Here, someone said.
And then I felt a cool liquid coursing over my face. It was milk.
My cloudy vision was cloudier still for a few moments, and then cleared a little. My eyes felt slightly better.
Stings like a motherfucker, don’t it?
I nodded, and the person poured more milk on my face. Just as my eyes started to feel better, my arms and chest began itching.
Don’t scratch, the same voice said.
I didn’t know I was scratching. I only realized I had been once I stopped.
Suddenly, the van lurched into motion and the kid who had been steadily banging on the side stopped and toppled over onto his side, having lost his balance. All the rest of us grew silent, even the white girl who had been sobbing. The inside of the van smelled like a combination of smoke and sweat, milk and even a little piss.
We couldn’t see the driver.
As we moved, there was the blare of sirens outside, and the screams and howls of a crowd out of control. Everyone in the van listened. No one spoke.
The drive is a short one, and when we arrived at our destination, the van stopped briefly. When it moved again, we tipped forward slightly like we were going downhill. When we stopped again, the tires gave a high-pitched screech, so I knew we were no longer on asphalt.
The door at the back opened and light flooded in. We were in an underground parking garage and all the other vehicles were police vans, marked and unmarked cars. For the first time, I remembered Lamar and wondered where he was.
Two cops in riot gear herded us one by one out of the van. Each of us paused, shading our faces from the bright light as we exited. As we stepped out, they did what they hadn’t done downtown at the scene, probably because of the chaos of the moment, securing our wrists with plastic ties behind our back.
I saw one cop’s eyes shift as I got out, falling to my forearm where I’d written my parents’ phone number. With a black Sharpie. Her lips twitched a little, not in amusement, but with what looked like discomfort. For the first time, I wondered what it must be like to be them, to be on the other side of all this anger, to realize how much we feared them, how little we trusted what they might do.
Next to us, another van pulled up but before its engine cut off, we were all being led into a building, then after that into what looked and felt like a freight elevator. The two cops with us didn’t speak, and neither did any of us, not even the kid who was banging on the side of the van trying to be a badass earlier.
My eyes fell to the cops’ hardware. They had a lot of it, on heavy belts around their waist. Both of them kept their backs to the elevator doors, and eyes on us, but not seeing us. They looked weary.
When the elevator lurched to a stop we were shepherded past a desk that said, ‘Secure Area’ and down a narrow hallway. The guys were shoved into one room, the girls and women into another.
Just as the door to the room was about to shut, I caught sight of her. The girl who had yelled ‘run’. She was being led down the hallways with another group, maybe from the van that had pulled up after mine. It was a split second. Less than that. But our eyes met.
They pulled us out, one at a time from the room, and with each person who left, it took about a half hour for them to come back and get someone else. When I got pulled, it was weird, but I already knew I would see the girl with the braids again.
Chapter Two
Lila
Okay, it’s going to sound stupid, but once it got down to it, I was relieved when I got arrested.
But how I wound up arrested in the first place? It started for me the same way it started for most of us: I saw the video. And once I had, it was impossible to do nothing, and to get the images out of my mind. By then, most of my friends from school had already scattered, isolated in our respective homes and spaces to finish out the semester remotely. I was at home with my parents.
But separated though we were, for all my friends, all the activists, the reaction was immediate. There were posts on social, video calls so we could cry and rage together, hastily organized meetings of our racial justice group. We kept so busy there wasn’t a whole lot of time to connect with the feeling that was beneath the flurry of activity, which was just … grief.
At the loss of a man’s life in such an horrific and dehumanizing way, and at the initial ho-hum response of most people in the country who don’t look like us. And even some who do. Me? I cried alone, mostly. And I tried to look away from my dad’s face at the breakfast table which told me that privately, he had been shedding some angry tears of his own. My mother did what she always did—she tried to make things better and cheer us up.
We can’t let this go, my best friend, Tianna kept saying. We can’t just do nothing.
And we didn’t. We hadn’t been doing nothing even before the video came out. The organizing that was already happening kicked up a notch pretty much right away because we had been talking about the other incidents. Except what we planned to do before—come out with policy asks, platforms, petitions—felt tepid and insufficient now. So, we started talking about the protest march.
The plan was to coordinate with other
