Marsha’s been prepping me every day for the testimony, giving me all the information she has about how the grand jury is going so far. Apparently the cops have already testified and today is the last full day in court before the jury deliberates. I’ve been trying to get ahold of Alé, but she hasn’t answered her phone. Every time I start to leave a message, my throat closes up on me and I hang up. Last night, I figured out how to say three words, “They took Trevor,” before hanging up and proceeding to bury myself in the script Marsha told me to memorize. She says it’s not about saying the lines, it’s about knowing the story. As if I could forget it.
I poke my head up between the two front seats and stare at Marsha: the peak of her chin, the barely visible click of her jaw side to side.
“You remember the plan?” Marsha asks and I can tell she’s jittery.
I take a rubber band off my wrist and pull my twists—new ones Marsha paid me to get done a few days ago in preparation for today—into a ponytail just to feel the weight on my neck.
“Calm. Secure. I’m the golden child that got swept up in this mess,” I repeat. “They all gonna be watching me?”
“That’s kind of the point,” Marsha says.
I rest my cheek in my hand and stare at her stone face. “You really think I ain’t done nothing wrong?”
She tears her eyes away from the road for a moment to glance at me. “If you did something wrong, then so did Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem and every other woman who did what she had to do even when it wasn’t respected.” She coughs. “I’m not saying you couldn’t have made other choices, but I don’t think you deserved any of this either.”
In moments like these, I remember Marsha’s just another white woman who’s never gonna understand what I been through, who can’t find anyone besides Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem to compare me to. I try to think of Daddy’s face plastered on that poster instead. Maybe my thighs are just like Daddy’s fists: lovely and soft until they are not; leading us closer and farther from the other limbs that make us up and call us holy.
The rest of the car ride is filled with the hushed hum of Marsha’s car, her index finger tapping on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change. Marsha knows what happened to Trevor, but we’re both avoiding it. She tried to talk to me about it after she found out—from God knows who—but I shut her down with a quick side glance. She don’t got a right to put his name in her mouth. I’m doing this now because there ain’t no reason not to. Because if Trevor is gone, I gotta do everything I can to try to get Marcus back. If not, I’m more alone than I was that night in the alley, than I have ever been. I will testify and I will hope Marsha is right and it ends in Marcus’s release and some kind of payment so we will have a chance to start over, and if it doesn’t, I will have to return to some kind of hustle, find some other way to live or end up on the street. Freezing.
We pull into the courtroom parking lot and Marsha puts the brake on, pivoting her torso to face me. “We’ve had reporters on our tail all the way here. We’re going to wait about two minutes and, by then, they’ll be positioned by the front doors. You walk straight past, just follow me. Got it?” Her ice eyes bulge.
I nod.
She’s about to turn and open the car door, but her head swings back to me. “They’ll be in there. Men, I mean. Not the exact ones who…you know, but ones just like them. They might stare at you, try to intimidate you. Don’t look.”
“How am I not supposed to look if they staring at me?”
“Just don’t.”
Marsha clicks the doors open and puts her heeled feet on the ground. I open my own backseat door and place my feet on the asphalt, pulling myself up. I haven’t walked in anything but sneakers in weeks and it’s like my feet have forgotten how to step delicately, the shoes so slippery and new. At first, the only thing I hear is the occasional whoosh of cars behind us, the lake’s salt winding its way up the county courthouse steps with us, now lined in people dressed in half-business, half-casual, cameras out. I hear my name like a chorus of bees with a few distinct words coming through.
“Ms. Johnson, do you have a moment?”
“Do you have hopes for the outcome of the grand jury?”
Their voices are high-pitched and squeaky, always saying something, but none of it really for me. They want it for the camera. They want it for the quick news segment that never extends past city limits. I focus every muscle on the walk up the steps, the back of Marsha’s head, her ponytail swinging. She pulls the door to the courthouse open and I shiver in the breeze, slide inside, let it thud behind me. Marsha keeps walking, but I stop. I guess she hears my shoes stop tapping on the marble floor because she turns around and saunters back to me.