Damaged Petals.

[Soapy]

Season 8, Episode 5
Nearly an hour after the final whistle of practice had been blown, players were still on the field. It started with Brice and Jo’Ziah, the way most things on this field started. A comment about throwing with anticipation that became a comment about coverage that became Jo’Ziah saying, loud enough for everyone still hanging around to hear, that the defense had been babysitting the offense all summer and at some point the offense was going to have to learn to take care of itself.

A few minutes later, Corey, Jesse, Hudauri and Leland, a third year linebacker from Nap, had found themselves on the track that surrounded the field.

"Easiest hundred I ever made," Jo’Ziah shook his head as he stretched his hamstrings.

A small crowd had gathered along the infield. Someone had music going from a Bluetooth speaker sitting in the grass.

Jesse got them out clean, Corey held the lead through the second leg, and Brice took the handoff with maybe four strides on Leland when Leland received the baton from Hudauri and it was not enough. The Nevada transfer was faster than Brice had remembered from spring practices and prior conditioning drills.

The defense erupted.

"Slow ass motherfucker!" Jo’Ziah boasted, "This conference must be weak as hell if they let your sorry ass run for a thou!"

“Run that shit back,” Brice said, avoiding eye contact as he tried to catch his breath.

Jo’Ziah laughed. "Nigga about to die talking about run that shit back."

“Stop being a bitch," Brice met his eye, "And run that shit back."

Jo’Ziah looked at Hudauri. Hudauri looked back at him without expression.

"If you pull some shit, this was your idea."

"Stop running your fucking mouth and let’s run this shit again," Brice began walking back to his position on the track. Jesse and Corey followed suit.

Jo’Ziah scratched the back of his neck and looked at the sky for a moment. "I ain’t doing it again for a hundred."

“Bet whatever you want."

Jo’Ziah looked over at Hudauri again. "How much was that ticket we was looking at?"

"About six hundred," Hudauri smiled.

"Atlantis looking nice too," Jo’Ziah shrugged.

"Real nice," Hudauri laughed.

"Aight," Jo’Ziah nodded, shifting his attention towards Brice, "You pay for our trip next week. To the Bahamas."

The crowd made a sound.

Brice kept his face still. “Whatever."

“Flights, hotel,” Jo’Ziah confirmed. “All of it."

Leland raised one hand. “Me too, nigga. I ain’t running for nothing.”

Jo’Ziah pointed at him. “Him too. Nigga."

"I’m not worried about that," Brice shrugged, "We can figure out what y’all owe me after this race anyway."

They lined up again. The crowd was bigger now as players re-emerged from the locker room. Jesse got them out slightly cleaner this time, maybe a stride better than the first race, and Brice allowed himself one moment of thinking that this was going to be different.

Corey ran the second leg with everything he had but the faster Hudauri had gained ground, coming in even for the final handoff. Brice put his all into it, pumping his arms and legs like his life depended on it. He avoided the urge to look over at Leland but he could feel the 240 pound linebacker keeping pace and eventually start to pull away.

Leland crossed the line with two strides to spare.

…

Brice got his coffee and found a chair and sat down. Elaine got them started the way she always did, easy and unhurried, giving the room a chance to settle into itself before anyone was expected to say anything real. Carlos went first. Then Gwen. Then a woman Brice didn't know whose name turned out to be Patricia and who had lost her daughter fourteen months ago and was still figuring out what normal looked like now.

When it got to Brice, he looked at his hands.

"I've been doing a lot of talking about grief lately," he said. "My therapist asked me when I'd actually had time to grieve, Like, really grieve. I don’t know that I know how to grieve or maybe how to allow myself to grieve. I know how to keep busy. I know what happens when I don’t."

He stopped there.

Elaine nodded. "I think we’ve all been there. Grief looks different for different people."

"Yeah," he said. He turned the Styrofoam cup in his hand.

A few people offered things after that. Tanner talked about cleaning out his late father’s storage space and how he had sat on the floor for forty minutes without doing anything in particular. Patricia said something about the difference between moving on and moving forward and the guilt that comes with that.

Brice listened.

When Elaine closed them out, people started moving in the easy, slow way they always did at the end of these things. Chairs scraping, people finding each other in pairs and small groups. Brice stood and was stretching his back when he reached when he heard her.

"You spoke."

He turned around.

Mel was standing a few feet away.

"Hey," he said.

She was quiet for a second. Around them, the room was thinning out. "It sounded good. Sounded real."

Brice nodded.

"Was it?" she asked. "Real?"

