One of the Good Ones Read online

  These past few months have been a never-ending performance for Mom. She’s been reciting the same lines over and over again on an endless loop of repetition. But that just meant that she was always on point. You could ask her any question, and she’d be ready, because she knew how the show ended. Booming applause. Tear-filled eyes. Deep breath sniffles.

  My mother is a natural speaker who can draw in the crowd, pull them right up against the door to our pain and then guide them back out, farther away from what we had experienced and closer to the promise of hope. To a day when things like this didn’t happen anymore. She has gotten particularly good at separating herself from these moments. She’s playing a part, after all, her true expressions of grief folded into a tiny box only to be unleashed in the privacy of her home. Uncorked with a bottle of wine. They never see that.

  Until today. Right now.

  The room is as silent as death as my mother mourns. The unbreakable barrier between her heartbreak and the public shatters into a billion shards. I feel the pricks in my own eyes.

  “My baby,” she gasps. “Kezi.”

  A wail as deep as the ocean and just as blue escapes her lips. I am suddenly hot, my blood rushing through my veins and arteries, not nearly fast enough to my brain to tell me what I should do. Because I have to do something. Genny looks stricken, equally uncertain how to react. Her fingers find the loose rubber band she’s taken to wearing on her right wrist. She snaps it hard against her skin. Again and again and again. The flush spreads up her arm.

  I wonder how bruised Kezi was when she died. How long she screamed before her throat burned and she couldn’t anymore. If she even screamed at all. But I can’t wonder long. Wondering takes me there with her, and she keeps leaving in a blaze of agony, over and over.

  The worst thing that could ever happen to my family did happen, exactly one hundred days ago. Each day has brought one more brick on our backs, added one more link in the iron chains that unite us through blood and fire. Politicians make promises about what they plan to accomplish during their first one hundred days in office, that period of time that is still early and hopeful, yet substantial enough to make a difference. But no one talks about the first one hundred days into a death. How you still expect to see your sister unceremoniously dump her textbooks on the kitchen table. How your nose still anticipates smelling the avocado and honey hair mask she does while editing videos on the weekend. Or how her room has become an untouched museum. A shrine. A crypt.

  She can’t be dead.

  Speaking about her in the past tense still feels weird on my tongue.

  If I just close my eyes—

  We’re still here.

  My dad is the muscular and mute type. He is content to stay in the shadows and let my mom be our collective voice. But that won’t fly today. Not when she is standing before a crowd of hundreds and about to collapse with exhaustion. With despair. Because even in a perfect world from here on out, even if all her speeches and interviews lead to not one more drop splashing into the rivers and seas of the blood of the innocent, Kezi will still be gone.

  So Dad makes noise. He leaps from his chair and calls out to his wife.

  “It’s all right, Mimi.”

  It doesn’t take him long to reach her, to wrap his broad arms around the shuddering body of the only person in his life who knows what it feels like to have a part of your human legacy extinguished. Genny, who shuns most attention, walks purposefully to the stage as well. To be the brace to the family backbone.

  I know what I should do now. I don’t need to look to my left or my right or behind me to realize that these people expect me to join my family and share in our communal torment. To help us hold each other up. But only a tissue-thin wall stands between my aching sadness and the withdrawn mask I wear.

  So I can’t. I can’t keep my end of the bargain.

  I rise from my seat too. Genny’s eyes find mine. Even as I turn my back on my oldest sister and parents onstage, as I drag my feet down the aisle, slowly enough that every shocked face remains in focus and human, I know her gaze still follows.

  Something to know about me is that I hide.

  I burst through the double doors.

  I run away.

  2

  KEZI

  MONDAY, APRIL 16—

  1 DAY BEFORE THE ARREST

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  I must have died and gone to hell.

  Right?

  Because why else would I have heard that outrageous bleating from my alarm at 5:30 (in the morning!) and chosen to wake up? It was mid-April of twelfth grade. I should have been suffering from a severe case of senioritis that could be cured only by sleeping in. But there I was, doing my Monday morning countdown to study.

  “Eight...seven...six...five...four...four...four...three... why, oh, why...two...ONE!”

  I yanked the covers shielding my head down to my waist and leapt out of bed before the just-right firmness of my mattress and perfectly fluffed pillows could lure me back into their warm nest.

  Bang bang bang.

  Couldn’t even blame her. I dragged my feet over to the wall I shared with my baby sister, Happi, and knocked twice. Two syllables. Sor-ry. (For counting so loudly that I woke you up while I was trying to wake myself up.)

  Silence.

  I slipped on cozy padded knee socks and plodded to my desk, where my notes were spread neatly across my laptop, right where I’d left them the night before. Mr. Bamhauer, my AP US History teacher and the miserable Miss Trunchbull to my precocious Matilda, was a stickler for the “old way” of doing things and insisted our notes be handwritten on wide-ruled paper so that the letters were big enough for him to see without his glasses while grading.

