Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(125)
He texts back an image of the protest. Within seconds, his phone rings. The ultimate mom move.
“Hello?” he says, one finger in his ear to block out the deafening mix of chanting and helicopters.
“Are you out of your mind?” Mom Lisa yells.
Mama D’s trying to break through. Miles can only handle one mom at a time.
“Tell me you’re wearing the N95 under that bandanna!” The mask might muffle Lisa’s voice but the pissed-off tone cuts right through.
“I’m not an idiot, Mom.”
“Don’t test me on that tonight, Miles.”
Now Mama D is FaceTiming. He patches her in and he’s got both moms squawking at once, the satellite and overworked bandwidth making everything wonky, but the message comes through: Go home. Now.
Miles explodes. “Mama! You are literally putting on an exhibition called Voices of Resistance and you’re giving me a hard time about being at a protest? Mom, how many of your patients have been rich white people, huh? Who’s not able to stay home? Who’s in danger every single day? How many times did you both have to march so we could be a family? You wanna lecture me about safety, well, there is no safety! Not when it’s selectively applied!”
He takes one second to appreciate that he has used the phrase selectively applied.
The moms fall silent.
“I get it. I’m not happy, but I get it,” Mom Lisa says at last. “Don’t stay too long, okay?”
“Viral load. I know.”
“And when you get home, drop trou at the door, shove your clothes in a garbage bag for a few days, and take a thorough shower. Like you’ve vacationed in Chernobyl kind of shower. That’s the nurse talking, not your mom. Okay, the nurse and your mom.”
“I will. I promise.”
There is a round of “Love you, stay safe” that manages to sound both protective and irritated.
A lone protester has slipped through the metal barricade. Five cops are on her at once. She howls as they zip-tie her wrists, hoist her up, and haul her toward the empty arena. Watching her feet dragging across the concrete, Miles has the urge to hop back on the Citi Bike and pedal home. But he stays put. The protesters are shouting at the cops and rattling the barricades. Phone cameras whir.
Chi is trying to make it to a metal pylon but she’s small; she keeps getting pushed back by the angry crowd. For once, Miles knows what to do.
“Excuse me, can you let her through, please?” he says, using his broad shoulders to part the crowd. Without thinking, he helps Chi up onto the pylon. It’s the first time he’s touched another person in more than two months. It’s as much of a shock to his system as the scene unfolding around them.
Chi raises a fist and chants into the megaphone: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
“The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” the protesters answer.
Miles lifts his camera, checks the photo. Outlined by the approaching dusk and the oxidized copper of the sports arena, Chi rises like a new monument. Some time later, she jumps down and reaches into her backpack, handing Miles and Danny flyers for her voting organization. They pass these out to anyone who will take one.
“Your vote matters,” they say time and again.
“Come on,” she says, once they’ve exhausted their supply of flyers. “We need to get to Fort Greene Park.”
The crowd is on the move, one living, loud organism marching toward the park. More people are showing up. The city is a nervous system on the verge of overload. Out of nowhere, a white officer in an NYPD shirt punch-shoves a Black woman marching peacefully down the street. She flies across the asphalt and lands hard, hitting her head against the curb.
“Holy shit,” Danny says.
Something shakes loose in the air. There is screaming, shoving, chaos. A Black man with the build of a football player boils over with a lifetime of anger and anguish too powerful to be contained any longer. He hurls a metal barricade across the street. “Come at me! I dare you to come at me tonight!” His voice breaks. There are tears in his eyes. “If I’m going out, somebody’s going with me!” The crowd surges. Miles drops his phone on the street. He crouches down, patting the asphalt for it, trying not to get stepped on. By the time he recovers it, he can no longer see Danny or Chi. They’ve gotten separated in the chaos. New panic grips Miles; the night is on fire and he is alone. Riot police are slapping zip ties on wrists by the dozens now and hauling protesters toward waiting vans. Beside Miles, a white guy in a Tupac shirt scoops up a rock and hurls it at the squad car. Others join in. The sound of stone denting metal is like gunfire. Miles is scared. And angry. He is his own Molotov cocktail of unstable elements, all of them about to ignite. He reaches down, grabs a rock as a line of police with batons out moves against the crowd, who pick up the chant again: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
Watching.
Miles drops the rock. He scrambles onto the roof of a parked car to get a better view. In front of him, several cops pin a skinny brown man to the ground. They’re on top of him, four to one. “I didn’t do nothing, man!” the man screams. Miles can hear the fear, the pain in his voice. Miles hits record and uploads the video to Twitter in real time, the truth traveling at the speed of light. He is fighting back with the one weapon he’s got: Frame. Click. Upload. Record. Click. Upload. Across the street, a police van explodes into flames. A bottle sails past Miles’s head.