Brice shrugged. "Why wouldn’t it be? Don’t got no reason to lie anymore, perform for anybody. They’ve seen it all by now."

"I guess they have," she let out a small, humorless laugh.

…

The pasta was already on the table by the time Sophie sat down, and she spent the first few minutes doing what she always did at dinner, which was eat and answer questions in the shortest possible way until her parents lost interest and started talking to each other. It usually took about six minutes.

Tonight she made it to four before bringing it up herself.

"Priya's looking at Spelman," she said, reaching for the bread, "I don’t know, I think that could be cool."

Her mom looked up from her plate. "Spelman."

"Yeah."

"That's an HBCU," Liz said.

Sophie looked at her. "I know."

"I'm just—" Liz set her fork down briefly. "It's a big transition. Going from here to somewhere like that."

"She's been the only Black girl in half her classes since middle school," Sophie shrugged. "I think I can handle a few years at an HBCU. Also it's basically an Ivy League school so."

"Basically," Liz repeated.

The table went quiet for a moment. Tom had been cutting his chicken and he looked up now, reading the room.

"I’m sure it’s a great school," he said. "Atlanta’s a cool city, too. We could check it out this summer. It’s what, probably a day’s drive from Charlotteville?"

Sophie looked at him. "Really?"

"Sure. Might as well make the most of the trip. Check out as many schools as we can while we’re down there."

"Yeah," Sophie nodded, trying to hide her smile, "We could do that. Thanks."

Liz remained quiet before finally looking up.

"Did you already donate to David Niezgodski's campaign fund? We donated last time, right?" Liz reached for her wine glass as she looked at Tom.

Tom’s fork stopped moving for just a second. Then he set it back down against the plate and reached for his water glass. Liz took a sip of wine and said nothing else.

Sophie looked between them. Her dad was already eating again, head down, shoulders easy in that deliberate way that wasn't actually easy at all. She looked back at her own plate and tore off a piece of bread.

"I'll text Priya," she tried to cut through the awkward silence, "Maybe we can visit it together."

…

The CO's name was Briggs and he didn't talk much, which Nia had come to appreciate. Some of them narrated everything, told you to move faster, keep your hands visible, don't look at that, keep walking. Briggs just walked. His keys jangled against his hip and his boots made the same sound on the concrete every step and that was enough to follow.

The meeting room was on the far end of the building from her cell block, which meant a long walk back through two checkpoints. Nia kept her eyes forward and her hands loose at her sides.She was still thinking about what Dr. Ellison had said.

Being fair to yourself isn't making excuses.

She had been turning that over since she left the room. She didn't know what to do with it. It sat wrong somehow, not because it wasn’t true but because she couldn't figure out how to hold it without it becoming something she used to let herself off the hook, and she didn't want that. But she was also eighteen years old and sitting in county and she had gotten here because for two years she had been running from something that started the day she saw that post on Instagram.

The thought stopped there because the noise started.

It came from around the corner ahead, before the first checkpoint. Not loud at first, just voices climbing over each other, and then something hard hit something else hard and then it was loud and Briggs was already moving, his hand going to his radio.

Nia stopped.

Two women she recognized from C-block had each other in the corridor. One of them had the other by the hair, and the other one was trying to get her arm free and there was blood, a thin line of it, along her face. Two more women were pressed against the wall, one of them shouting, one of them very still. A second CO appeared from the far end, running.

"Back up," Briggs said, not to Nia, to the crowd that was forming.

Nia pressed herself against the wall.

The two of them hit the floor together. Briggs and the other CO were on them in seconds, pulling them apart. The one with the blood kept screaming something that Nia couldn't make out, just the register of it, that particular pitch of a person who has stopped caring what happens next.

It was over in maybe two minutes. Maybe less. The women were separated, cuffed, walked in opposite directions. The corridor went down to a low hum of noise, the women who had been watching drifting back, saying things to each other that Nia couldn't hear.

Briggs came back for her. "Let's go."

She followed him.

Her hands were shaking slightly and she put them in her pockets before remembering and took them back out again. She kept them at her sides and watched the floor pass under her feet.

This was the thing. This was the thing she couldn't figure out how to explain to Dr. Ellison or to her attorney or to anyone who hadn't spent a night here. It wasn't one thing. It was the accumulation of it. The way your body never fully stood down, the way every corridor was a calculation, the way she had gotten good without trying to get good at reading a room the moment she walked into it. Who was agitated. Who was watching who. Where the exits were, not because she was going anywhere but because knowing was the only control she had.

