by G. Neri
“Erica, we meet again,” said Rodney Graves, rising up to greet me, along with a nicely dressed woman who looked like a lawyer. “Have yourself a good run?”
I didn’t even have time to say anything to Mom because they were all sitting there in the living room waiting for me. I’m sure they grilled her all about me, but she really didn’t know anything, so they probably learned nothing.
“I wasn’t feeling good.”
He nodded. “You go to Truman, right? You probably remember me from school?” he said in that soft Southern lilt. “I’m the Special Investigator for the Juvenile Division. This here is my partner, Ms. Hallstrom, from the Family Court Prosecutor’s office. She makes sure we do everything by the book.” He winked, tapping on his notebook. He was well-dressed and had a kindly but weary face—the deep lines in his brow said he’d been doing this forever. “Your friend Destiny. She wasn’t too pleased that you ditched her and left her holding the bag.”
“What bag?” Mom asked.
“It’s just an expression, ma’am, you know?” He stared straight into my eyes like he was trying to suck the information from my head using telepathy. “I already know that you know something about the events from this morning, so you might as well start talking before things get ugly. We have your camera and that alone says a lot. Right now, you could either be a potential witness to a serious crime and or you could be a suspect. One is a lot better than the other—”
“I didn’t do it.” The words just came out. “I . . . I . . .” Mom looked at me, confused by it all. “I need to think.”
“I think you’ve had plenty of time to think this afternoon. Where did you go?” he asked.
“Is that important?” I asked.
“It is if you went to visit the suspects in a murder investigation.”
The words sunk in.
“I went to the Arch.”
Mom looked at me, surprised.
“Funny time for sightseeing,” said Mr. Graves.
“What did Destiny say?”
Mom put her hand on mine. “Erica, if you know something, you have to tell him. A woman died today! She could be somebody’s mother. What if it had been me?”
I imagined Mom lying in a pool of blood. After seeing what Kalvin was capable of, I knew anything could happen if I talked.
“She’s right. This needs to stop, now,” said Mr. Graves.
Mom panicked. “Was that Kalvin involved?” she asked.
I tensed up. Graves noticed.
“Who’s Kalvin?” he asked.
“A boy from school,” I said.
“What’s his last name?”
I wasn’t ready to say anything; I was so stunned. I just shrugged. “I don’t . . . even know. Everyone just calls him K.”
He scribbled some notes. “Does the name ‘Knockout King’ mean anything to you?” He looked for a reaction from me.
I dug my nails into my arms to see how much pain I could take. Mom noticed I was about to explode.
“Is she under arrest?” Mom asked.
He stopped writing, glancing at Hallstrom. “Not yet.” He seemed to confer with the woman lawyer telepathically. She nodded. “But perhaps . . . it would be best if you all came down to my office. We could take a formal statement and, as you have the right to an attorney, especially considering her age—”
“I didn’t do anything!” I said, the tears flowing.
A lie. That stupid camera would betray me. I wished Dad had never given it to me. I wished he and Mom had never divorced. I wished we’d never come to St. Louis and that my video had never impressed Destiny. Then I wouldn’t be stuck in this mess.
Assured that I wasn’t about to skip town, they gave us until tomorrow morning. Mom said we’d come down after she called Dad. He knew lawyers. I almost screamed from the tension in the room, but Mom kept a firm grip on my arm until they left.
“Please don’t call Dad,” I begged.
She grabbed my shoulders hard and hissed, “You think I want to call him?! I can’t afford a lawyer by myself for whatever you’ve gotten yourself into. So it’s either him or you’re on your own!”
I could see I would lose this one. I was tired of fighting. “Fuck it.”
Her face screwed up. “What happened to you? You used to be such a sweet girl.”
“I moved to St. Louis,” I shot back.
She gritted her teeth. We’d been through this many times and she didn’t want to go through it again. She spoke very slowly. “Now . . . you’re going to tell me and your father everything. No more stories, just the truth. Because the police are surely going to get to the bottom of this and we are the only two who have your back. Certainly not that Kalvin.”
I nodded to Mom. She called Dad, who was too busy until she told his assistant that I might be going to jail. That got him on the line.
I heard them arguing for about half an hour, blaming each other for how I turned out. Finally, she came in and put Dad on the speakerphone.
“Erica.”
“Hi, Dad.”
He sighed and then there was silence. “I don’t really know what to say to you. I was getting ready to come in a few days for Thanksgiving.”
“Are you still coming?” I squeaked.
There was a long pause on the other end. I knew he was trying to hold it in. Finally, he said, “Yes. I will save my sermon for tomorrow when I’m there. But right now, you need to tell me everything. And I mean everything.”
Of course, I couldn’t tell him everything—just some of the highlights. I made it look like I’d been sucked in, and that I was innocent. I didn’t tell him about the other Knockout Games, but let him know that it was an accident gone bad and that I didn’t do anything but try to save her.
Mom’s expression was bad enough. She’d read about the Knockout Games and was horrified to see it hit so close to home. “He was in your bedroom,” she said over and over. I lied again, told her he’d never touched me, that he was a mixed-up boy who wasn’t so bad.
