“And the last name? Holt, yes?”
I blink. “I didn’t want to give strangers my real name.”
“Why not?” His forehead is a map of lines.
“It’s dangerous?”
He nods, taking a few steps, head down as if he’s pondering something, when we all know this is just for dramatic effect.
I dig my nails into my wrists to see the crescent marks, see anything but his face.
“What do you do for a living, Ms. Johnson?” He walks closer to me, staring up at where I’m seated. I know Marsha drilled me on this, but his face, the way his mouth gapes a little, makes all of it flush out of my head.
“I don’t got a job.”
“However, you do have a steady income?”
My knee starts to shake involuntarily. “No. Used to make a little but it wasn’t no salary.”
“Where did that money come from?”
“Men.” The moment I say it I know I said the wrong thing. One of Marsha’s rules is one-word answers are golden when the response is yes, no, or maybe. Not when that word can be twisted into a target on my head.
He looks surprised by my bluntness, coughing once and taking a moment. His demeanor shifts, from an interrogative scowl to a stare too intimate for our proximity, for these wooden walls. He comes closer. “Would you mind telling me about why these men were paying you?”
In my head I’m speaking, but no words come out. Then I think of Mama, of how we screamed together, the sky cradling us. Of Trevor’s body tremors. Of Marcus sobbing in a cell. All that shit just to end up here without a tongue? I keep making marks with my nails until I find the words.
“They was paying me because I didn’t have no money and I needed it so I could survive and so I did what I needed to do.”
“What would that be, if you don’t mind me asking?” Of course, it don’t matter if I mind or not, but at least he’s trying to be gentle, at least it’s less of an attack than I expected.
“I kept them company.”
“By company, do you mean sexual relations?”
“Not always.” I think of Officer 190 and how he talked on and on for hours, how sometimes he turned into a puddle with his cries. “Wasn’t always like that.”
“And with Officer Jeremy Carlisle? What was it like with him?”
I pause for a minute, close my eyes so I can get a picture of him again, the splotches on his cheeks and that big gray house.
“I didn’t know him by his name, only by his badge number. I saw him a couple times, mostly in groups. He picked me up one night and took me to his house.” I glance at the jury. None of them have any expressions on their faces, like they’re just waiting for me to finish so they can go piss. I wait, like Marsha would tell me to. She says if I leave enough silence, the DA might forget some of the things he wanted to ask me.
“What did you do at his house?”
One of the jurors, a black woman with her braids tied into a bun, makes eye contact with me.
“We had sex.”
“How much did he pay you?”
“Nothing.”
The DA stops and looks directly at me, like he’s registering my personhood for the first time. His nose scrunches. “You’re saying that Officer Carlisle never paid you for the time you spent together?”
“He said he would, but when I woke up, he refused. Said he’d already paid me.”
“Had he?”
“He said telling me about an undercover operation was enough of a payment.”
He nods, up and down, spinning to pace closer to the jury, then asks me to explain what I mean by an undercover operation. He faces me again. I tell him about the party, about how Carlisle picked me up in that Prius and took me to his place, how I didn’t mean to stay the night, how it all spiraled. He continues to ask me questions about Carlisle I don’t have the answers to and then pauses.
“During your interview by detectives, you said, ‘I shouldn’t have been there.’ Is that correct?”
“I guess.”
“And would you say you understood after that interview the seriousness of these allegations?”
I don’t know what he’s getting at, so I repeat, “I guess.”
“Yet the next week you attended a party in which you had sex with several members of the Oakland Police Department and did not believe that to be morally questionable?”
“I never said that—”
“You didn’t bring this to anybody. Nor did you refuse to attend said party. Is that correct?”