Redeeming Justice Page 4

  “I can’t believe you,” the roommate says, her voice rising. “What are you doing?”

  And then, almost as if a wave of anger surges through her, in a ferocious afterthought she says, “You’re having sex on my bed? That’s my bed. You’re a slut.”

  The roommate storms out of the room, banging the door shut behind her. The young woman pushes off the bed. She whirls on the three of us.

  “Act like nothing happened, okay?” she says.

  Then she repeats herself, almost as if she were scrambling to gather her thoughts. “If anyone asks, just act like nothing happened.”

  She goes after her roommate, a few doors down the hall. I can hear her pounding on this other door and shouting, “Hey!”

  Then I hear the roommate’s voice, slightly muffled, coming through the closed door. The rooms are so close together and the walls so paper thin that I hear the conversation clearly.

  “Don’t open the door for her,” the roommate says to someone inside that room. “She’s a slut. She’s on my bed with these guys, having sex—on my bed.”

  “Wait,” the young woman says, then shouts into the room. “Are you mad at me? Don’t be mad at me. Let me in. I want to talk. Come on. It’s not what it seems. Don’t be mad. Please. Don’t be mad at me.”

  Silence.

  Dimitri, Rovaughn, and I don’t look at each other. We don’t speak. We don’t stir. We barely breathe. Seconds pass. I count in my head: one, two, three.

  Then footsteps. The young woman charges back into the room.

  “She’s mad at me,” she says. “She’s upset.”

  Then she says again, “If someone says anything, act like nothing happened, okay? She’s so mad at me.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Cool. Look, I told Shawn we’d meet in the smoking area. Let’s go downstairs.”

  We all leave the room. I hustle out of there, bounce out of her room, Dimitri and Rovaughn on my tail. We take the stairs, the same way I came up, go past Shawn Demain’s room, and go outside to the smoking area. We find Shawn among a few other people. He greets us, passes a joint. Then I see that the young woman has joined us, followed close behind. We all make small talk. Nothing seems strange, or strained, or off, in any way. We talk, we laugh, we smoke. A bunch of people mingling at a party, passing the time.

  Then the roommate and another girl, someone I haven’t seen before, walk into the smoking area. The roommate stops and stares at the young woman. She narrows her eyes and points her finger at the young woman, stabbing the air.

  “There she is,” the roommate says. “Right there. And those are the Black guys she was with—having sex on my bed. Unreal. She’s a slut.”

  The young woman stands. “I don’t need this,” she says. “I’m leaving. I’m done. I’m not gonna stay around this.”

  She goes.

  I never see her again that night.

  A joint comes my way. I cup it and take a hit, my last of the night. We stick around talking with Shawn and a few other people, laughing and hanging out for another forty minutes or so. By now, it’s close to three in the morning and the group in the smoking area has thinned out. Dimitri, Rovaughn, and I go back to Shawn’s room, and he and I exchange contact information.

  “I’d like to stay in touch, man,” I say.

  “Definitely,” he says.

  “Let me know when you got other parties going on. Homecoming, stuff like that.”

  “I will. You have to come up for homecoming.”

  “You’ll be all settled in by then,” I say.

  He grins and we shake hands. Dimitri and Rovaughn say their goodbyes, and we climb inside Rovaughn’s clunker as the party fizzles out. He eases out of the parking lot, and we head toward the expressway, the Waffle House, and back to Chicago. I calculate I will be back in my bed, if all goes well, by eight in the morning. My mother won’t know that I’ve been out all night. She won’t suspect a thing.

  “I’m starving,” someone says.

  “I could eat a horse,” someone else says.

  We go quiet then, maybe all of us replaying parts of the party in our heads, maybe imagining a stack of waffles or pancakes swimming in maple syrup, maybe anticipating the ride back to Chicago, arriving home, getting back to our basically uneventful lives. We cannot fathom the events that lie ahead. We’re three teenagers heading home from a road trip.

  Three disposable young Black men.

  “Good party,” someone says.

  It’s at the Waffle House, I believe, that Dimitri realizes he doesn’t have his wallet.

  4.

  Intake

  With two weeks left before school, Dimitri, Rovaughn, and I hit up a couple more parties, including one at Northern Illinois University, a little over an hour away. Rovaughn still drives, his old beater barely making it there and back. September surprises us with a heat wave, extending summer a couple extra weeks, and then we come to the last of our road trips. As my grandfather might say, I experience a sudden case of the blues. I’ve got to start piecing stuff together, I tell myself.

  Slowly, I do. I don’t feel I have my future figured out completely, but I have a vague plan. I request more hours bagging groceries at Shop ’n Save. I need to bank as much cash as possible. I have to pay for books and new clothes and put away enough for first and last months’ rent and a security deposit for an apartment I’m picturing. I scratch out some numbers on a legal pad and figure out that the financial aid I’ve received will cover my first-semester classes and fees. If I ace my courses, I will earn a scholarship for the rest of my community college. Forget about joining the military. Visiting all these college campuses has stirred something in me. I don’t have a career goal in mind yet, but I know I want to get a college degree. I don’t want to spend the next seven years wearing a uniform.

