The tremors have made their way outward now and every limb is shaking. I’m rocking in my chair, its legs squeaking on the platform.
“Because they saw me. I was lying there and they looked me in my eyes and they knew. They knew and they kept them eyes open the whole time, staring at me while they had sex with me, like that only made it better. Because they looked at me and they saw how small I was. I was a child.”
Creak on the floor, splinter in my tap-tap fingernail, rigid shake, eyes blurred, Oakland sky so bright inside my throat. I might not have been Soraya, too small to stand up on the shallow end of the pool, but I was still small. I felt so small.
“But you never told them your age?” He knows this is it, the last question.
Fingernails deep inside my skin, blood trickle. “I was a child. I was a child.”
And even though Trevor and Marcus and Alé and Mama are out there somewhere, even though there are so many reasons why I gotta say it all, why I gotta let it erupt from my lungs, I’m not thinking about none of them. All I can think about is the way my fingernails stay pressed into the skin even when it breaks, even when I start to bleed. When everything turns to chaos, when I’m sitting in a room full of faces I can’t distinguish, when my body doesn’t feel like mine no more, I still got these nails. Still got a reminder that I can exist broken, like Trevor facedown in his own crusted blood, still finding a way to get air into his body. That these nails are a miracle. Don’t need nobody to make them pretty, to trim them, sharpen them. All they gotta be is what they are: mine.
“Thank you, Ms. Johnson.”
He says something about how I can step down, a juror sneezes somewhere in the corner of my vision. Everything keeps on moving, colliding, a wood room where I set myself free like the sky that one night when stars showed themselves over the freeway, before I went back to the apartment that would never really be mine again.
I was a child.
Every moment passes like water through a clogged drain, barely getting through. Marsha took me home straight from the courthouse, dropped me off without a single word the whole ride, not that I would have heard her if she had spoken.
Somehow, I exited that courtroom with a different body than the one I had when I walked under its ornate wood ceiling, sat on those benches so many before me sweated into. This new body has a chain of holes from the throat to the stomach, where I have tried to bury myself in carvings. This new body got scars more permanent than any tattoo and calls them glorious. This new body got too many memories to hold up inside.
I’m sitting in the center of an apartment that don’t nobody really own and hollering. Like Dee finally infected me, like Mama crawled up inside me to massage my jaw open. And the sun has set—left me in the dark seeing only a glitter of pool out the window—and risen again. Over and over. Maybe three times before the knock. It comes when the sky is just starting to pastel. When my mouth has found its close.
I don’t move, but she doesn’t wait for me to. Alé opens the door like it’s hers, marches in with a large bag that she swings onto the counter and then beelines right for me on the floor, kneeling, pooling me into her until we are a singular body and I can smell every scent she’s ever carried. Every spice. Her mama’s crochet blankets. The skate park.
She loosens her grip a little and I can see her skin, where I get a peek of what must be her newest tattoo, on the back of her neck: a pair of shoes, colored lavender with a K in the sole of one of them.
She fully lets go of me now, so I can finally look at her eyes, which are spilling. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Alé cry like this and I can’t help but lean forward and kiss her cheek, taste the salt, trail up to the corner of her eye with my lips. She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt. The warmth got hold of my chest, other side of what they say about the heart; when it’s not breaking, you might just get lucky enough to have it feel full, blood pulsing.
Her hands find my waist and a series of thoughts flash across her face, an internal debate surfacing in mouth quivers. When Alé touches me this time, we are on the floor, we are without barriers. My mouth is already so close.
“Kiara.” Her tears have stopped running, but I haven’t moved, and my name is a question.
Hers is an answer and this is the first time I think that this all might have been worth it, that the only way back to Alé was wading right through the shit pool. She is kissing me. I am kissing her. She’s softer than I ever thought she could be and I’ve never been more relieved to be touched, to have her lace her fingers through my hair. Her on top of me. Her pulling back just to stare into me like the stars found their way beneath my eyelids, and I think this might be my universe-halting love, the one that undoes me and keeps me whole all at once.