The front of my mouth caught a draft. Where I landed, my limbs almost spilled into a sewer drain built into the curb. Arms pinned behind me and my collarbones on the pavement, I took a breath in.
Ah, the sickly stench of the world beneath Harlem! The melting trash and toilet water and rotten food salting the underground streets, where the rats and raccoons lived.
What’s that world like? Do they fight each other there too?I started to laugh at the visual of a congressional board of pests.
I surrender to the bottom of the earth!It might comfort me to roll into the underground, salt the earth with a root system—a rootsystem that never stopped growing before calling it quits!
My head was against the ground, but I could get enough leverage in the cop’s grip to crane my neck around and look back at the street.
Goodbye, beautiful city!The next moment may find me crunched into the fetal position and chucked into the sewer. All I could see was Jay, through a twisted, sideways angle. He had found a standing position, and the sun framed his perfect form. He still looked dizzy, unable to process his emotions, desperation red like a fever on his face as the fighting in the background waged on.
A police officer snapped handcuffs on his wrists, treating him like just another citizen, not rich, nor important. Our eyes held each other, even as my face was smashed into the cobblestone. Muffled in my ears were the rushing feet of New York’s best fighters.
I felt close enough to Jay now to almost hear his thoughts. I knew he was thinking,How did I end up here?
Because you met me,I sent back, through our mental connection—I was convinced he could hear my thoughts too.
The cop pulled Jay through the streets, until they disappeared behind the chaos, and a thought passed through our brains at the same time.
What now?
13.
The police threw me in the back of a car where Jay was waiting already, eyes downtrodden, his posture slumped, surely pondering his fall from grace.
I’d have touched his arm to make sure he was all right, but my hands were pinned behind my back. So I shuffled over and laid my head on his chest.
Jay didn’t resist it. The policeman, as he took off, noticed it in the mirror. He kept noticing it until we arrived at the precinct, in fact, but there was no comment on the touching—only constant glancing.
The police station was a nasty place of cold white tunnels and iron bars that made you wonder why humans treated humans like animals. Once they let us out of the handcuffs and pushed us into a cell, Jay’s first move was to wipe something off the bottom of my chin, but he resigned to stop wiping it when nothing came off.
He went to the little sink on the wall and washed his hands.We were still bleeding some from our mouths when they closed the cell door behind us.
Jay looked absolutely panicked as he paced the room. “Do you know what this will look like on our records?”
“The sky isn’t falling, Jay. Our faces are so dirty they may not even realize who you are.”
“I’m Jay Gatsby,” he said. “Of course they know who I am.”
That caused me to laugh—how pompous of him to think random police officers knew who he was—but Jay wasn’t laughing. He took himself very seriously.
He charged up to the cell bars and grabbed them and called to the hallway, “Hello? I need my phone call!”
Much to my surprise, a guard came and opened the cell, but he didn’t even look at me. It was as if I was not entitled to a phone call.
Jay turned back to me and said, “I’ll call my father,” before disappearing down the hallway.
I waited for five minutes, knowing Jay would come back.
Then another five minutes passed, and he was still out there, laughing with the police as I lay on the sheetless mattress, staring up at the stone ceiling.
I felt so lonely and abandoned. Jay preferred to be out there talking to them than in here with me. I was sure the guard let him out because his skin was lighter than mine. I also knew that if I had physically fought a police officer today, I might be dead.
Jay could have been using his charisma to get something across to them about what we were fighting for and why they shouldn’t stop it next time. But that’s not what it sounded like.
Jay laughed again, louder this time, and I wished they would stop.
Can I trust you?I wondered as I rotted for an hour in the grime of a cage from which Jay had been freed.
