But my cell phone’s dead and Justice never sends his people down here for a pickup, it’s the one thing he was saying about getting out. I gotta make my own way to him. Almost feels like a test. And I fucking hate tests, I got no idea what for do next. I swing one hand into the pocket of the sweatpants. Got a paper scratching at me and when I pull ’um out, no shit, like an answer from God, the paper says Khadeja, and a number. Hell, no, is what I’m thinking.
But it’s cold and I stand there long enough and the no goes to yes. Bad idea. But I do ’um anyway.
Back inside I ask to use the phone and the lady on the other side of the bulletproof glass pops her gum and gives me a dead look.
“I bet you get that question all the time,” I say.
She’s all, “Every one of you people that comes out those doors. Plus people coming in off the street. There’s families, too…” She shakes her head.
“I like your braids,” I say. “You do ’um yourself?”
She laughs once, ha, smirks like, come on. “Like I’ve got three arms and eyes on the back of my head that can see where to do it all?”
“Oh,” I say. “But I mean, looks good, those red braids and your dark skin, don’t be like that.”
She pops her gum and gives me the dead stare again.
“You know you kinda look like Oprah, though,” I say. “You ever hear that? Got that same no-nonsense look, yeah. When you gonna quit this job and get something better?”
She does that one-sound laugh again, ha, rolls her eyes. She strokes her braids. “You don’t even know how fast I’m leaving this place.” She shoves the phone up close to the glass. “I tell you what, you get one call,” she says. “Two minutes.”
“Whatchyou doing later?” I say while I’m grabbing the phone, but I almost start laughing even when I say it, and she starts laughing, too, she’s all, “Like I’m finna take your prison-clothes-wearing ass to Cheesecake Factory or something.” She points to the phone and makes deuces with her fingers. “Two minutes.”
When Khadeja picks up I say, “It’s Dean, don’t hang up.”
“Who?”
“Nainoa’s brother.”
The line goes quiet.
“Don’t hang up, I said.”
* * *
AFTER, I’M STANDING OUT ON THE STEPS, I figure Khadeja’s not coming even though she said she would, but then there she is, pulling up in her little sedan, wearing her black pantsuit and her hair out in the full Afro, not like the cornrows in front with the Afro puff in back I seen last time. I try for take a step toward her but something happens.
I have to keep pulling on Noa’s sweatpants, because they can’t stay up, but it’s more than that. Almost it’s like I don’t wanna go from the prison, like it’s scary. I stop and turn and there’s that prison and I’m fully sad, how crazy is that. Feels like I’m leaving home, or at least a place that made more sense than most other places I been, which means it is a home, I figure. Around me now there’s all this space and noise and light and everything that comes after Noa, just waiting around the corner.
But I blow out a breath and take a step, then another. At the bottom there’s Khadeja. She’s got a worried face.
“You’re walking slow, did they hurt you in there?”
I snort. “It’s prison. Whatchyou think?”
And she’s all playing with her key chain, watching it spin and dangle. She stops. “I’m only here because of Nainoa,” she says. “So don’t give me any of that attitude.”
The anger comes on me in one big flex. “Look at the good girlfriend,” I say, “here for him now, not like back when he was hurting real bad and needed someone and you was out the door. Lucky him.”
She looks me over. Down, up, down. Then she presses the accelerator and the car jumps forward, throws my hands off the frame, and she keeps going, driving down the street away from me. I cross my arms and wait, like, Yeah, right, she’s gonna drive away without me. But then she’s almost at the end of the block and I start running, those torn-ass sweatpants tearing and ripping even more and me holding them up with one fist, plastic bag of everything I own flapping and swinging and me calling hey hey hey and her brake lights go red.
She rolls the window down when I get there. “I’ll take you one place you need to go and that’s it.”
Rain’s been spitting down, on and off, but I let it hit me. I wanna feel the drops on my skin. It’s prison that does that, I want to tell her, that’s what started this whole argument, it’s not me, it’s the inside that does that. But I figure no way I can tell her what it’s like in there and have her understand, and probably it’s gonna be like that with everyone else now, too, and when I figure that out with the rain in my face I’m like, You see that, there’s a me that was in prison that no one else is gonna know for the rest of my life.
“There’s a time limit on my offer,” Khadeja says.
I pop the door and get in.
* * *
MY ONE STOP is to a big-and-tall on MLK Boulevard. We didn’t say nothing while we drove, just listened to all this music on the radio, there’d be a song and I’d be like, Crazy beat, or, She got a high voice, and Khadeja would say, That song’s been on the radio for months. But me all like it’s the first time, so after a while I stopped saying something about the songs. Most of Portland I never seen, either, so all the streets and neighborhoods is something new, but it’s just a city. Bright glass buildings and suits and ties and then blocks where round-hip Ethiopian mamas are walking white babies in strollers and then bombed-out blocks where there’s old brick walls and boarded windows, Chinese take-out boxes and ripped bags of kitchen garbage all over some sidewalks and alleys, and plenty places—under freeways and up against the fences and in the parks—got people sleeping by shopping carts lumpy and overfilled with clothes and boxes and milk jugs, like a dollar store threw up into ’um.
I get out the car. Stopped raining, so Khadeja rolls the window down and I lean back in and say, “I know you didn’t gotta do this, so thanks.” Even though I want to be like, You left us at his apartment and then we got fucking arrested. I think she sees how I’m thinking about that day again and she says, “So this was your one stop?”
I raise both my hands away from my body, showing all what I’m wearing, like what do you want me to do, and when I do Noa’s torn sweatpants swoop off my waist and puddle at my ankles. She laughs at my naked-ass thighs and then covers her mouth against it. “I can’t go anywhere like this,” I say. I bend to lift the pants back, and while I’m down I hear the sucking thump of the window closing back up and the clunk of the door locks and then Khadeja’s on the street standing next to me.
“I want to ask you something,” she says.
I get all crushed in my throat, I figure she gonna ask more about what it was like inside, guys screaming crazy shit until they went hoarse in the middle of the night, the ass-rape and salad-tossing and dick-sucking that was being forced on guys, and me sometimes scared I was next, but also how outside Khadeja’s car there’s way too much space and noise and things coming at me from every side. All of it rushing at me at once while I’m standing there. Me feeling like I need a small room to back into so I can see what’s coming from the front only. Must be there’s a look on my face that I don’t fix, because Khadeja closes her mouth.