The Officer's Daughter

by Elle Johnson

  I slid into a seat on the Q2 bus and stared out the window. Thoughts of Karen tumbled heavily inside my head like wet clothes in a dryer. I saw her standing behind the counter, then facedown on the floor, then lying underneath a white sheet stained with blood.

  I shut my eyes and reeled off the order of my classes instead. Science, math, social studies, Spanish, English, band, gym. I’d finished my homework on Friday night, before I found out Karen had been killed. Since then I hadn’t thought about the assigned reading on World War II, the trigonometry theorems, the haunting of Heathcliff by Catherine on the moors. I wondered what Karen had been studying at her Catholic girls’ school. Was she memorizing Bible verses like I had to at my Lutheran elementary school? The trip she was supposed to take to Spain was only weeks away. Would someone take her place? Would my aunt and uncle get their deposit back? Did they even care about the money? Karen had been killed over a mere $241. It was a gut punch, how her life had been ended. Face blown off at point-blank range. What did that even mean? How was that possible? Was there a nose, mouth, and eyes? Or just a bloody gaping hole? I flashed on photos of concentration camp victims from my social studies textbook. I didn’t know how I would get through this day.

  I got off the bus and plodded up the hill, surrounded by students. Black and brown kids mainly—Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Filipinos—but also Asian and white kids, too. I wondered if they had heard about Karen’s murder. If Karen would be another Renee Katz, the seventeen-year-old Flushing girl pushed in front of an oncoming subway train. The screeching wheels severed her hand. A promising career as a classical flutist over before it began. The police never found the hooded Black man the media kept referring to as “the assailant.” But everyone knew who Renee Katz was. She was in the papers and on the news just like Karen. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five immortalized her in a verse from “The Message”: “They pushed that girl in front of the train / Took her to the doctor, sewed her arm on again.”

  I thought if I had been on that subway platform, I would have saved her. I would have reached down and pulled her out of the path of the oncoming train. Or jumped onto the tracks and rolled us both under the platform as the train rumbled by. I would have chased down the assailant. Sprinted through the station after him and bolted up the stairs, tackled him to the sidewalk and held him down with my knee in his back.

  My jaw clenched and my fingers balled into fists when I thought about stopping the assailant, the man—or maybe he was just a boy—before he had a chance to shove Renee Katz onto the track.

  I would have protected Karen, too.

  If I had been in the Burger King, I would have stopped the boy with the sawed-off shotgun. Snatched the gun right out of his hands and thrown it to the ground. Or better yet, pointed the barrel at his face, then racked a round into the chamber. He would have dropped to the ground, covered his head with two shaking hands while Karen called the police to come cart him off to jail.

  But my daydream didn’t make sense. I knew it was unlikely that I would wrestle the shotgun away. That I would have been there in the first place. I would never have been in the Bronx, at that time of night, without my parents. I searched my brain for a scenario that put me there with Karen, one in which we were already best friends like I’d always wanted. But there was no way I could have saved her.

  Jamaica High School loomed before me. It was a massive redbrick building with east and west wings, surrounded by a rolling green lawn and enclosed in a black iron fence. I walked past clusters of rock ’n’ rollers. The kids who listened to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Who. They wore concert T-shirts and ripped jeans with bandanas dangling out of back pockets or tied around pimply foreheads, holding long, greasy hair out of their stoner-red eyes. They were unburdened by knapsacks full of textbooks and homework. Their only concession to the classroom was a pencil tucked behind an ear or nestled inside a pack of Marlboro Reds and rolled up in the short sleeve of a T-shirt.

  I looked for the skinny girl with the painted-on jeans, spiked heels, and curly blond hair who everyone said was Christine Sixteen from the Kiss song. I recognized the stage crew boys from when I was in the school play. They ran the lights and sound, built the sets. They were friends with Kevin, the cute shaggy-brown-haired boy with a pug nose and baby seal eyes whom I had a crush on. By chance on my way to the bathroom one day I found out that we sat in the same seat during different classes. I started writing notes for him on the desktop. That ended when he found out who I was and left a note that said “I don’t date niggers.” Stung but not surprised, I scratched out our notes with pen. After that he started writing to another girl who sat there during a different period.

