky and almost swerving by 145th and St. Nicholas. I shove past all the bundled-up commuters to find the back door closed. Winter air stomps through the open front door, and I shout. “Back door!”
People mill. The bus idles at a light.
“Back door!” Fuck this. “I know you hear me, my nigga! Open the fucking back door!” Slowly, grudgingly, the back doors unfurl, and I hop out. “Suck my dick!” I shout before tugging the fur hood of my coat up over my head and shuffling to the bodega by the apartment. Already, a bunch of them are waiting outside. I hear someone say, “Aight, so boom,” and I’m tight, because I ain’t ready to stick around for another hour and listen to this nigga tell another story about how his chick dogged him yet again.
“Ayo, whatup, slime,” Tone says, as he daps me. Our fingers twist, curl, and with one last shake, we’re finished.
“Whatup, whatup, whatup,” until everyone’s dapped. “Yo, fam, it’s mad brick outside. I’m finna get a sandwich, wait for me.”
“Yo, get me a chopped cheese,” Melo hollers after me.
“Suck my dick!” I shout back, and everyone chuckles.
Inside is warm, dry air and the sound of good-smelling meat on the grill. Some new Dominican dude is on the phone behind the counter.
“Ayo, lemme get a bacon-egg-and-cheese.” I gotta shuffle from one foot to the other to keep from freezing, even though heat fogs the windows. The dude behind the counter doesn’t move, just keeps talking in a low, loving voice to the phone. “Ayo! Can I get a bacon-egg-and-cheese, please.” Like I’m not even there. “Yo, can I get a fuckin’ bacon-egg-and-cheese, my nigga?” I slap the glass to make my point, and five minutes later, I’m back outside, and half the sandwich is gone.
“Yo, you know Jamila’s out of school for Winter Break?”
That line cuts through the cloud of conversation, and I forget the sandwich in my hands. “Word?”
“Oh, nigga, that’s you?” Melo says around the spliff he’s lighting.
“She ain’t my girl, but deadass, you try for her, I’ma fuck you up.” I half mean it, but I don’t know what half they’re chuckling at.
A cop car idles to a stop across the way. Melo stubs out the spliff and tucks it in the space where the sole of his Tim is hanging off. There’s no other reason for the cops to be here than us, so we get ready.
“Officer?” I say, by way of greeting, but they’re angry and they stomp toward us the same way the cold wind stomped toward my face on the bus, and before I know it, I’m on the ground with a police boot on my cheek, and everyone screaming “what the fuck” around me. My body thrills to it. It’s been like this ever since Ella left. Like she took the forcefield protecting me with her. And you hit a certain age and realize the forcefield’s a cage, and that’s maybe part of why I got snow in one eye and dirt from the cop’s Nike boot in the other.
“You got anything that can stick me, you fuckin’ worm?” from the cop frisking me. And he almost gets to the box cutter in the inside pocket of my coat, but I can tell people got their camera phones out, so the cops back off a little bit. They got cuffs on me and twist me around until I’m sitting on the ground, and the others are pressed against the wall with their hands against the windows.
“Who I look like, Officer?” I jeer. “What suspect I look like this time? Let’s figure this out. Help me help you.”
“Yo, why you hasslin’ my mans?” asks Cassidy.
I bark out a laugh. “Don’t worry ’bout him, he’s just mad I hit him with the ill crossover at the ballgame last week. Ain’t that right, Officer Ankledicks? So you know he gotta up his arrest quota for the month. Nigga had Sonic rings comin’ outta his ass.”
The cop cracks me across the face, right on the cheekbone, and I spend a stunned second on the ground before sitting upright and spitting blood into the snow, then grinning through my red teeth.
“Take your gun off, and we can shoot a fair one, Officer Handles. NY Play Dead, nigga.”
He’s about to hook off on me again, but one of his partners puts a hand to his chest, and the others throw hushed whispers at him, then eventually one of them, a different one, comes over and unlocks my cuffs.
“Thank you, Officer,” I tell this one, nodding my appreciation. Then, as they retreat, “Have a good night, Officers! Stay warm!”
When the cars peel off I mutter, “Bitch-ass nigga.” And turn around to see my sandwich on the ground. Flattened under a Nike boot print.
When I look back, I’ll know it’s during Winter Break for schools because when I stumble down the street and hit my hip on a trashcan rounding a corner, I’ll nearly slip and fall in dirty-ass snow. I’ll remember just in time to take off my ski mask and stuff it deep into the garbage, then ditch my blood-spotted coat in an alley before nearly smashing through the door to the bodega. I’m shivering in my gray Tech hoodie, and slow to a stop as soon as I’m inside, wandering down the aisle to the back of the store to see if any blood’s gotten on my hoodie or the shirt underneath. Check my face in the glass doors over the sodas. Then the jingle of the bell as two cops come in, and I put my hood up and wander, pretend like I’m just browsing while I make my way back to the front, but the cops are still talking bullshit, so I have to walk back and wait, then try to avoid the one that peels off to do a circuit of the store. And when the blood stops pounding in my ears, I’ll hear faint echoes of a familiar voice. But then, I’ll see an opening and make a dash for the door, and one of the cops will slam into me and pin me against the counter, my face smashing into the top while they hit me twice in the ribs and twist my arms behind me and the other one raises my head and slams it into the glass again so hard it cracks and blood spills out of the cut above my eye.