Of Hustle and Heart

by Briseis S. Lily

  I scream as Blanca tries with every bit of her 116-pound frame to pull the girl away from Rocky. I charge, knocking into the five-foot-seven, 189-pound, rabid girl. She finally stumbles away, and Blanca and I are able to wrestle her to the ground. She falls on top of Blanca, still holding the scissors. After Bee slides from underneath her, I clutch a handful of her curly red hair in both fists and smash her head into the pavement until she drops the scissors. I pick them up and jerk the scissors back, holding them over the girl’s chest. As I plunge them forward, Shannon grabs my arm. He twists hard until the scissors fall free again.

  “No,” he growls, trying to calm me the same way he did Beatrice, who is now standing over Rachel’s body with Blanca. Shannon holds me as he instructs Bradley to pick up the scissors. “Wipe them,” he says as I wriggle out of his arms and run to my wounded friend. She’s gasping, coughing, choking on blood. Blood. It’s everywhere.

  Blanca and I bend down over her, scared shitless. Rachel looks at us, her eyes big as saucers, trying to talk. She mouths the words hurts and breathe. And then my name. Then her head falls back, and her body goes limp.

  Bradley scoops Rachel up and runs to the parking lot, panicking and desperately trying to save her life. Bee, Robert, and I follow, as we argue stupidly about who should drive. Bradley disregards us and runs straight to his forerunner.

  “Just shut the fuck up and get in the car, you idiots!” he barks as he lays Rachel’s unconscious body across the backseat. Rachel and Bradley have a lot of blood smeared all over them. As Blanca and I pile in, I can see Bee’s bottom lip trembling. Rachel was bleeding too much for us to tell where her wounds were. I saw the biggest gash in the middle of her neck and covered it with my hands.

  “Rocky?” I plead, my voice sounding dry and salty, “I need you to say something.” Bee looks at me, her eyes flooding with tears. “Please! Please answer me, Rocky.”

  Robert, riding shotgun, looks over his seat at us, scared as shit, as Bradley barrels out of the school’s parking lot.

  “Is she…” he asks. I shake my head. Then her chest rises again, for the first time since Bradley handed the scissors to Shannon after he’d wiped them. And now, there’s hope.

  Rachel’s been critical for two days, and Blanca and I have not left the hospital. We’ve spent the night in the waiting room, with Antonio, my mama, and Leidys all rotating shifts. They watch over us, bringing us food we don’t eat and clothes we don’t change into. The whole thing’s too surreal. Bee and I have lived in a constant cloud of trauma and grief. We want to pray, but we don’t know how. So we sit in the farthest corner of the waiting room together, huddled in a twosome, hoping beyond everything for the best.

  Rachel’s parents don’t bother much with us, too concerned and ravaged by their only daughter’s deteriorating condition. From time to time, her father will come over to us with coffee or water and stoner-red eyes. He doesn’t say much, asks if we’re okay, and thanks us for staying. He tells us how much it means that we love his daughter so much. Every time he comes to sit with us, I wish he hadn’t. He looks like Rachel is dead already. The three of us rarely stop crying. And Mr. Ghalichi always makes a mad dash for it when he gets too overcome.

  On the third morning of our stay in the hospital, while Blanca and I are hovering in the hallway outside Rachel’s room, Tony comes to remove Bee and I from the hospital. Well…he tries, anyway. Of course, we refuse.

  “You guys smell,” he says after Blanca and I blast him from trying to take us away from the hospital and from Rocky. “You don’t have to go home. I booked a room for y’all right down the street. In walking distance.”

  We glance at each other.

  “I don’t smell anything,” Blanca says, moving toward the open room door. We watch as Rachel’s doctors evaluate and consult with the nurses, their faces grim. The false hope they’d been giving the Ghalichis…there was no truth to any of it.

  Rachel was stabbed eleven times, two of those wounds fatal: an injury to her lung, and the injury to her neck that reached her left vertebral artery. She has been on life support for three days. She has never once breathed on her own during that time. They unplug the machines, hoping she will respond. When she doesn’t, no one is surprised. Except for me and Blanca. We can’t believe she has left us like that. Two days before graduation.

  Even after she dies, we don’t go, because she’s still there—her body is, anyway…downstairs in the morgue. I want to see her before the rest of our friends come. I want to be special.

  “Will you come with me?” I whisper to Bee.

  The two of us remain crouched in the same corner of the waiting room for three hours after they roll her body from the room.

  “To the morgue?”

  “I want to see her, don’t you?”

  Tears flood our faces. Blanca shakes her head. “I can’t.” She sobs and coughs, trying to catch her breath. “I c…can’t.”

  I understand and feel stupid for asking. We throw ourselves into each other’s arms, sobbing and making such a racket that the hospital staff will kick us out for sure. And then Antonio finds us and pulls Blanca from the floor first.

  “Zina,” he says. I look up. “I told your mom I would bring you home. Is that what you want?”

  I’m not sure what he’s asking as I stare at him, my lip quivering, my vision blurred. I don’t know what I want. Pathetic.

  “I don’t—”

  I stop talking as Tony turns away, distracted by something behind me. I feel two arms wrap around me.

  “Zina,” Shannon says, pulling me from the floor. His eyes are red, his hair a curly mess of grayish-brown curls. He’s been crying. “You have to leave.”

  “You have to leave,” I say, pushing away from him.

  He looks at me, his face twisted in grief. “What? What are you doing?”

  “Where were you?” I ask, referring to his absence from the hospital. “I haven’t seen you…I haven’t talked to you…in three days. Why didn’t you call? You don’t care about Rachel?”

