The Package

The package arrives by U.S. mail. Slipped in between a stack of those old paper grocery ads, it slithers out when I slap the pile onto the kitchen table.

         The first thing that seems weird: no return address.

         Second thing: it is addressed to Marie Bacher. Marie was my grandma, who had been dead for four years.

         “Ma!”

         She comes shuffling in a moment later, coffee mug steaming in her frail hands. She is perpetually cold, always seeking heat from one drink or another.

         “This package is addressed to Grandma.”

         “Who’s it from?” she asks, eyes darting to the windows as if the sender is lurking to watch us open it.

         “No one.” I lift the package, slender as a phone, to show her. “See?”

         Her eyes settle in the distance somewhere between the package and the tabletop.

         “Leave it, I’ll open it later,” she says. “How was school today?”

         I roll my eyes. “Angela still isn’t talking to me.”

         “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. You were bound to outgrow your little friendship at some point.”

“What do you mean?”

Her voice is a pained echo. “Well, you two don’t have a lot in common.”

I hear the truth tucked between her placating words. That she’s Black, and I’m white. That Angela is from that neighborhood and I’m from the suburbs.

Mom turns and shuffles back into the living room, and slips under a blanket and into a daze, staring blankly at the TV.

         Setting the package back on the table, I pull out my phone to snap a photo to Angela. But the last five snaps sit unopened in our chatroom. I then consider opening the package. But something about the way the brown wrapping is crinkled at the edges, dented at the corners as if it had rumbled around in someone’s closet for years, makes me hesitate.

If Angela were here with me, I might have the guts to open it.

It wasn’t even that big of a deal.

We were literal besties on Sunday. After the shooting, Angela started going to protests. She invited me to one, so Monday afternoon she came over after school to get ready. It was her first time meeting my mom. Linda smiled and served snacks. But in the privacy of my room, Angela confided that she felt my mom didn’t like her. I shrugged it off. My mom likes everyone. Except people who come from that neighborhood…

But at dinner, mom asked where we were going that night.

“To protest violence against Black lives,” Angela said.

“As long as you protest peacefully,” mom said, shrugging like it couldn’t be helped.

“We protest loudly so we can be heard,” Angela said, red rising in her high cheeks.

“I just don’t understand why they always have to start looting and taunting the cops.”

That was a hella awkward dinner. Angela left after and said she wanted to go to the protest alone. I apologized on behalf of my mom the next morning in homeroom. But Angela didn’t talk to me since.

         I get why.

Two weeks ago, WPD killed Briony Rickard, a sixteen-year-old Black girl from Bunker Hill. News said she was selling drugs on the corner of Congress Ave and resisted arrest. But plideo released a week later showed the truth. Old white woman was driving through a part of town she usually avoids. Narrow roads, steep hills, cars parked all along the sidewalks on both sides. She did a rolling stop through a blind corner with a rose bush that she couldn’t see past and a car parked right up on the curb. Briony, who knows the streets and was at a full stop, pulls through the intersection and they hit. Briony’s car had been at the stop sign first. But the white woman called the cops, rambling the whole time about how teenagers “like you” shouldn’t be driving alone at night.

 By the time the cops arrived, the woman had worked herself into such a frenzy making Briony out to be some drug-dealing car thief. Then they tried to cuff Briony, and she got scared. She struggled a bit before giving in and crying that she was complying. But the officer slammed her against the ground and she stopped moving after that.

Five neighbors saw that happen. Each gave a news interview and testimony at the station. No one believed them. All the news talked about was that the cops were investigating Briony as a drug dealer.

But the rose bush on the corner saw everything. No one doubted plideo. And when they released the plideo last week, the images and audio extracted from the plant’s photoreceptors revealed what they tried to hide. It caused protests across America. Another innocent child murdered.

When scientists discovered plants have eyes, politicians were the first to fall. Scandals always dominated gossip columns and the seven-p.m. news but this was different. There was no talking around it, no lies. The plants had eyes. They saw everything. Just like that, everyone’s best-kept secrets were outed.

I was reading an article last week that said scientists now found a way to go back and extract plideo dating back decades. Photoreceptors don’t just see us. They remember us. They were the secret spy in every room. Leaves-dropping, Angela calls it. All they were waiting for was for us to develop the technology to extract their memories.