  The disco kids were on the other side of the sidewalk. They wore shimmery nylon tops, tight polyester pants with polished pointy dress shoes. And that was just the boys. They gathered around the parked cars of the older bad-boy dropouts who blasted music from speakers in the trunk or carried suitcase-size boom boxes on their shoulders like dumbbells. The girls were tiny and teetered like praying mantises on too-high heels. Skinny purses on long metal chains bumped off their bony hips, threatening to knock them off balance as they talked, gesturing wildly with their hands and neck.

  I saw Serena, the Puerto Rican girl who’d tried to be my friend. But one night on the phone she told me how much she hated niggers. When I reminded her I was Black, not Puerto Rican like she thought, she insisted that she knew. “I call everybody nigger,” she said, laughing.

  I walked quickly past her and inside the gate. I wanted to find my friends. I made my way down a long path to the flagpole right in front of the grand entrance to the school—a trio of arched dark metal double doors underneath an ominous bell tower. This was where the honors students gathered. A phantom breeze pushed the rope against the metal flagpole with a persistent sharp tap, like an outside guest knocking to come in. I moved through the crowd and joined my classmates.

  Suddenly I was on the verge of tears. I wanted to talk to someone about Karen, the dead girl in the newspapers. Then I realized no one would know who she was to me. I wished the reporters had interviewed me, quoted me, the grieving cousin, the relative who aspired to be her best friend. I wanted people to know what I had lost. I felt sick to my stomach for thinking that way. For needing the attention. For wanting someone to ask. But I kept my eyes open for a sympathetic ear.

  Wiry, wavy-haired Ben stood nearby. He could have been considered a class clown, but he was confident and his outbursts were too smart to be easily dismissed as just attention seeking. He listened quietly to a motley assortment of geeks, nerds, and bookworms. Their faces animated with tales from the weekend spent in Hebrew school and temple. Legs and feet tapping, they barely listened as they waited to breathlessly one-up one another, eager to spit out facts that everyone already knew. In the same conversation they’d discuss science projects, Billy Joel, and Israeli politics.

  I moved on to Steve and Stephen: one was short and spry, sarcastic but sweet; the other was a sincere teddy bear, stocky with shaggy hair and glasses. I had crushes on both but had been advised that because I was a shiksa, a goy, and a schwartza, they’d never ask me out. And if they did, I’d be little more than practice until a nice Jewish girl came along. Only half the girls in my classes were Jewish. The rest were Chinese or whites who didn’t want to be called that. They were Greek, Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, Polish—and proudly so. The daughters of immigrants, they wore their ethnicity as a badge of honor, like their good grades and good behavior. They were my competition for our teachers’ admiration and glowing letters of recommendation for college. I didn’t want them to know about Karen.

  I hid behind a flock of bohemian hippie-chicks. The ones with puka shell necklaces and long, straight hair that fell past the drawstrings on their gauzy peasant skirts. They mingled with the fashion plates, the sorta-smart, outgoing girls who dressed in designer blouses and name-brand jeans. The air crackled with their shrieks and cackles as they complimented this one�
�s jewelry or the french braid in that one’s hair.

  I knew if I got too close they’d ask me about my weekend. If I told them the truth, they’d cover their mouths and shake their heads as they listened to the story of Karen’s murder. They’d form a circle around me, rub my back, and say, “If there’s anything I can do.” By the end of the day, everyone in school would know. I’d be the subject of whispers and stolen looks. Pulled aside, apologized to, asked how was I doing. People I barely knew would call me at home. They’d insist on mourning with me. Then I’d have the burden of politely acknowledging their thoughts, prayers, and sympathy. Though some might have a hard time believing it and wonder what kind of a family I came from that a sixteen-year-old relative could be murdered at an after-school job. I felt the heat of sweat on my neck and tried to smooth down the frizz of my hair with the palm of my hand.