  I skimmed over the major moments of the Civil Rights Movement that I knew the Advanced Placement test makers were likely to ask about when I sat for the exam in less than a month: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Emmett Till. The March on Washington. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Each bullet point was like a twist unscrewing the faucet of my brain, flooding my skull with facts. To me, Brown v. Board of Education wasn’t just some case. It was the rebuttal to Plessy v. Ferguson, the racist court decision that dictated the “separate but equal” ideology. It was one of many nails in the giant coffin of Jim Crow laws and had ushered in the legacy of the Little Rock Nine. But before the Nine, we’d had students like Linda Brown, the Topeka One. Mr. Bamhauer lectured about the past, of course...but he made it stale and removed. To him, the people involved in all this world-changing were just names and dates in a book. Nothing more. They hadn’t had souls. Or dreams.

  Brown v. Board of Education propelled my thoughts directly to that little girl. I envisioned how Linda Brown must have felt when she’d learned at nine years old that she couldn’t go to the school down the road, the one her white friends in the neighborhood attended, just because of her skin color. I felt her heart hammering when she saw how shaken up her daddy was on the walk home after his talk with the school principal. I imagined the hushed conversations Oliver and Leola Brown had over the kitchen table when they decided to move forward with the case, knowing what it would mean. I thought of all the parents hunched over in exasperation, fear, and determination, the folks in Delaware, Washington, DC, South Carolina, and Virginia, who decided they could no longer accept segregation either.

  I drank in American history, in all its problematic glory, like water. It was mine after all. My dad’s grandmother Evelyn had embarked on the Great Migration to California after her husband was killed overseas in World War II. He died for a country that didn’t think he deserved to call it home. My mom’s grandfather Joseph had been killed right here in America’s Jim Crow South. And their tales were just the family history that had been passed down.

  I wasn’t much of a morning person, but once I rubbed the crust out of my eyes, I couldn�
��t close them again. Not with all these stories of individuals insisting they be remembered calling out to me at once. I had to listen to them.

  After almost an hour of studying, my alarm rang again to drag me out of my bubble. I walked back over to my and Happi’s shared wall and knocked out another syllabic message: Hap-pi! Wake! Up! Her groan was loud and miserable. I chuckled. The only human being on earth less of a morning person than me? Her.

  As I waited to shower, I checked the email account I used for my YouTube page, marking off the usual spam, replying to short messages, and noting the invitations and requests I had to think on more and get back to.

  But then. I paused.

  Oh Kezi. I was reading this ridiculous article about parasocial relationships. It was describing those pathetic people who feel like they know media personalities but don’t. You know, those freaks who get excited when they catch a glimpse of a celebrity’s baby or read every interview to see what brand of shampoo they use. Like that would make them closer. I thought it was fine. But I stayed up all night. All night. All night wondering if you would see me that way too. Like some random weirdo on the internet.

  But I told myself over and over, she’s much too good, way too smart, to not realize that some of her subscribers are more special than others. And I’m more than a subscriber. I’m a supporter. A lifeline. We get each other. No one understands the struggle and what you’re fighting for like I do. But all night I thought of this. Going insane. Running in circles in my mind until I tripped on something that made me stop. It was something you said, actually.

  I tried to swallow but couldn’t get past the sand in my throat. Nausea washed over me in waves, and I clutched my stomach to steady myself.

  You said: We’re in this together. You remember that, don’t you? It was that youth panel you spoke on two weeks ago at city hall and you made this beautiful, beautiful comment on how to have hope in the face of hopelessness. You promised that “even in the darkest moments, when you feel completely alone, like you’re the only one who cares, just remember that I care. Our community cares. And the people who came before us and behind us and the ones who come up beside us care too. So long as we keep caring and trying, there is hope.”

  I cried when your words came to me. And I’m going to sleep well tonight knowing that I’m not alone. I’m not hopeless. I have you.

  There was a video attached to the email, sent from an address named mr.no.struggle.no.progress. My eyes widened and my pulse pounded against my ears when I registered whose face was in the thumbnail. Mine. I clicked on the preview button with a shaky hand and watched myself at the event the email sender mentioned. There I was, speaking animatedly and pronouncing the very words this stranger had taken the time to transcribe. The camera panned slowly across the room as my voice continued in the background.

  I remembered that day. I almost hadn’t made it in time, because Happi’s audition for our school’s Shakespeare play had gone longer than planned. Instead of taking my sister home after her tryout, I had dragged her with me straight to the panel. There she was in the video, seated between Derek and Ximena, who’d also come to show their support. The customary sounds of an audience wove in and out of the audio, a fussy baby babbling merrily, a chorus of a dozen sheets of paper rustling, a sniffly man’s sneezes punctuating every few sentences.

  The camera continued its survey of the room, and I noticed a group of people standing along the back wall. The space had been remarkably packed for a city hall meeting, and I recalled that quite a few members of the audience had come because they were subscribers to my YouTube channel, generationkeZi. When the meeting was adjourned, more than half in attendance had made a beeline to where I was seated, to chat. I’d greeted a lot of people, but others had stood on the sidelines and watched from afar, never approaching.