She had been doing this for four months. If the trial went the way her attorney had quietly prepared her to expect it might go, she could be doing it for the rest of her twenties. Her thirties. Longer.

The thought didn't land the way it usually did. Usually it came with a kind of vertigo, that sick drop of the stomach. Right now it just sat there, flat and factual. This was the world. This corridor and the next one and the checkpoint and the smell and Briggs's keys and the math of every room.

And none of it had started with a choice she had actually made.

That was the part she kept coming back to. Not to excuse it. Just because it was true. The last two years of her life had not been her life in any way she recognized. She had been moving through it like someone else was driving and she was in the backseat, watching, too blurred to reach the wheel. Jimmy was gone and she had not known how to live in a world where that was true so she had stopped living in the real world entirely, and the people who had handed her the thing that made that possible had known exactly what they were doing and she had let them.

She hadn't been in control.

She knew that.

She also knew that the two women in that corridor weren't in control of much either. She knew that the woman with the blood on her face had probably gotten here the same way Nia had, through a series of moments that felt like choices from the outside and felt like falling from the inside, and neither of them had anyone coming to explain the difference to a jury.

Briggs stopped at the checkpoint. The door buzzed and opened. Nia walked through.

She thought about Jimmy. TShe thought about the last real conversation they'd had, the one she could still locate clearly because the drugs hadn't touched it yet, the afternoon before everything went sideways and she was still just a person who missed her friend. She had been so angry at him for dying. She had never gotten to be done with that anger. It had just turned into something else and gone underground and eventually she had followed it down.

Her cell was at the end of the block. Briggs stopped at the door and she stepped inside and heard it close behind her. She sat on the edge of the bunk. The thriller was face-down on the pillow where she'd left it. She picked it up and turned it over and looked at the page she'd stopped on without reading any of it.

The corridor outside was quiet.

She set the book back down and lay back and looked at the ceiling and let her hands rest open at her sides, palms up, the shaking almost gone now, almost.

[djp73]

Gotta figure Nia opts out at some point

[redsox907]

And none of it had started with a choice she had actually made.

if this ain't the most 'woe is me' millennial shit I ever heard ffs

bitch, Jimmy's punk ass dying to a lil blood clot ain't make you shoot that shit in yo veins

and to answer soap - with the history he and Mel have we all know that boy ain't trying to reconnect with an old friend

[Caesar]

Brice knew he wasn't going to win that race. He just wanted to trick on his homeboys. Kam, now Brice. Sensing a trend here.

Liz was about to say something WILD to Sophie before Tom stepped in. Had the N loaded on her tongue.

Maybe longer? Nia, you ain't seeing the outside ever again, fam. They giving you the NEEDLE.

[Captain Canada]

Liz really moving diabolically, my Lord.

Brice out here trying to outgas cornerbacks is so funny. You're not that guy.

[Soapy]

Gotta figure Nia opts out at some point

wouldn't blame her

And none of it had started with a choice she had actually made.

if this ain't the most 'woe is me' millennial shit I ever heard ffs

bitch, Jimmy's punk ass dying to a lil blood clot ain't make you shoot that shit in yo veins

and to answer soap - with the history he and Mel have we all know that boy ain't trying to reconnect with an old friend

fair. harsh but fair.

Brice knew he wasn't going to win that race. He just wanted to trick on his homeboys. Kam, now Brice. Sensing a trend here.

Liz was about to say something WILD to Sophie before Tom stepped in. Had the N loaded on her tongue.

Maybe longer? Nia, you ain't seeing the outside ever again, fam. They giving you the NEEDLE.

That's a crazy reach lmao

"Blacks" was definitely coming out

She is 18

maybe the judge will be lenient

Liz really moving diabolically, my Lord.

Brice out here trying to outgas cornerbacks is so funny. You're not that guy.

It was two corners vs. two WRs and then Brice vs. a linebacker that's 240 pounds

should have won the race smh

[Soapy]

Season 8, Episode 6
“Girl, we in the Bahamas with all the liquor we can drink. I know your ass ain’t still mad.”

The lobby buzzed around them with rolling suitcases rattling across the marble floor. Somewhere deeper in the resort, water rushed through one of the indoor fountains while an Afrobeats song floated through the speakers. Tourists in linen sets and oversized sun hats drifted past them toward the elevators, sunburnt and loud and already drunk.

Serena rolled her eyes, crossing one leg over the other as she brought her phone to her face. The bar sat just off the center of the lobby, expansive and glowing blue beneath the bottles lined against the wall. From where she sat, she had a clear view of the check-in desk across the room.