Mom had been in one of her moods ever since Briony. We didn’t know her. I’m not allowed to hang out in that neighborhood. But Angela knew her from elementary school.

         Back in my bedroom, I try to put the strange package out of my mind. I have megabytes of homework waiting to be done but it suddenly feels naïve to be doing homework when kids are being hunted and murdered. Angela invited me to a BLM protest. I agreed to go. I should go tonight. It’s the least I can do as a descendant of people who supported segregation and maybe even slavery. SMH.

         I have my hoodie on and goggles hanging around my neck when Mom pushes through the door.

         “Hey,” she says, her voice still airy but with more concern. “Why don’t you take tonight off? I heard they’re planning a sit-in at the police station. It sounds dangerous.”

         I nod, waiting for her to get to the point. Then I realize that is the point.

“And?”

         She brushes her knuckles over my cheek, hesitates. “I don’t want you to get arrested. You just got into your dream school. Don’t blow your future on something like this.”

         “’Something like this?’” I repeat dumbly. “So what if I get arrested? They’re not gonna hurt me. I’m white. And people’s lives are more important than any dream school.”

         Mom raises her hands defensively and backs into the doorway. “Hey, I’m your mother. I worry about you. Listen, Abby…”

         I wait for her to say something profound and motherly that will change my mind. Her eyes, blue pools of despair, search me. “There are things you don’t know,” she whispers.

“Here we go again. Mom. You’re acting like a racist. Instead of being part of the problem, we have a chance to be part of the solution. Maybe if you join me tonight you’ll see.”

Her lip quivers and she’s gone.

         That’s when I remember the package.

         Slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I dash down two steps at a time and swing into the kitchen.

         In the dark, the table looks empty. Doubt scuttles up my arms and neck. Did Mom open it in secret? Or did she throw it out? Or toss it in the pile of accidental mail addressed to past residents and neighbors we get weekly? Not likely. She’s sentimental about things involving Grandma.

         Trying not to rouse her suspicion, I feel around in the dark. My fingers fumble for the counter, feeling behind the glass bowl of fruit and underneath the microwave. They stumble over a rogue chocolate chip. An idea lights up. I tiptoe over the creaky floorboards to the opposite side of the room. Lifting a knee, I hitch myself onto the stove and reach for the short cabinet above it. Mom used to hide candy in here when I was a kid. Just as my fingers wrap around the leaf-shaped handle, the ceiling above groans and I freeze. Mom’s feet sound overhead. My lungs forget to expand as I hear her at the top of the staircase. But then she turns into the bathroom. I wait for the lock to click before opening the door.

And there it is, wedged behind some glass candle holders.

         I shove it into my backpack to open when I’m safely away from the house. Outside, night shrouds the city. A hedge of forsythia watch me turn up the sidewalk and onto the main road. I take the bus because there’s too much risk of cars getting damaged in the protests. Some anti-protesters have been showing up, dressed in black and BLM t-shirts, causing trouble and making them all look bad. They burn buildings, key cars, fight the police, stuff like that. News eats it up.

         We live in the suburbs, but on the outskirts. My neighborhood is full of run-down, Victorian-era clapboard houses with sunken roofs. It’s the last street at the end of the bus line. We’re wedged in between Bunker Hill and The Mansions. Bus lines don’t go near The Mansions.

         As the bus sits in downtown traffic, I open Angela’s stories because I miss her. She’s already at the protest, livestreaming. “Bring water and goggles!” she shouts to the camera. “It’s a warzone. Opposition forces are here already!” Her voice is full of fear but the look in her eyes is all energy and excitement. She wants this. Sometimes I think she would martyr herself if it meant police would think twice before ending another Black life.

I begin to have second thoughts.

Is it necessary to go this far to prove I’m not one of them?

I’m joining a protest. I’m not a racist.

But I’m scared.

         To distract myself, I pull out the package and examine it. The handwriting looks familiar. It could be a relative who just forgot to put their name and address at the top. I picture Grandma’s round jowly face and deep voice. Feel the butterfly kisses she used to tickle me with. What if she sent this to us from the past?

Tearing off the wrapping, I find a slim box with a phone inside. It’s unlocked, no passcode. I swipe it open.       

         The screen is blank, a black mirror staring back at me. My reflection blinks. There’s just one app, in the center of the screen. A video player.

         I tap it. A single video is saved in the camera roll.

         I tap it.

         It plays.

