“Anything.”
“You mind if we have breakfast?”
I smiled.
“I mean, I didn’t eat this morning and …”
“Breakfast is fine.” It was well past noon, though I wasn’t sure how long past.
I instinctively reached for the front pocket of my backpack where my phone was and when I felt it was still there, I took it out and check the time. Two-fifty, and the face of my phone was cracked, and I missed two calls, both from home. Both from my mother. I ignored them.
“Everything okay?” Kai asked when he saw my expression.
“Yeah. Just …” I showed him the face of my phone and he reached to get his.
His was fine.
“You still good for breakfast, or …?”
I couldn’t help but smile wide at that.
“Yes,” I said. “Even with a broken phone, I think I’m still good for breakfast.”
Kai nodded. He inclined his head toward the large glass doors that lead out to the street, and when I moved toward them, he rushed to open them for me.
Only then did I glance back and notice the front desk in the lobby where a female cop, or uniformed security guard had been sitting the entire time, watching us, and smiling.
Chapter Three
Kai
When she told me her name, I tried not to smile. Because it’s not a name you hear often. It suited her perfectly. Not only because Lila reminds me of lily, a flower, something fragile, but because it made sense that she would have a name that’s out of the ordinary.
“What does that mean? Kai.”
It felt like she’d read my mind and knowing I was thinking about her name, asked about mine.
“My mom said she heard it in Hawaii where she and my pops had their honeymoon. And she liked it so much she decided to name their first kid ‘Kai’ whether they had a boy or girl. In Hawaiian it means ‘sea’.”
Lila smiled. “That makes sense.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“Because … your eyes,” she said. “They’re like gray, but blue. Like some parts of the ocean are.”
Then she blushed and glanced down at the table.
I was about to ask her about her name when she beat me to it and asked about mine, and once she had, it just seemed like maybe it would come across as unoriginal. I was kind of quiet for a little bit, just looking at her, trying to think of something else to say.
Lila’s face is heart-shaped, and she has apple cheeks with deep dimples, eyes that are sort of heavy-lidded and mournful. Her lips are full, evenly full top and bottom. She has the kind of face that makes me sure that if she ever cried, I would do basically anything to make the tears stop. And if I was the one who made her cry, it would only break my own heart.
Lila looked up again and around us.
Just a few blocks from the jail, the diner was small, and inside, ordering only a few at a time as prescribed by health regulations, was a mix of cops and folks like us, who looked like they may have been protesting as well. Each group was ignoring the other, as though we were actors on a movie set, playing out a scene called Protest-and-Arrest until the director called ‘cut!’ and we all ambled off to have lunch before resuming our roles.
Outside where we were, clusters of socially-distanced groups sat on the curb or sidewalk to eat, or at the few tables that remained. I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be doing that, but the cops who were going in and out didn’t seem to care.
“So, how’d you wind up out there today?” I asked.
Lila turned to look at me again. “I’m part of a group that organized it,” she said before letting her eyes drop to the menu in front of her.
It was like she was embarrassed for taking even a tiny part of the credit.
“Oh, word?” I asked.
“Yeah. How about you?”
It was the second time she’d done that: how about you?
She didn’t like having the spotlight on her, even in one-on-one interaction.
“One of my homies called me up after what happened and …” I shrugged. “Didn’t feel like sittin’ it out was an option.”
“No,” Lila said. “I know what you mean.”
Her eyes clouded over for just a few seconds, and I knew she was thinking about the video.
I actively try not to think about the video.
When I think about it, I remember my grandfather dying.
He went out in a chorus of slow moans, in a small house in Southern Virginia where my father grew up, way down a long country road where there isn’t another house for about two miles. My uncles and aunts were there, my grandmother, some neighbors, people from my grandparents’ church.
Everyone sat in the living room, talking, and sometimes singing while in the back my grandpa, attended to by his wife and kids, took his last breaths. When the moaning stopped, we knew he was gone and that was when the church folks started singing louder and more energetically. All us kids got wide-eyed and frightened, and the church ladies pulled us against them and rocked us back and forth while they sang.
Later, when the coroner had come and gone with my grandpa’s body, and I was sleeping on the living room floor with some of my cousins—or supposed to be sleeping anyway—my dad walked by, stepping over us to go sit on the porch. I heard the flick-and-whisper of a lighter. He was smoking, something he had quit doing a long while before that.
I went out to join him and he turned to look at me. I was like ten, I think? He batted away the sandflies and gnats, and with eyes squinting against the dark and smoke, patted the space on the step next to him. I sat there, and he put an arm around my skinny shoulders.
You alright, Kai? he asked.
And I immediately started to cry. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t crying.