Brice stood there with Abdul and two of his teammates, all of them towering over the counter while one of the women behind the desk typed furiously into a computer. Beside them stood Jo’Ziah.

“None of that cheap shit either,” Sabrina nodded approvingly as she finished her drink.

Within seconds, a waiter in a cream-colored vest appeared beside them to clear the glass. Another drink replaced it almost immediately.

“Gracias,” Sabrina said.

“They speak English,” Serena shook her head. “And how the fuck would you know it ain’t cheap shit? You was drinking Cutwater on the way to the airport.”

“Just because I don’t got money don’t mean I don’t got taste,” Sabrina cackled, already halfway through the new glass.

Outside the massive windows behind the lobby, she could see flashes of turquoise water beyond the resort grounds. Palm trees bent softly in the wind. Somewhere out there was supposed to be peace.

“I just don’t see what this stupid bet got to do with us not being in Bali right now,” Serena sucked her teeth as she placed her phone down and grabbed the glass, taking a small sip.

Sabrina was right.

This wasn’t no cheap shit.

She took a bigger one.

“In his mind, he probably feel like he ain’t really lose if he go on the trip too,” Sabrina tried to explain. “You know how competitive Brice gets.”

“You do?” Serena raised an eyebrow.

“I just know what Abdul tells me,” Sabrina held her hands up. “You know niggas love pillow talking.”

“Yeah, some niggas.”

Serena’s eyes drifted back toward Brice before flickering toward Jo’Ziah again.

“Maybe I need you to be my translator for that nigga because none of that shit you just said make sense.”

“What make sense is drinking this good liquor,” Sabrina finished off her glass and handed Serena hers. “And for you to stop stressing over you know who. Y’all went to the same high school. That’s it."

…

Connie noticed it the way she had learned to notice things in this quiet village where the days tended to blur together. She noticed it when the session started and the back row chair by the wall sat empty. She noticed it again when the food line moved and the spot where Valentina would have stood, patient and unhurried at the back of it, was just a gap between two other kids.

She told herself it was nothing. Kids missed sessions. Families had things come up. She had no reason to assume anything.

She noticed it again the day after that.

And the day after that.

By the fourth session without her, Connie was moving through the serving line on autopilot, spooning rice and smiling and saying buen provecho and watching the door in her peripheral vision in a way she was aware of but couldn’t quite stop doing.

After the courtyard cleared and the other missionaries started breaking down the tables, she found Maya stacking the folding chairs near the wall.

“Hey,” Connie said. “That girl who used to come. The one who always sat by herself in the back. Valentina.”

Maya looked up. “The little one?”

“Yeah. You know where she lives?”

Maya thought about it. “No. I don’t think I ever talked to her, honestly. She kind of kept to herself.”

Connie nodded. She tried one of the junior pastors next that were from the host church, catching him near the door as he was tucking his Bible under his arm. She asked in careful, rehearsed Spanish and watched his face for something useful.

He shook his head slowly, said something she caught pieces of.

No sé. Por aquí, creo.

Somewhere nearby, he thought. He didn’t know more than that.

She tried two of the women from the village who came every week, older women who seemed to know everyone, who greeted people by name and asked after their families. She had her translation app ready, typed the question out carefully and held the screen toward the first one, who read it and shook her head. The second one read it and said something back that Connie asked her to repeat, slower, and then she typed what she heard into a translation field and got something about a neighborhood on the far side of the market but the woman was already moving, her attention pulled somewhere else, and when Connie looked up she was gone.

She stood there in the emptying courtyard with her phone in her hand.

The sun had started its drop, pulling the warmth out of the air. Around her, the last of the folding tables were being stacked, the serving pots drained and covered. The plastic chairs were already in a pile near the wall.

She typed the girl’s name into her notes app. Just the name. Then she stared at it. She didn’t know her last name. She didn’t know which direction she walked when she left. She didn’t know if there was a mother or a father or someone who might know to ask. She had one conversation to go on, broken up by a translation app and a language she still couldn’t move through with any confidence, and a container of rice and beans and a piece of bread.

She closed the app.

Maya was coming back across the courtyard with the last of the chairs. “Any luck?”

“No,” Connie said.

She put her phone in her pocket and picked up the serving spoon from the table beside her and turned toward the wash station, running the water until it came through cold, pressing the sponge along the bottom of the pot in slow, even circles that she didn’t have to think about.

The courtyard was almost empty now.

