We Are Not Like Them
Christine Pride & Jo Piazza
For our friends
The only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people that are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.
—A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara Maybe she and I failed each other by allowing each other the freedom to be ourselves, and maybe that was the inevitable consequence of true friendship.
—Trouble, Kate Christensen
Prologue
When the bullets hit him, first his arm, then his stomach, it doesn’t feel like he’d always imagined it would. Because of course, as a Black boy growing in this neighborhood, he’d imagined it. He’d thought it would feel hot and sharp, like the slice of a knife; instead, his entire body goes cold, like someone has filled his insides with ice.
The blood is a surprise too, not how much—he’d pictured it pooling around him—but how little, a warm, sticky trickle flowing from under his jacket where he fell to the ground.
He hears heavy footsteps and voices coming closer, two of them. One is calling for an ambulance. They’re talking loud and fast, not to him but to each other.
“Check his ID.”
“No, don’t touch him.”
“Fuck!”
And then: “Where’s the gun? Get the gun!”
One of them says this over and over.
There’s no gun. He wants to explain, but no words come out of his mouth.
He was wearing his headphones—Meek Mill blasting in his ears—when he thought he heard shouting, felt footsteps pounding in the alley. He turned and instinctively reached for his phone in his pocket to turn off the music. That was stupid. He knew better. No sudden movements. Don’t be a threat. Do what they say. His mom had drilled this into him since he was old enough to walk. He didn’t even have a chance though; his mind moved so much slower than the bullets.
An image comes to him—his face on the news. He knows exactly which photo his mom will choose: his school picture from last year, eighth grade. She was happy he’d finally smiled in it; he usually tried to keep his mouth closed to hide the gap in his teeth, even though just last week he’d overheard Maya in line behind him in the cafeteria call it “cute.” He pictures Riley Wilson, the pretty one on Channel Five, with her bright red lips, her voice smooth as melted chocolate: “Fourteen-year-old Justin Dwyer was shot tonight by Philadelphia police officers….”
He looks at his phone on the ground next to him, screen shattered into a spiderweb of cracks. For a split second, he’s seized with panic—his mom had made it clear when he lost his last phone that she wouldn’t buy him another one. Then it hits him just as suddenly: it doesn’t matter. In the backpack lying beside his phone there’s a brand-new polo—one he bought with his allowance, ten bucks a week for good grades and doing the food shopping and making dinner the nights his mom works double shifts. He’s scared he’s never going to get to wear that shirt. He vibrates with nervous jitters like when time is running out on a test. There are so many things he still may never get to do now—drive a car, see the ocean, have sex. As he hears the sirens growing louder, he starts to shake uncontrollably.
He tries to stop himself from thinking about his mother. He knows what her cries will sound like, because he heard them when his dad died four years ago. He won’t be able to comfort her as he did then, rubbing her back, telling her, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” even though it wasn’t, even though he was terrified that he now had to be the man of the house.
It’s okay. It’s okay. He whispers the words to himself because there’s no one else to do it. The officers are close, their scuffed boots eye level; their voices float far away, jumbled with the shrill sirens and the chatter from their radios. One of them kneels near him. “Hang on, kid. You’re gonna be all right. Please just hang on.” He wants to tell them his name. If they know his name he’ll be less alone. Worse than the pain or even the fear is that he’s never felt so alone in his life.
A single star is visible in the hazy sky above, like the light in the fish tank in his room. It’s something to focus on, something to hold on to until whatever comes next.
Chapter One RILEY
You can’t trust white people. My grandmother’s voice is in my head out of nowhere, her Alabama lilt still honey-thick despite almost a lifetime of living in Philadelphia. I swear I can even feel her hot breath in my ear. It’s been happening more and more lately, ever since Gigi passed out two weeks ago on her faded corduroy La-Z-Boy, where she faithfully watched Judge Mathis every afternoon. She may be over at Mercy Hospital on round-the-clock dialysis, with a prognosis the doctors call “grim,” but she’s also in my ear with her no-nonsense advice and favorite sayings on random rotation. Always keep some “runnin’?” money in your pocketbook. Don’t kiss a man with dainty fingers. Never drink more than two glasses of brown liquor. Sometimes she’s a little more direct, like this morning when I stopped by the hospital and she clucked, Baby girl, that skirt’s a little short, ain’t it?