  Late September arrives. The famous Chicago winds kick up, the days turn chilly, the leaves start to fall. I circle the day of orientation on my calendar, a week or so away. Going to the store for my mother, I run into Dimitri, who works for UPS. We talk about life now and in the future. We don’t talk about the summer. The summer seems like a distant memory.

  One day, a Tuesday, I go to campus and purchase my books for the semester. I come home, cradling the stack of books in my arms, and see a business card tucked into the corner of the screen door. I push open the door with my shoulder, put down the books, and pluck out the business card. On it I read, “Chicago Police Department, Robbery/Homicide Division,” and after that the name of a police officer.

  I frown at the card, thinking the police have made a mistake. They have obviously come to the wrong house and stuck this card into the wrong door. Then I flip the card over and see my name.

  “Why did they write down my name?” I say quietly. I turn the card over, stare at it, then turn it back to my name. What could this be about?

  I search my memory.

  Then it dawns on me. Over the summer, I noticed an uptick in gang shootings in my mother’s neighborhood. The police must want to know if I’ve seen or heard anything. They want me to help them.

  I look at the number on the card. I dial it on the phone in the kitchen.

  An officer answers. I ask to speak to the officer whose name is on the card.

  I wait on hold for a short time. I pace. I twist my fingers through the phone cord. A police officer comes on the line. I tell him my name and describe the card I found stuck in the screen door. He’s friendly. He thanks me for calling.

  “What is this about?” I ask him.

  “Better if you come down here and we talk in person,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll be right there.”

  “No.”

  I’m thrown.

  “No?”

  “We’ve got—it’s too busy right now. Better to come—Thursday.”

  “Thur
sday? In two days?”

  “Yes. Thursday. That’ll work. That’s better.”

  “Okay, I’ll come Thursday.” And then I say again, “Can I ask—what is this about?”

  “Informational. We wanted to ask you a few questions. That’s all.”

  He’s so vague, I think. I don’t understand why he won’t tell me more. But I don’t press it.

  “Do I need to bring my mother?” I ask.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “Couple months. November 19.”

  “You don’t need your mother. You’re fine. So, okay, we’ll see you Thursday.”

  “All right. Oh. Any particular time—?”

  Click.

  The line has gone dead.

  * * *

  —

  Thursday.

  I sit at a table in a cold barren room across from two police officers, the man I spoke to on the phone and a woman with short blond hair and filmy blue eyes. They offer me water or a soda, but I decline. I try to get comfortable. I can’t. I shiver and feel claustrophobic. The male police officer nods at the woman officer.

  “This is Sergeant Scout. She came down from Wisconsin.”

  She doesn’t say anything. She stares at me. A probing, unsettling stare.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “We just want to clear you out of this thing,” the male officer says.

  He semi-smiles. An attempt, I believe, to put me at ease.

  I am not at ease. I should have brought my mother, I think. She doesn’t even know I’m here. I didn’t tell her, or my father, or anyone else.

  “What thing?” I say.

  Sergeant Scout folds her hands on the table, leans in, and says, “The incident in Wisconsin.”

  Again, that stare.

  “What incident in Wisconsin?” I say.

  “Did you attend a party in Wisconsin?” the male officer asks. “At a college?”

  “Yeah. I did. It was maybe six weeks ago.”

  “What happened at that party?” Sergeant Scout asks.

  I shift in my chair. I really don’t know what she’s talking about.

  “What happened—?”

  Sergeant Scout starts peppering me with questions. She asks the questions so fast I hardly have time to answer them. One after another, after another, after another. She pummels me with questions. Whom did I come with? Whom did I see? What time? What did you do? Where? When? Who, who, who? Finally, she slows down and asks, “Did you and your friends meet any girls at the party?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about these girls you met?”

  I wait, confused.

  “I don’t understand. What about them?”

  “One particular girl. You met one particular girl, didn’t you?”

  “I—”

  “You met one particular girl.”

  “I mean—”

  “Did you and your friends have sex with her?”

  “I, well—”

  “Did you have sex with her? Jarrett, did you have sex with her?”

  I take a deep breath and exhale. Words, sentences, paragraphs, come gushing out: everything that happened, every detail, every moment I can remember. As I speak, I think what my mother, my aunts, and my grandmother have told me over and over about dealing with the police, what they have drilled into me. Be calm, be polite, tell the truth.

  Most of all, tell the truth.

  “Yes, I did have a sexual encounter with her,” I say. “We all did. All my buddies, the three of us, had sexual encounters with this young woman. Yes, ma’am. It was consensual.”

  “How did you get up to her room?” Sergeant Scout asks.