She kept scrubbing.

…

The restaurant sat on a terrace that overlooked the water, open on three sides so the night air moved through it, warm and salt-thick. Tiki torches lined the perimeter and the ocean beyond the railing was black except for where the resort lights caught the surface and turned it that same glowing turquoise from the lobby.

Brice sat at the far end of the long table between Serena and Abdul, working through a plate of grilled snapper while Leland held court from the middle of the table, recanting tales from his time in Reno.

Brice reached for his glass and caught a fragment of conversation from down the table.

“—nah, nah, that was the Citgo on King Drive,” Jo’Ziah told Hudauri. "I don’t even think it was $100 in that bitch."

Serena’s laugh came out quick and unguarded. "I think it was like $30 or something."

“Thirty months for thirty dollars,” Jo’Ziah repeated, shaking his head, laughing too. “Yeah, I remember we used to clown him for that shit."

“Whatever happened to him?” Serena asked.

“Probably locked up somewhere," Hudauri laughed, "I think I camped with him once. I don’t think he had offers like that. Even before that shit."

"Yeah, he went JUCO for a bit," Jo’Ziah confirmed, "By the time he came back, I was already at Michigan."

Brice set his glass down, suddenly aware that he hadn’t moved his face in a while. He picked his fork back up.

He ate the rest of his snapper and listened to the rest of their stories and watched Sabrina take a photo of her dessert from three different angles. Dinner slowly wined down as the drinks began piling up and the travel slowly caught up to them as everyone tried to stifle their yawns.

They eventually made their way to the railing and stood there for a few minutes looking at the water before Hudauri, Jo’Ziah and Leland eventually peeled off towards the casino, wanting to continue the night. Sabrina and Abdul begin making their way to the beach, wanting to watch the stars which left Brice and Serena walking the path back toward the room.

The path was lit by small ground-level lights that glowed amber in the landscaping.

“You have a good time?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Food was good.”

She made a sound of agreement and reached for his hand. He let her take it.

They walked for a moment.

“I didn’t know you guys used to hang out like that,” he said.

She glanced at him. “Who?"

“Jo’Ziah and them."

"Yeah, we went to high school together," she replied quickly.

"I know," Brice cleared his throat, "I just didn’t know you guys were cool like that."

"I don’t know about that," Serena scoffed, "I told you, he was cool with some of the girls I hung out with in high school. I think he like dated one of them or something."

He didn’t remember her saying that.

“Oh, okay,” he said, "You were lame as fuck in high school, weren’t you? The third wheel."

"Boy, bye," she smiled as she rolled her eyes.

The room card worked on the first try as he held the door for her and she walked past him and immediately dropped onto the edge of the bed, pulling off one sandal and then the other.

Through the sliding glass door at the far end of the room, their private pool caught the light from the room and threw it back in wobbling shapes across the ceiling.

“Want to break it in?” Brice said, nodding toward it.

Serena looked up at him. Then at the pool. Then back at him.

“I don’t feel like wasting a bathing suit on that."

“Who said anything about a bathing suit?"

The corner of her mouth moved.

…

The alarm didn’t go off because he hadn’t set one.

Brice was already awake at five forty-three, lying on his back in the dark with the kind of stillness that wasn’t rest. Serena was turned away from him, her breathing slow and even. He laid there another minute, listening to the AC hum and the faint sound of the ocean beyond the glass, and then he swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

His phone was on the nightstand. He picked it up and the screen lit up in the dark.

One notification from last night. Ilyssa.

Have fun but be smart. Remember what you have a stake. Enjoy the time off. You’ve earned it.

He read it twice. Then he turned the phone over in his hand for a second and put it on Do Not Disturb and set it face-down on the nightstand.

The hallway was empty and the elevator was empty and the whole building had that particular pre-dawn quiet that felt borrowed, like the day hadn’t fully committed to starting yet. He pushed through the gym door and felt the cool air hit him and heard the familiar sound of weight plates and then he saw Jo’Ziah.

He had his shirt off and there was a stripe of sweat down the center of his back and he was moving through a set of dumbbell rows with rhythm of someone who had been at this for a while.

Jo’Ziah glanced over.

Brice gave him a nod.

Jo’Ziah gave him one back.

Brice found the rack he wanted and started pulling his weight. He didn’t put his headphones in, which he noticed after a few minutes, and then he didn’t put them in on purpose. He moved through his warm-up sets and let the room be what it was, the two of them breathing and the iron moving and the speakers in the ceiling playing something pop that neither of them would have put on.

