Needy Little Things(72)
“What? You can’t do that. We don’t know what he could be capable of, Sariyah.”
“My dad would be my first stop. I wouldn’t confront Jed alone.”
He considers this. “Say the word when you’re ready. I’ll drive you down.”
* * *
Malcolm doesn’t show up at school Friday. I text him throughout the day, confirming more than once that we’re still on to meet at Deja’s. So I’m pissed to high heaven when he doesn’t show. I call and text back-to-back for fifteen minutes before giving up and catching a bus to his place.
The garage doors are up, but his parents’ cars aren’t inside, only his dusty little hooptie. I let myself inside the house. He’s out on the deck, French doors wide open.
“Your mom is going to trip over you letting all her AC out.”
He pockets his phone. The burner one he’s been lying to me about. “Do you see my mom anywhere around right now?”
I jerk my head back. “Excuse me. If anyone has the right to have an attitude right now, it’s me. You stood me up.” I lean against the pollen-coated grill. “What happened? I’ve been calling you nonstop.”
He checks the phone again, then rubs his hand back and forth across the top of his head, knotting up his tiny coils.
“I know you don’t want to hear it, but Colmy, I found out some stuff. Let’s go over to Deja’s now. I can tell you everything on the way.” I start walking back toward the house.
“There’s no point, Sariyah.”
I stop walking but take a second to fix my face before I turn around. He’s irritating the mess out of me. “Yesterday you said it wouldn’t hurt to go look around.” The words come out stiff, not at all disguising my annoyance.
“Yeah. It wouldn’t, but I got a lot on my mind right now, okay?”
I know he does. We all do, but I still don’t understand. “You could’ve—”
“Sariyah, please. I need to think.” He paces and once again checks that stupid phone.
“Malcolm, what’s going on? Talk to me.”
His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. “I messed up, Ri.”
“What do you mean?” I move closer to him, wondering if this is the moment Mama told me to wait for. I hope it is because he has one more time to touch that phone before my patience runs out.
“Something’s wrong,” he says more to himself than to me.
“Yeah, Malcolm, a lot of stuff is wrong. Can you be more specific? What happened?”
He laughs, but his eyes are watery. Tormented. “I just think it’s funny how the video of me quitting Sweet Pea’s went viral with no effort. People, even our own damn people, won’t hesitate to share a video of a Black person popping off, but a Black girl who’s missing? Nah, that’s too much. They want a minstrel show, something to laugh at. Not a thirteen-year-old dark-skinned girl disappearing quietly into the night. Not even a seventeen-year-old one disappearing under suspicious circumstances.”
“Mal, you want something to make this viral, I got it. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you. We could have searched Deja’s entire house by now.”
He takes out that phone again, and I slap it from his hands. He barely reacts. We both watch it clatter and clunk across the deck, unmarred in the end.
“She stopped answering my texts,” he says to his feet. “I haven’t heard from her in a day and a half. Maybe her phone died. I don’t know. But I’m worried. She should be home by now. I held out because I knew it was the last day, but something’s not right.”
“Malcolm, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Deja.”
* * *
Malcolm leans against his windowsill, wringing his hands as I pace in front of his bedroom door.
“Do you remember that current issues project Deja and I were excited about doing together?” he asks.
“What’s that got—” I freeze in place. “Do not. Malcolm, I swear to God. Do not sit there and tell me you two faked her disappearance for a social studies project. Tell me you didn’t.”
“We didn’t,” he snaps. “It started the conversation, but we did it for Tessa. And Deja’s cousin Amari. And every other Black and brown girl the world let disappear without a second thought.”
“Are you seriously going to act like you did someone a favor? That you helped anyone by doing this? You made a mockery of those girls. You made a mockery of Tess. Turned it all into some big fat joke. And for what? What was the end goal, Malcolm?”
“Change! To see if anything had changed. Casey’s case was still fresh on everyone’s mind. We wanted to see if people would keep that same energy if the girl wasn’t blond. I needed to know. If Tessa disappeared today, instead of five years ago, would she have had a better chance of making it home? And if the answer was no, I wanted the world to see it. I wanted it right in everyone’s face. I wanted people who shared Casey’s posts and not Deja’s to look in the mirror and ask themselves why.”
“Oh, be for real, Malcolm. Some ill-conceived social experiment wasn’t about to change anything. What were you going to say when she came back, huh? That she ran away? You chewed me out for even considering that possibility while y’all were out here literally creating a whole new data point for that statistic. You thought that would make things better for Black missing kids? And what if the truth about all this gets out? Our people don’t get the benefit of the doubt as it is. What do you think will happen if they catch us crying wolf?”