  “You know that’s not true,” he says. “Don’t do this. C’mon.” He holds his hand out to me. When I don’t take it, he kneels in front of me as Tony watches, Blanca pressed close to his chest.

  “I love you,” he whispers.

  “I needed you.” I place my hands over my chest. He lowers his head, unable to speak. “You were with Beatrice,” I cried. “This is her fault.”

  “It’s not,” he says.

  “She tried to stab me!”

  “You know Beatrice is sick.”

  “You can’t tell me you love me,” I cried. “Y…you…you don’t. You would’ve been here.”

  “I do,” he says. “I really, really do.”

  “Leave.”

  Antonio steps in, grabbing my arm, pulling me away from Shannon.

  “Your timing sucks, kid. This ain’t the place for this,” he tells Shannon. He looks into my eyes. “He’s leaving,” he says, kissing me on the forehead. I wrap my arms around him. He beckons toward the elevator, signaling Shannon to leave.

  Shannon hesitates but not for long. He knows he’ll never get past Antonio.

  My letter to Rachel is my life in the last four months poured out on purple stationery. Purple’s her favorite color. She wore a lot of it. Most of the things she’s ever given to anyone were been some shade of purple. We graduated this past Sunday, and as I sit at the kitchen table at my mama’s house, dressed for Rachel’s funeral and numb to the touch, I confess everything I’d been too stupid or scared to say. I’m now friends with the monsters that haunt me. And I control the voices too. The letter’s not that long—two pages front and back. Shannon and I had written way longer. But the letter doesn’t have to be long. Good-byes shouldn’t be long. They should be honest. Quick. I start off with the God-honest truth.

  Rocky, I love you. Forever. To me you can
never die. I am you, and you are me. This is hard. I missed you at graduation. It feels like Blanca and I will never stop crying over you. But still we are together forever. The three of us. Royals…

  The confession of my rape takes top priority in my letter, as I confess how excited I’d been to be anywhere with a guy like Zack, how crazy it drove me when he touched me. How I thought, I mean, I really thought I could have sex with him. Then came the moment I realized that I couldn’t, because I didn’t want him to be my first. I tell her he held me down, forced his too-big penis inside me, and how hard it was not to scream. I was afraid to scream. Anyhow, I beg her to forgive me for not telling her sooner.

  As I write, a well of tears drips onto the purple paper. I tell her about how hustling by myself has become an escape and how confusing Shannon’s up-and-down confessions of love—or whatever it is—are to me.

  Then suddenly I fall into talking about Tony—what I did with him and how sex with him was nothing like sex with Zack. I am better because of him, I think. By the time I’m done with my letter, my family is ready to leave.

  “Another funeral in less than three months,” Andrew says to my mama as we walk down the cracked driveway.

  She looks at him. “Go get in the car,” she says.

  More than half of Albert Chesney’s graduating class has showed up, everyone wearing some sign of purple: a flower, a tie, a bow, or a shirt. Anywhere you look, there is a stream of purple. When Shannon arrives, he stays close to Bradley and Robert, who sandwich me and Blanca as we stand alongside Rachel’s open grave. Once the graveside service is officially over, I wait for my chance to give Rocky my letter. I walk up to her plot, digging around inside my purse for it, while everyone talks solemnly among themselves. I dig in my purse and panic when I realize I’ve lost Rocky’s good-bye letter. I tear my purse inside out looking for it, sobbing when I can’t find it.

  “What’s the matter?” Antonio asks as he walks up from behind me. Since Rachel’s death, he calls every night. He spends hours on the phone with me, talking me through all this.

  “I can’t find my letter,” I blurt out. “I wrote Rachel a letter. I was going to throw it in.” I gesture toward her grave. He looks at me solemnly. Losing the letter feels like I’m losing her again. “I think I dropped it. I don’t want anyone to see.” I look at him purposely. He raises his eyebrows.

  “About…you and me?”

  I nod.

  He breathes deeply. “Don’t worry. The chances of someone reading it—”

  Then I see the purple paper from the corner of my eye. Someone stoops to pick it up, but I can’t see who it is.

  “There it is!” I grab Tony’s arm and duck around him in an effort to see who has found my letter. Leidys! My heart catches in my throat as she stares at the paper. As Leidy’s begins to open it, Blanca appears next to her and grabs her hand.

  “Is that your letter?” Tony whispers.

  I’m stunned. “Yes.”

  The two of us watch as Blanca peers at the purple paper. I can tell she recognizes something in the letter, probably my handwriting. She takes it from Leidys and reads.

  “I guess I won’t have to explain anything to anyone,” he says. “Cat’s out of the bag.”

  “She hasn’t gotten to the part about us yet,” I mutter, my heart sinking fast. I’m frozen in place, what’s left of my pride draining away like the color in Bee’s face. No, that letter is for Rachel. None of the things I wrote were meant for anyone else. I don’t want Bee or Leidys reading it. I don’t care what they find out by reading it. The point is, they shouldn’t be. As I walk over to retrieve Rocky’s letter, Blanca stops reading. She looks up and glances around the cemetery. Her eyes are huge as she searches for me. She sees me walking toward her and holds the letter out. I can see the questions in her eyes.

  “What part is she on?” Tony asks. He walks up from behind me. I swallow hard, realizing how difficult it is to say out loud.

  “I don’t know, Tony. Maybe it’s time I write you a letter,” I say as Blanca folds the note in half and hurries toward me and Tony.

  “I want more than a letter from you, Zina. No more secrets.”

  “Shhhh. Blanca will hear you.”

  “Good,” he says. “Maybe she should.”

  Absolution of the Heart

  Book II available 2017