  Who sent this message? A fan I hadn’t gotten to speak with? The cameraperson? A local citizen who was feeling particularly inspired?

  The slow creak of the bedroom door opening diverted my attention. I spun in my chair, not even sure when I’d grabbed the silver plaque I’d received from YouTube for reaching one hundred thousand subscribers, noting the instinct I had to hold it in the air menacingly.

  “Bathroom’s all yours,” Happi said, pausing midyawn to look at me strangely.

  “Thanks, I’ll be right in,” I replied to the back of her head as she stumbled to her room.

  Instead, I gripped the plaque in my lap and sat there, frozen.

  Him again.

  3

  KEZI

  MONDAY, APRIL 16—

  1 DAY BEFORE THE ARREST

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  I closed my eyes. Breathed.

  In...three...two...one.

  Hold...two...one.

  Out...four...three...two...one.

  I stayed like that for a couple of minutes, finally putting to use the guided-meditation app Genny had made me download months ago, until the tension in my shoulders slithered out of my muscles and into the atmosphere.

  As I slid on my shower cap and let the warm water pitter-patter against my goose-bumped flesh, I gave myself a talking-to.

  Chill.

  You are here. No one is going to get you.

  Lots of people online receive weird messages from randos. What are you going to say?

  Someone sent a couple of emails gushing over you and wished they knew you better?

  Oh, they quoted something you said at a public event?

  Who would you even tell?

  Not Mom and Dad, for sure. They would cut all access to the internet before you finished your sentence.

  All for nothing.

  Chill.

  * * *

  “Why do you even start from eight anyway?”

  I smiled. It really shouldn’t be such a big deal when Happi engaged with me, but it happened less and less lately. We had a wall between us in more ways than one. She made me feel like a parent wanting to connect with their kid who was super embarrassed of them. If I was honest with myself, I knew that was part of the problem in our relationship. I had a tendency to be, let’s say, a little...overprotective of Happi. Yeah. Let’s go with that.

  “Five is way too short of a countdown for me,” I explained while pulling out of the driveway. “I tried it my first year of high school and dreaded getting up. Ten is too long. I did that as a sophomore and would kind of drift off in the middle. Eight is just right.”

  “But you say four like seventeen times.”

  I blinked. “Don’t question the process.”

  Happi rolled her eyes and scrolled through her phone, her message clear. Table Scraps of a Conversation: Over. I turned up the speaker volume and pressed Play on my daily news podcast. Hoped the glib anchors would distract me with their at-times tone-deaf banter until we got to school.

  “Nationwide protests continued overnight in response to the death of Jamal Coleman, an unarmed Black man in Florida killed by police in front of his children, who had the presence of mind to record...”

  “I don’t need a ride home,” Happi said as we pulled into the student parking lot.

  “All right,” I said. I forced myself not to demand what she was up to. Contorted my lips into a smile to prove how cool I was with her vagueness. She stared at me defiantly, as if expecting an interrogation. When I didn’t offer one, her gaze softened.

  “Thanks, Kez.”

  She hopped out the moment the car stopped.

  I took my phone off Do Not Disturb and checked my texts. When Ximena’s name popped up, I smiled for real.

  Morning!

  Working on my game in the computer lab.

  *The very empty computer lab

  I grabbed my bag and walked across the sprawling lawn of Thomas Edison Senior High, nodding and waving at the Bible Club kids about to pray at the flagpole and the skateboarders p
racticing tricks on a makeshift ramp. I wasn’t popular in the way early–2000s TV shows depicted it. I didn’t throw epic “ragers” or have petty rivalries with worthy adversaries. No one gossiped about my secrets on a popular website written by an unknown omniscient blogger. But I was student body president, likely to be valedictorian, and the older sister of one of the drama club’s biggest stars, so people had definitely seen me around in one way or another over these four years.

  I used to be embarrassed about how much I cared about school, how hard I had to study to get excellent grades while others seemed to coast and have near-perfect GPAs, how often I wondered if I was doing enough to get into a good college when I had no useful connections. But then, one day, something had clicked in my head, and I’d realized that I could work around feeling self-conscious about trying so hard by wearing it as a crown on my head. “Feel the fear and do it anyway” and all that.

  While most people loitered outside in an effort to remain as far as possible from the classrooms they would soon be trapped in for hours, I pulled open the building doors happily, went down one hall, then another, then another. The path to the computer lab was free of students. And at first survey of the room, it looked like the lab was empty too. I walked to the last of the six rows of desktop computers. Ximena Levinson sat typing at the computer closest to the wall, absentmindedly humming to herself. I took in her slightly sagging dark wash jeans, short-sleeved snow-white button-down, and red, white, and black Adidas NMD runners. The wings of my heart beat keenly.

  I closed the short distance between us. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said, her resting-neutral-person-face lighting up when she saw me.

  “Hey.” I dropped my things in front of the seat beside hers and sat down. She leaned forward easily as I slid my hands onto her shoulders and paused to admire her face, our smiles inches apart.