         The video is a collection of silhouettes and echoes. It’s shades of grey shadows moving against a murky background. It takes me a minute to realize I’m watching plideo.

         The voices are garbled sounds, like listening to someone talk when your head is underwater. Then the shadows shift into over-saturated human forms, filling up the frame, and the words become clearer. I see four people. Two adults and two children.

         “Your daughter needs to apologize to Linda now.” The white woman’s voice sounds familiar. She’s too pixelated to see clearly.

         “It was just an accident,” the second woman, a Black woman, says. “Please, Marie. Let it go.” My skin freezes over. I know why the voice is familiar. It’s my grandma, Marie, talking to someone I never met. Linda is my mom, but she’s just a child.

         “Our girls go to school together. They were walkin’ home when they got lost. They’re just kids.”

         Grandma pauses. I catch my lips moving, whispering for Grandma to let it go and forgive this woman.

         “Is that why you were in Bunker Hill?” she asks the child version of my mom.

         “She said we could hang out there,” my mom squeaks, pointing at the Black girl. My heart sinks.

         “Linda knows she’s not allowed to play at Bunker Hill. But ever since she started hanging around your daughter she’s home late everyday. I don’t care if they go to school together. I do not want my child hanging around your kind.” It sounded like Grandma Marie, except I’d never heard her this angry. Her voice was shaking, and full of hatred. The plideo was at least thirty years old if mom was a child.

         “What do you mean, ‘your kind?’”

         “Black people,” she spat. “Now apologize and get out of our neighborhood.”

         There was a tense silence. Then, “This is our neighborhood too. We live two streets down. Our girls take the bus together. But you wouldn’t know that. You just assume we come from the ghetto.”

         “That’s it. I’m calling the cops. I’m going to tell them that a black woman is trying to kidnap my daughter.” 

         “You know me, Marie. Don’t do this. My baby did nothing wrong.”

         A door slams and Grandma’s voice fades away. For a while, all I hear is the rush of my own pulse in my ears. After some time, sirens signal Grandma did call the police.

         What follows is a scene I know from the news. Not exactly the same. Unlike Briony, this Black woman is shot right in front of her daughter, without even a chance to comply. Mistaken for a criminal. All she did was defend her daughter against a racist. And then the truth bores a hole through my heart.

         I am the granddaughter of that racist. My mother was the reason a woman was killed.

         The bus jolts to a halt at the Green. I hear the chants and rallying cries of protestors, see smoke rising out of the adjacent street. I move in a daze, feet tumbling down the stairs and around the corner. Hundreds of people crowd the main street chanting, holding signs that read “DEFUND THE POLICE” and "BLACK LIVES MATTER."

         Angela is near the front, leading a group in chanting “I can’t breathe.” Energy radiates off her in warm waves. But I can’t meet her eyes. Shame and guilt chain me.

         I hover near the back of her group. There are two guards out front but the rest of the police are hiding inside. The anti-protesters moved their looting onto the next street. During a lull in the action, she sees me and comes over.

         “You came.” She wants to be mad at me, but the excitement of the protest warms her features.

         I look at my feet. “Angela… I’m so sorry.”

         “About what?” She folds her arms. Another organizer calls her name, and she stares at me expectantly.

         I look at her then, because I have to eventually. My heart halts its pounding and tears lace my vision. I see her, not as the energetic, warm friend that I love. I see her handcuffed, bleeding from a wound to her head, dragged off to her death. I see her feet shackled to the system, chained to the same fate as the woman in the video. The woman my ancestors killed.

         Her face shifts. Like a rock slide, the enthusiasm crumbles, revealing a hard inner surface carved out of disapproval.        

         “I guess you saw it.” Her voice is unrecognizable. A cold shell. “My grandma died for your white ass."

"Your grandma...?" Then it hits me. The package. Angela sent it to show me the truth.

"What are you gonna do about it?” Her words are a challenge, not a threat. I know that. But I’m suffocating. My cheeks burn with shame and anger. I see no future for our friendship. The easiest answer seems to be: run away.

         Then I see something else. A dark rock zooming through the air behind her. She doesn’t see it.

         It’s not a rock.

         It’s a can of tear gas. Its trajectory is perfectly calculated. It will hit her in the head. She might lose consciousness, or an eye, or her life.

         No. I still have a choice.

I push her aside, and the movement carries me forward. The canister crashes against my skull. 

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