  Lisa grabbed my raised elbow and wiggled it back and forth. “Hey, Slime,” she said.

  When we weren’t calling each other Slime, we’d try Sleaze, occasionally Scuzz or Scuzzy. Silly nonsense nicknames that made us laugh and let everyone else know we were friends.

  “How are you?” she asked. I could tell by the crinkle of concern around her eyes that she had read about Karen’s murder in the newspapers. Over the weekend, articles about the investigation had come out in the Post, the Times, and the Daily News, which ran an old photo of Karen, with her curly hair and bright eyes.

  I wasn’t sure what would come out of my mouth if I tried to speak. I didn’t want to cry. I nodded and managed a small smile that made me self-conscious as soon as it crossed my lips. Lisa squeezed my shoulder. “I am so, so sorry,” she said, sounding like she had when I hadn’t been cast in the school play. I bristled. She didn’t understand. How could I explain that my hopes of having a real friend, a best friend even, had died with Karen?

  “How was your weekend?” I changed the subject, then watched Lisa talking as my mind drifted and created images of things I knew but hadn’t actually seen.

  My mother told me that the night Karen was killed, my aunt and uncle had gone to the crime scene. Word had spread through the neighborhood about a robbery in which shots were fired and someone was killed. Her parents drove up to the end of the street where the Burger King was. A uniformed officer stood guard behind the yellow crime scene tape. He pointed to an ambulance speeding away and told my aunt and uncle that their daughter was being taken to the hospital. Aunt Barbara and Uncle Warren got back into their car and raced after the flashing lights and siren sounds to Misericordia General. They ignored the signs, parked haphazardly in a red zone, and ran after the paramedics rushing a stretcher with a patient they couldn’t quite see into the emergency room. My uncle flashed his badge at the nurses’ station and stepped through the fluttering nylon curtain wall of an examination room. There they caught sight of a dark brown–skinned foot hanging off the gurney and knew it was not their light-skinned daughter.

  I was angry with that officer for sending my aunt and uncle on a wild-goose chase, for giving them false hope. But my father said that the officer was right not to let my aunt and uncle see their little girl “that way.” He said, “They would have messed up that whole crime scene. Then what? She was already dead. No, he did the right thing.”

  Lisa shook my elbow again. “Earth to Slime. You going to class?” The bell was finally ringing. My mother was right: I didn’t want to be there.

  The halls of my high school were decorated with ornately framed posters of famous works of art. Guernica and The Starry Night. The Persistence of Memory. Before social studies class, I stood opposite a framed reproduction of The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch. I was drawn to this unnerving display of heinous crimes and human suffering. A reminder of the terrible things that would happen when you didn’t follow the rules. Though following the rules hadn’t helped Karen.

  My classmate Carter walked up to me. He planted his elbow on the wall next to my head and smushed his cheek against the flat of his open palm. When he leaned in, I noticed the freckles across his nose and a slightly soapy scent in his blond hair, parted sharply on the side. As always, he was wearing his varsity baseball jacket and seemed on the verge of laughter.

  Carter was quick with a joke, sarcastic comment, or off-color observation. He didn’t take himself or anything too seriously.

  “You do the homework?” he asked.

  I wondered what he was after, then leveled him with a look. “Yes.”

  “Lemme copy it real quick.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” He smiled. I pushed off the wall and lugged my book bag into the classroom.

  “Everyone does it.”

  “So ask everyone,” I said.

  “I could just take it, you know,” he called after me.

  “Have some dignity,” I said. “You should go down with honor.”

  Carter laughed out loud. “You are such a weirdo. What’s the big deal? It’s just homework.”

  It was more than just homework. I slid into my seat.

  Carter stood over me with his arms crossed and a finger tapping his sleeve. I pointedly ignored him by slowly setting up everything I would need on top of my desk: textbook, spiral notebook, black pen and sharpened pencil lined up in a groove carved into the wood. I knew he was still watching when I squinted at Mrs. Riger’s white chalk handwriting on the blackboard—a neat cursive, more angular than round. An adult’s penmanship. Authoritative and decisive. She had written out questions about the end of World War I. I was about to write the questions down when Carter snatched the spiral with my homework off my desk.