He pressed. Jo’Ziah pulled. Brice moved to the cable machine and Jo’Ziah moved to the bench and at no point did either of them acknowledge the other but Brice was aware of every set Jo’Ziah finished and every plate he added and he was certain, without looking directly, that the same awareness was running the other direction.

He went heavier than he’d planned on the incline. His shoulders were going to feel that tomorrow. He didn’t stop.

Jo’Ziah finished a set and stood up and rolled his neck and looked at his phone. Brice was between reps and he kept his face neutral and watched Jo’Ziah set the phone back down and load more weight onto the bar.

Brice worked through his full routine and then started on the things that weren’t in his full routine, the accessory work he usually skipped when he was pressed for time, the face pulls, the rotator cuff stuff that his trainer had been on him about for two years. He did all of it. He did it slowly and correctly.

Jo’Ziah did not leave.

He was on the treadmill now, not jogging, incline walking at a pace that looked casual and wasn’t. Brice could see the grade on the display from where he stood and he knew what that grade felt like after an hour of lifting.

He moved to the pull-up bar.

He was on his fourth set when the door opened and he heard his voice before seeing him.

"Y’all niggas doing too much."

He dropped from the bar and turned around. Abdul was there along with Serena who was standing in the doorway in a white sundress and sandals. Sabrina had sunglasses pushed up on her head and was already scanning the room.

"Y’all niggas thinking y’all better than me because of this shit?" Abdul shook his head, "Could have at least told a nigga."

"Your ass would have went right back to sleep," Jo’Ziah laughed.

“We’re going to breakfast,” Serena said, looking at Brice. She glanced toward Jo’Ziah on the treadmill for exactly a half second and then looked back. “You coming?”

“Yeah,” Brice nodded.

Serena held Brice’s eyes for a moment. Then she turned and followed Sabrina back out through the door, Abdul behind them, and the gym went quiet again.

Brice looked at Jo’Ziah.

Jo’Ziah had slowed the treadmill down and was stepping off, reaching for his towel. He draped it over his shoulder and picked up his phone and his water bottle and didn’t say anything, just moved toward the door.

Brice grabbed his own stuff.

They rode the elevator up in silence. It was a long enough ride that the silence had shape to it. Brice watched the floor numbers climb and turned his water bottle in his hand.

The elevator stopped on seven.

“Small fucking world, huh,” Brice let out a wry chuckle.

Jo’Ziah looked over at him.

“You and Serena,” Brice kept his eyes on the doors. “I didn’t know y’all were cool like that. What are the odds of that?”

Jo’Ziah was quiet for a beat. Then he let out a short breath that was almost a laugh.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Rena is the homie.”

The doors opened.

Jo’Ziah stepped off first, turning left down the hallway toward his room. Brice stood in the elevator a half second longer than he needed to, his hand not quite reaching for the door-hold button, and then he stepped off too and turned right.

Rena.

…

The room she found was at the end of the mission house hallway, a small storage space that someone had cleared out enough to fit a plastic chair and a side table. The wifi was weak but it held, which was all she needed.

Connie opened her laptop and waited for the call to connect.

Dr. Mendel appeared on the screen. "How are you doing, Connie?"

“I’m okay,” Connie said. Then, because Dr. Mendel had a way of just waiting, she added, “I’ve been better, honestly.”

“Tell me about it.”

She had been rehearsing this in her head since she sat down. The words came out anyway in the wrong order. She talked about Valentina, about the back row chair and the food line and the four sessions in a row where she had watched the door and the door had given her nothing. She talked about going around the courtyard afterward, the junior pastor who didn’t know, the two women from the village who couldn’t quite help her, the neighborhood near the market that had dissolved into the evening before she could follow it anywhere.

“I spent basically the whole afternoon trying to track down this girl,” she said. “My Spanish isn’t good enough and nobody really knew where she lived so just a waste pretty much."

Dr. Mendel was quiet for a moment.

“What did it feel like?” she asked.

“Disappointing,” Connie said. “Like I’d failed at something. Which is dumb because it’s not…she’s not my responsibility. She’s just a kid who came to a few Bible sessions and then stopped coming. I’m sure she’s not the only.”

“But she matters to you.”

“She does,” Connie nodded. “She just…there was something about her. The way she sat alone. The way she didn’t ask for anything.”

Dr. Mendel nodded slowly. She let the silence do its usual work.

“Connie,” she said. “I want to ask you something and I’d like you to sit with it before you answer.”