“Not so bad?” Dad started in. “Your mom said they were doing this game for fun! Do you think this is fun?”
No, I told myself. “It wasn’t like that . . .”
“Why would you even attack another human being? It really makes me sick—” he paused for a few seconds, the anger building up in him. I heard something break. Finally, he took a deep breath. “To know that you were somehow involved in all this just makes me sad. I liked you better when you used to sit by yourself and draw, not—” he couldn’t say it.
So much for saving the sermon for tomorrow. “Maybe if you hadn’t divorced Mom—”
He cut me off. “Don’t even go there, Erica. You’re close to becoming an adult and it’s time you learned that we cannot clean up after all your messes. I take responsibility for mine because I know life is messy. This one, you’ll have to deal with the consequences. Whether you like it or not.”
I was done talking. So was he. He said he’d make calls to his lawyer acquaintances and be here tomorrow first thing. We’d plan on a strategy where I had been coerced by the others, but I had never actively participated. I did not tell him about Metal Detector Man. He said if I testified against the others, I could probably get probation or community service.
This is a conversation I never expected to have with my dad before my Sweet 16.
33
Dad showed up at ten in the morning. His lawyer friend, Mr. Tillman, did not look like the lawyers I’d seen in the commercials. I found out later he wasn’t even a criminal lawyer, but that’s all Dad could come up with overnight. Tillman was short and balding, and probably needed glasses because he squinted at everything. Dad said the guy owed him one, though he wouldn’t say why. When you owe a bail bondsman one, it’s usually not a good thing.
Tillman had already done some digging. “They’re not after you. They really want this Knockout King guy. You give them him, and we can negotiate. At your age and being that you have no criminal record, you might get off ligh
tly.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” I said.
Dad was confused. “Why?”
I sighed again. “You’re asking me to snitch.”
My parents were about to say something, but Tillman cut them off. “Right now, Erica, you still have a future. But you’ve hit a major fork in the road. One way is a dead end. That road goes nowhere and you can ride it with all the others who were afraid to speak out. The other road is filled with obstacles, but at least it goes somewhere.”
“Where?” I asked. I wanted to know.
“That’s up to you.”
Dad stared at me, confused. “Are you in love with this guy or something?”
“What?” The question caught me off guard. I was sure my face was turning red.
He rubbed his temples, unsure. “Do you . . . care for him?”
I felt my stomach. I imagined something alive growing in there. But even with that possibility, I wasn’t sure about this.
“No.”
He turned back to Tillman. “Can she get off with probation?” asked Dad.
Tillman shrugged. “Possibly. Or a few months in juvie.”
“There goes college,” said Mom.
I shot her a look. “Thanks for caring.”
“Push for probation,” said Dad. “Or no deal.”
“Do we know what’s on the camera?” Tillman asked me.
I sighed. “Enough to get Kalvin.”
“Good. Then we have something.”
“But if they have that, why would I still have to testify?”
He turned to my dad. “They’ll probably want to build a bigger case than just second-degree manslaughter. If they can show that he was the leader of this gang and that he got young boys to do all his dirty work and that it was premeditated, then it’s conspiracy to murder. They’ll try him as an adult. That’s the only way to really keep him off the streets. Otherwise, he may just go to juvie for a few years, get out, and then you’ll have a problem.”
When we arrived at the Juvenile Division, things were not so easy. Rodney Graves sat behind his metal desk, perfectly groomed in his dark suit and calmly laying out crime photos of Mrs. Lee on the table for me to see. Dad turned pale. I couldn’t look at them. But I knew they were there.
Mr. Graves was going to show us the surveillance video from the library. Dad made Mom wait outside, but it was bad enough having Dad see this.
The black-and-white video showed Joe Lee and my teacher walk past, holding hands. You could tell they’d been together a long time. They didn’t talk. But they still held hands, something my parents were definitely not doing right now.
“And here come our suspects.” Mr. Graves watched closely, even though he’d seen it many times before.
Everybody’s back was to the camera, Kalvin and Prince in the lead. The only one that turned around, just for a second, was yours truly, but the black-and-white video was blurry so you couldn’t even tell the color of the clothes or my hair.
“That doesn’t look like her,” Dad said.
But it was. Seeing us on this video with no sound, where everything was so matter-of-fact, made what was about to happen feel even worse. I suddenly wished I could rewind my life just like this tape and start over again. But that wasn’t going to happen.
“They’re so young,” Dad said to himself. “Just babies.”
“Middle-school kids. Sad but true,” said Mr. Graves. “It’s been going on for years. They seem to outgrow it by the time they reach high school, except for a few, like the Knockout King.”
The video was just too grainy to get much detail. The lens was pretty dim from all the bad weather it had seen. On top of that, Kalvin was wearing a hoodie, so you couldn’t see his face.
Kalvin just took off, out of frame. Prince and the others followed. Only I was left on-screen, holding my camera and struggling to catch up. It was strange seeing how tense I was. Everyone else ran out of range and I followed.
The camera caught none of the attack. After about thirty seconds of staring at the cement, Tillman interjected.
“That’s it?” said Tillman.