  He laughed at me over his shoulder and sped toward the front of the class. I leapt out of my chair and caught his sleeve in my left hand. He fell over, into a front-row seat, and dragged my spiral under the desk. I slapped at his lifted knees, holding me at bay.

  “Just let me copy it.”

  “No,” I said. “Never.”

  “Riger’s coming.”

  “Give it back, Carter.”

  I lunged and snatched the soft green cardboard cover in my right fist. I tried to pull it away but Carter wouldn’t let go. I tried yanking the notebook out of his hand. He leaned farther back, digging in for a game of tug-of-war, and dragged the bony top of my thumb across the splintered wood bottom of the desk.

  The delicate skin caught on a piece of jagged metal that twisted my flesh open like the twirled top of a sardine can. I yelped as blood doused my hand. Carter slipped off the chair, halfway to the floor.

  “Jesus,” he said, clawing himself upright. “Are you okay?”

  “Get away from me.” I snatched my spiral out of his hand.

  Mrs. Riger walked to her desk and looked around the room. “What’s going on?”

  I hadn’t noticed that my classmates were frozen, watching.

  “Nothing.” Carter shrugged red-faced and sauntered to his assigned seat. But I couldn’t move on.

  “Carter tried to steal my homework.” I waved the bloody spiral as proof.

  The air surged with a burst of shocked laughter and surprise from my classmates.

  “All right, people, settle down.” I waited for Mrs. Riger to punish Carter. But she looked down at her textbook and flipped through the pages, as though she hadn’t heard me.

  Blood spilled out of the open wound and covered my fingers in a satiny glove. There was too much to suck clean. It dripped off my hand in perfect teardrops that splashed into stars on the floor. I tucked the spiral into my book bag, then fished around for the folded cotton handkerchief my father made me carry, and pressed it over my bleeding thumb. I felt light-headed, but I refused to sit down.

  “Mrs. Riger, he stole my homework.” She didn’t look up. “You know, everyone cheats in your class. Even on tests. They share answers.”

  I heard agitated voices behind me.

  “What is she doing?” someone hissed.

  �
�Shut up.”

  Mrs. Riger pushed her glasses up with an index finger, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and sighed. “Thank you for telling me. I’ll be on the lookout. Now let’s everybody settle down. The bell is going to ring shortly.” She turned her back on me to write on the blackboard.

  The handkerchief was stained through with blood. My hand throbbed. I stumbled into the hallway and ran my thumb under the nearest drinking fountain. The clear water turned crimson and the wound stung like an angry bite. I didn’t care about the bell or my homework or class anymore. I loped into the girls’ bathroom for clean paper towels to stem the flow.

  When I pushed on the door I was hit in the face by a gust of cold air from an open window. The bitter tang of smoke burned the hairs inside my nose. Christine Sixteen was perched on the windowsill, pointy-toed boots resting on the porcelain lip of a dirty old sink. She almost tossed her cigarette out the window until she realized I was nobody. She took a long drag, then passed the smoldering butt to a snaggletoothed, dark-haired friend, inspecting blackheads in the mirror with her nicotine-stained fingers.

  I pulled rectangular sheets of rough folded white paper out of a silver dispenser.

  “Oh, shit, what happened to your hand?”

  “Carter . . . some boy tried to steal my homework. I wouldn’t let him.”

  They looked at me, expecting more. Christine Sixteen shook her head. “Fucking brainiac. Well, good for you. Don’t give up without a fight.”

  They smoked and watched as I struggled to cover my wound with the rough paper. Then Christine Sixteen said, “Here.” She jumped to the floor, tucked the cigarette into the corner of her mouth, and squinted into the wisps of smoke, just like my mother. She took my hand in hers and turned her head, considering how to fix me.