Connie shifted in the plastic chair. “Okay.”

“What is it about Valentina specifically that drew you to her? Not the general compassion you feel for the community. Not the work of the mission. Her, specifically.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it.

She thought about the back row chair. The way Valentina had come in alone and sat alone and waited for the crowd to thin before she got in line. The serious eyes. The way she took the to-go container with both hands.

“She reminded me of…“ Connie stopped.

Dr. Mendel waited.

“She reminded me of myself when I was younger,” Connie said. Her voice came out flatter than she intended. “Of my daughter. I know that. I’m not…I’m aware of that.”

“How long have you been aware of it?”

She looked at the bare bulb above her for a second. “Probably since the first time I saw her.”

“And yet you spent today trying to find her.”

It wasn’t an accusation. Dr. Mendel never made it feel like an accusation. That was almost worse somehow, because it meant Connie had to do the work herself of understanding what was being said.

“I know what you’re getting at,” Connie said.

“What am I getting at?”

“That I’m projecting,” she said. “That I’m not actually worried about Valentina. That I’m…that this is about my daughter and Valentina is just…That I’m not as far along as I thought I was.”

She hadn’t meant for that last part to come out. It came out anyway.

Dr. Mendel tilted her head slightly. “Is that what I’m saying?”

Connie looked at the screen.

“I thought I was doing better,” she said quietly. “I genuinely thought I was making progress. I’ve been present here. I’ve been doing the work. I’ve been showing up and not just going through the motions and then this happens and it feels like I’m back at square one.”

“You’re not back at square one,” Dr. Mendel said.

“Then why does it feel like that?”

“Because you noticed it,” Dr. Mendel said. “That’s not square one, Connie. That’s the work. Square one is not knowing why you’re sitting in an empty courtyard at dusk asking strangers where a little girl lives. You know why. You can name it. That is progress.”

Connie looked at the side table beside her.

“I still went looking for her,” she said.

“Yes,” Dr. Mendel agreed. “And that’s what I want you to pay attention to. Not as a failure. As information. You are in an environment that is rich with potential triggers. Children in need. A service context where your role is to show up and care for people. A language barrier that limits your control. And somewhere in this village is a child who is alone, who accepts what you offer quietly and without asking for more. That is a very specific constellation of things.”

Connie was quiet.

“I’m not saying your care for Valentina isn’t real,” Dr. Mendel continued. “I’m sure it is. I’m saying that you need to be able to hold both of those things at the same time. Real care and a real trigger. They’re not mutually exclusive. But if you can’t see the trigger for what it is, it will drive the car without you knowing it’s behind the wheel.”

“And if she’s actually in trouble?” Connie asked. “If something is actually wrong and I just…what, I sit with my feelings about it and do nothing?”

“I didn’t say do nothing,” Dr. Mendel said. “I said be cognizant. There’s a difference between following up through the mission, through the appropriate channels, and spending an afternoon alone trying to locate a child in a neighborhood you don’t know in a country where you don’t speak the language.”

Connie looked away from the laptop.

“That distinction matters,” Dr. Mendel said. “Not because your instincts are wrong. But because when we’re not aware of what’s driving us, we can do things that look like helping and aren’t. We can also do things that hurt us.”

Through the thin wall, she could hear the sounds of the mission house settling into the evening, the clatter of someone in the kitchen, distant voices, the particular low frequency of a building full of people winding down.

“So what do I do?” Connie asked. “About Valentina.”

“Talk to the people at the mission,” Dr. Mendel said. “Tell them a young girl has been absent and you’re concerned. Allow them to assist. You’ve done your part by noticing.”

Connie nodded slowly.

“And the next time you feel that pull,” Dr. Mendel continued, “I want you to pause long enough to ask yourself one question. Am I responding to this child, or am I responding to mine?”

…

The show Sabrina had picked ran two hours and change, which Serena had announced with the tone someone who had already decided they were going whether anyone else was or not. She kissed Brice on the cheek in the lobby outside the restaurant and told him not to do anything stupid, and he had laughed it off and watched her and Sabrina disappear around the corner toward the theater wing.

The bar they ended up at was on the lower level, open-air on two sides, the ocean doing its thing in the dark beyond the railing. Leland was already into a story about a girl he’d met at a at the pool that morning when Hudauri lined up the first round of shots.

“What is that?” Abdul picked up the glass and looked at it.

“Rum,” Hudauri said. “Local shit.”

“What are we? Fucking pirates?" Brice scoffed.

“We are tonight,” Hudauri raised his glass.