  “We were downstairs in this guy’s room. We were hanging out. I was playing a video game. This girl came in with her roommate. She was there for a short time, and then she invited us up to her room.”

  “Were you drinking?” Sergeant Scout says.

  “I wasn’t, no.”

  “Were you smoking marijuana?”

  Tell the truth, I think. Tell them the truth and it’ll be fine.

  “Yes,” I say. “We were smoking marijuana.”

  “And then you went up to her room?”

  “My buddies did first. I went up later.”

  “You went to her room?”

  “Yes.”

  Sergeant Scout unfolds her fingers, grips the side of her chair, and leans back. She doesn’t move a muscle, but she looks right into me, right through me.

  “Why would this white girl from up in Wisconsin, the first time she meets you guys, three Black guys from Chicago—why would she consent to have sex with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Because we were kids. We were at a party. We were smoking marijuana. Drinking. Probably because of all that.”

  Sergeant Scout pauses for what seems like a minute.

  “Well,” she says.

  She glances at the other police officer and then turns back to me.

  “I want to let you know that since you’ve admitted to placing yourself at the scene, you’re going to be charged with party to a crime of sexual assault.”

  I feel my mouth open, close, snap shut.

  “Sexual assault,” I manage to say. “I don’t understand—”

  “Rape,” Sergeant Scout says.

  “Rape?” I say. “There was no rape.”

  The male police officer suddenly stands. Sergeant Scout keeps looking at me, and then she stands so deliberately it looks like she’s moving in slow motion.

  “You said I’ll be charged,” I say, but I can’t finish the sentence. I feel as if I were in some kind of dream.

  “You’ll be hearing from us,” the male officer says. He opens the door and stands to the side, indicating for me to leave. I peek at my watch. I’ve been sitting here for two hours. I stand and walk past the two police officers, avoiding eye contact, not sure what to do, where to go, or whom to talk to about this.

  I can’t tell my mother, I know that. She has spent her life trying to keep me away from trouble, from the police. Now I’ve spent two hours with the police, accused of something I didn’t do, something I don’t even understand.

  They were trying to scare me, I think. I know the truth. Nothing happened. There was no sexual assault, no rape, no nothing. I told them the truth.

  “If you tell the truth,” my mother always says, “you’ll be all right. You’ll be safe.”

  I have told the truth. Nothing can happen to me. I know that.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t tell my mother or anybody else in my family. Instead, I do what so many seventeen-year-old kids would do. I tell my friend James, who lives next door to my father. He’s older than I am, and he’s had some experience with the cops. I tell him everything. I tell him about going down to the police station and the two cops who interrogated me.

  “This dude and this woman cop,” I say, “they were talking about a rape. There was no rape. There was no nothing.”

  “They were fishing,” James says. “They don’t have anything.”

  “They knew about us, though. They knew we went to that college, to that party. How did they find us?”

  It dawns on me then.

  Dimitri’s wallet.

  They must have found his wallet.

  “Look, man,” James says, “they were just trying to get information out of you.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s what it was. Had to be.”

  Then he echoes my mother.

  “As long as you told them the truth, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  * * *

  —

  Three days later, when I get home from w
ork, I go next door to talk to James again. Suddenly we hear cars roaring up the street, then doors opening and slamming. I look out the window, and I see six police cars parked in a semicircle outside my father’s house.

  “There’s police all over the place,” I say.

  I start for the door.

  “Don’t go over there, man,” James says, his voice even, grave. “Do not go over there.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I say. “I need to explain—”

  I feel my teeth grinding as I speak.

  “They don’t know you’re here,” James says. “You need to wait until they leave. Then go turn yourself in, with a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer—”

  “Listen to me.”

  I don’t listen. I feel so adamant, so angry, so violated.

  “I’m going over there right now,” I say. “I’m going to straighten this out.”

  I bolt out the door. The police see me and come toward me.

  “We have a warrant for your arrest,” an officer says.

  I start to explain that they’ve made a mistake, that I’m innocent.

  The police swarm me.

  They handcuff me.

  I start to scream, but the words stay caught in my throat. The world starts to whirl. My legs buckle. I look up from the ground and see my neighbors gawking at me. “What did he do?” they ask each other and the cops.

  Nobody asks, “Why are you taking him in? What is he accused of?” They assume I’m guilty of—something.

  Then I think of my mother, and a tremor of shame slices through me.

  A hand clamps onto my head, presses down, and stuffs me into the backseat of a police car. I crane my neck to look back at my father’s house, where I have lived, off and on, for the past two years. The car starts to pull away, and I see more and more faces I know, neighbors, friends, gawkers, watching me ride away in a police car.

  What did he do?

  This can’t be happening, I think. This isn’t happening. This is a movie. I’m watching myself in a movie. Then, incredibly, I think about the chores I have to do, the errands I need to run, the books I just bought for my first semester at college. I have so much to do. I have to get back. I have to go home.