Remembering the instructions of the march organizers, I somehow managed to grab the hem of my t-shirt and pull it up to cover my nose and mouth. But it was too late. I was running practically blind and knew, just knew that any second now I would trip over something, or someone, and fall to my knees.
I didn’t.
What happened was much worse. A pair of meaty arms grabbed me from behind, wrapping themselves around me like some kind of fucking anaconda, and I went down, hard and face first, about to crash into the pavement or the street—I honestly didn’t even know which by then—with no way to break my fall.
The only thing that stopped me from cracking my face open, ironically, was the forearm of whoever it was that grabbed me. He fell atop me, something hard, pressing into my spine so I winced, or maybe howled. My elbow slammed into the ground, shooting a sharp pain up my arm, followed by my chin. I felt the skin scrape, and break, and the blood and sting that came shortly after.
“C’mere, motherfucker!” the person on top of me gritted out.
My head was spinning from the impact, my teeth felt loose in my head and my arm hurt like a bitch. I was like a rag-doll by the time the person holding me lifted his weight off my back then dragged me to my feet by the waistband of my jeans.
He lifted me up so hard and so high, the crotch of my jeans bit into my nuts, which of course only made me grimace more, or maybe I yelped like a puppy getting beat. Either way, that shit hurt, and if there had been any fight left in me after the fall, it was gone.
Nagin! I heard the cop yell. Where’s it at?
Nagin, or someone, yelled something back and then I was being dragged, stumbling backward over my feet, to what turned out to be a van. It was the kind I sometimes saw pull into the courthouse building, no windows on the side, just two on the back, small, cloudy, and covered in chicken-wire.
I never even got a good look at the cop’s face before he spun me around and shoved me face forward into the back of the van.
You’re under arrest, you piece of shit.
Getting arrested in a protest march hadn’t been part of my plans. I was behind on my reading for class because I spent the better part of the night before having yet another fight with Brittainy.
Brittainy is the girl I was kind of kicking it with before school shut down. She had long gone home to Miami to ride out the national crisis with her parents and I stayed in the city because I had my own apartment and me and my folks decided that if it came to that, driving back to DC wouldn’t be a big deal.
I think you’ll be more of a mind to study if you’re not back here with all your friends, my mother said. Because you know everyone’s treating this like it’s some extended vacation, and you cannot afford to let your grades slip, Kai.
Nah, you’re right, I told her.
And my dad concurred. It’s probably good to keep as close to your routine as possible, he said. Until the semester is done. Then you come home as scheduled.
I mean, nothing about what was happening was ‘routine’ but there was still a tinge of denial in the way folks were dealing with it, and my folks were no exception. And the truth was, I liked my apartment. It was comfortable, and I did need to keep my grades up going into senior year. Just like my moms said, if I went back to DC, it would be too tempting not to hit up my boys, Coe and Jason and go play some ball, maintaining the appropriate CDC-recommended distance.
I spent my days attending virtual classes and studying and submitting my assignments electronically, which was how we generally did it anyway. And once a day or so, I had a video-call with Brittainy.
At first, it was cool, both of us making jokes about wanting to have FaceTime sex and making suggestive comments. One time she flashed me a little of her nipple and another, lifted her skirt to show me she had nothing underneath, but her heart wasn’t in it and I wasn’t about to force her into anything she didn’t feel one-hundred-percent comfortable with.
Problem was, once the promise of getting busy—even in our imaginations—was not an option, I realized how much of Brittainy’s appeal was and had always been the sex or anticipation of sex. We didn’t have much to talk about, that was the bottom line. And since she was basically a very social creature, my long pauses, and inability to think of a single interesting thing to say to her rubbed her the wrong way. She could probably see my eyes glazing over when we talked, so she got testy with me.
I started calling her by phone instead of using FaceTime since it was less painful to look at each other blankly as well as endure the long silences. And that’s when the bickering started. She wanted to know why I never offered to have her stay with me through everything. She asked whether I was talking to other girls. And the determining fight, the one that made me know for sure we were done was when she asked if I was watching pornos.
Of course I was watching pornos! The hell she think?
So I told her that, and she started talking about how it made her feel insecure.
Brittainy, I told her. I can’t do anything about your insecurity.