They drank. Leland finished his story and started another one. The bartender appeared, and then there were more glasses. It was somewhere around the fourth round that it became a thing.

Brice didn’t start it, exactly. He just didn’t back down from it when it started. Jo’Ziah had made some comment about pacing, something half-joking about being smart with it, and Brice had looked at him over the rim of his glass and said something back about not needing to be told how to drink, and something in the air shifted slightly and both of them felt it, and the bartender felt it too because he set the next round down and stepped back without being asked.

Leland and Hudauri exchanged a look.

Abdul poured himself some water.

The shots kept coming. Brice matched every one and kept his face even and his posture loose even when his chest was warming from the inside out in a way that had less to do with rum and more to do with the word that had been sitting in the back of his head since the elevator that morning.

Rena.

The bartender set down round six.

Jo’Ziah looked at the glass. He picked it up and turned it in his hand and then set it back down on the bar with a small, deliberate sound and pushed it an inch forward.

“I’m good,” he said.

Brice looked at the glass. Then at Jo’Ziah.

“Stop being a bitch," Brice sucked his teeth.

“I’ll be that," Jo’Ziah laughed.

Brice picked up his own glass and drank it.

The rum hit the back of his throat and he set the glass down without blinking and looked at the bar top and felt something moving through him that he didn’t have a clean name for. It wasn’t satisfaction. Because tapping out like that, calmly, without any theater, without making it a thing, that wasn’t losing. That was something else. That was a man deciding the competition wasn’t worth his time and stepping out of it with his dignity fully intact, which meant Brice hadn’t beaten anything. He’d just been left standing in a ring by himself.

He turned the empty glass on the bar.

“You let me win,” Brice shook his head.

Jo’Ziah looked at him. “What?”

“You let me win,” Brice said again, a small smile on his face that didn’t reach anywhere else. “That’s a bitch move, by the way. I guess that’s some G6 shit.”

“Nigga, I just didn’t want any more rum,” Jo’Ziah said.

“Right,” Brice nodded slowly.

“Right,” Jo’Ziah said back, and there was an edge in it now.

Leland had stopped talking. Hudauri was looking at the ocean.

Abdul set his water glass down.

“Alright, alright,” Abdul said, stepping slightly between them, not blocking anything, just occupying the space. “Y’all need to relax before somebody pulls out a phone and I’m running suicides because of y’all fuck niggas."

Hudauri made a sound that was either agreement or discomfort and picked up his drink. Leland looked at the ceiling.

"We’re just fucking around," Jo’Ziah sucked his teeth, "Ain’t we, QB1?"

Brice ignored him. The rum was beginning to settle in his stomach.

Jo’Ziah reached for his phone off the bar and pocketed it and rolled his neck.

“I’m gonna go find something to get into,” he said, mostly to Hudauri and Leland. “Y’all trying to move?”

“Where you going?” Leland asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Jo’Ziah shrugged. “Somewhere with bitches."

Both Leland and Hudauri nodded before standing up.

He dapped up Abdul and looked at Brice one more time. Then he was gone, moving through the bar before disappearing into the dark pathway. Brice watched him go.

Going to find something to get into.

Something.

The word turned over in his head and came out looking different every time. He picked up his glass and found it empty and set it back down.

“You good?” Abdul asked.

“Yeah,” Brice said.

Be smart. Remember what’s at stake.

He put his hand flat on the bar and pushed back from it.

“I’m gonna call it,” he said as he pulled out some cash from his pocket and slid it to the bartender.

Abdul nodded.

The path back to the room was the same one from the night before, the amber ground lights in the landscaping, the sound of the water somewhere close, the warm salt air sitting on everything. He walked it with his hands in his pockets and his jaw loose and his eyes on the path ahead of him.

The room was dark when he got there. He stood inside the door for a moment and let his eyes adjust and listened to the AC and the ocean and the quiet.

He sat on the edge of the bed and took off his sneakers and set them side by side on the floor. He put his phone on the nightstand without looking at it. He laid back on top of the covers and put one arm behind his head and looked at the shapes the pool light was still throwing across the ceiling, slow and wobbling.

He stared at them for a while.

Rena.

He closed his eyes.

[djp73]

[Captain Canada]

Sarky Brice a meathead fr

[Caesar]

Jo’Ziah about to go get reacquainted with Rena. And Brice just gonna lay in bed alone while it happens. What we supposed to call that?

Connie just needs to go get knocked up again at this point. Talking about “my daughter.” Bih you ain’t got no daughter.