“Hold on,” said Graves. Another unbearable minute passed, then a rush of Tokers came running back. Another twenty seconds later, me and Kalvin skirted the edge of the frame. Graves froze the video. It looked like just a blur.
“Really? You got nothing there,” said Tillman.
“Looks like Erica and the Knockout King to me.”
Dad squinted at the image. “Bullshit. No jury’s going to believe that. What about Erica’s camera?”
“So you’re saying it’s hers?” asked Mr. Graves.
“You know it is,” said Tillman slowly. “What I’m wondering is why you didn’t lead with that? Unless, of course, her camera had nothing on it.” He stared down Graves.
Mr. Graves stopped the video.
“There’s an issue with the camera,” he said, hesitating.
I perked up.
“It was damaged in the scramble and—” he glanced meaningfully at me—“my guys say blood and memory cards apparently don’t mix. They’re still trying to get some reliable footage off the camera.”
Tillman slapped his hand on the table, ignoring my sickened expression. “So you have nothing, then.” He shut his notebook. “I think we can go now, Erica.”
Graves eyed him wearily. “Mr. Tillman, I don’t want to put Erica in lockup if I don’t have to. Rest assured, we will get the video off that camera. But what I really need is a witness who can testify to these crimes and help put an end to these Knockout Games. If she can be of help, then—”
“Help. There’s a word you usually don’t hear unless they have squat,” said Tillman.
Graves looked like he’d eaten something bad. “You can help or we can drag this thing out.”
“Help with what?” said Tillman.
Graves turned back to his computer and opened another file. It was the same surveillance camera, but later in the day when the investigation was happening. That’s when me and Destiny walked back into frame looking for answers.
“Erica returned to the library a couple of hours later with this other girl, Destiny Jones. That’s where I first encountered her.” He reached down into a box and pulled out my jacket, which was in a big Ziploc bag.
“This was found in the trash around the same time. The security guard saw them run down to the bathroom, where he discovered it later.” He looked at the video and then at the jacket. Same jacket, of course. “These dark stains here? Blood. The lab—”
Tillman held up his hand. “I need to confer with my client. Alone, if you don’t mind.”
Mr. Graves nodded. “Take your time.”
Dad waited for Mr. Graves to leave. He turned his focus on me, studying my eyes for any kind of reaction. “So?”
“What?” I said.
“What else haven’t you told us?”
I stammered. “I didn’t think they’d find the jacket.”
“I say we go back to the original plan,” said Tillman. “We play friendly; they’ll be friendly back. We testify and shoot for full exoneration.”
“And between now and when they pick up Kalvin? What if he comes after her?” Dad asked. “Is he capable of that?”
Tillman shrugged. “It happens. But if they nab him quickly enough and he’s certified as an adult, chances are more in your favor that he’ll do real time. . . .”
I couldn’t get that quote from Kalvin’s Facebook page out of my head: “A disobedient child shall not live his or her days to the end.”
“He’ll come for me,” I said.
Dad leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, wishing it would all go away. “So what should we do?”
“Are you licensed to carry?”
Dad nodded.
“Just keep an eye out. That’s what I’d recommend,” said Tillman. “Those boys’ll be keeping a low profile for now.”
“Carry what?” I asked. “Will you just stop for minute
? This is all happening way too fast.”
Dad turned to me. “I’m sorry; we’re just trying to make it through this mess. If your teacher meant anything to you, you have to do what’s right. Even if it’s not fair. You need to step up for the good of everyone.”
My eyes accidentally fell upon the photos of Mrs. Lee that were spread out on the table. They were horrifying, even worse than I remembered. It hurt to see her like that. “If I do this . . . what will happen to Tyreese?” I asked. “He’s still a boy.”
Tillman studied his notes. “He’s too young to be tried as an adult, and you could corroborate that he was manipulated by Kalvin. I think they’ll lock him up in juvie until he’s eighteen and then, maybe probation after that.”
“But he didn’t mean to . . .”
Dad pointed to the pictures. “Tell that to her.”
Tillman made the deal. I’d testify in exchange for charges being dropped against me—two years’ probation with community service. I had to sit in front of a stack of yearbooks for Truman and Joplin and ID each member of the TKO Club. I knew no one’s last name or where they lived, except for Kalvin, Prince, and a few others. I told Graves about the club and the Rec Center and Kalvin’s home.
I almost lied to protect Tyreese, but the detective sensed me hesitating and didn’t let up with the questions until I buckled. I guess they’re good at that.
When I came to Kalvin’s photo, he was smirking like school was all a big joke.
Graves said, point-blank, “We know he’s the Knockout King. Will you back us on this?”
I stared into those green eyes, which had been dulled by the black and white of the photo. Without those piercing eyes, he looked like an ordinary punk. Even then, all I could think of was our night on the roof. I could almost feel myself lying in his arms and yet, my only memento of that night was that I still hadn’t had my period yet.
Graves sensed my reluctance. He was patient. “Take your time. It’s an important decision that will affect a lot of lives.”
I looked at Kalvin’s photo for the longest time. I wondered where he was right now. Did he know his fate was in my hands?