Free X by Ilyasah Shabazz

know who you are,” Mom snapped. She waved her fingers in the air, dismissing Ella. “You’re one of
them
.”
    Mom clamped her fingers on my shoulders. I closed my eyes. Would have turned away, but there was nothing to turn to. She had a grip on me, so strong that it hurt. I could feel her pulse through the tips of her fingers — or maybe it was just my own heart pounding, fast and fierce, as though it wanted to bust out of my chest. I opened my eyes, and the pounding ache drummed deeper. Mom’s fierce grip on me felt strong enough to last forever, but I knew the system hated us and would keep on tearing us apart. Behind these walls, she seemed caught, and helpless in a way I’d never imagined she could be.
    Still gazing at Ella, Mom whispered something, so softly I barely heard.
    “What did you say?” I asked.
    Mom’s attention flicked back to me, her eyes thickened by the clouds of pain and grief she usually kept above us, out of sight. I would have closed my eyes against it if I could have, but there was no escaping it. The air grew thick with sorrow.
    “He left them,” Mom said. “I should have known he’d leave us, too.”
    “She didn’t mean it,” Ella said as we walked away. “You know she didn’t mean to say that.”
    But he did leave
, I thought.
    “I don’t think badly of him,” she told me in a distant, floating voice. “He was always a father to me.” I watched her wipe a tear from her cheek. “Even when he wasn’t near. Can you understand that?”
    I couldn’t. I couldn’t, because what I remembered of him was small, dark flashes. His smile. The proud look in his eye. A few of his words and the rumble of his car beneath me, the way he made me feel safe, but not much more than that. In all this long time that had passed, what I knew of him had only gotten smaller.
    “Can you understand that?” she whispered.
    There was so little that I understood. Least of all this.
    Why I was here. Why Papa was not. Why I felt like I was leaving Mom, too. Why when Ella put her arm around me for a second time, I let her.
    “We’re family. And we have to stick together,” she said. “That’s how we get through it.”
    “Through what?” I asked her, but not because I wasn’t in it. Only because I didn’t know what was on the other side.
    “Oh, Malcolm.” Ella hugged me, with both arms this time. “You miss him, like I do. Don’t you?”
    I let her hold on to me, but I didn’t say anything. We didn’t talk about this. About the hole in us, or how it got there.
    “It helps me to remember Papa’s work.” Ella talked on, maybe because I wouldn’t. “He believed in something. It’s never wrong to fight for what you believe in. What you want.”
    All we have is want
, I thought.
All we do is fight. And he did leave.
    It was dark already, in the car on the way back to the Swerlins’. It had been a long day, and my eyes were drooping. I caught my neck jerking forward a couple of times.
    Ella patted her shoulder. “You can rest your head, if you like,” she said.
    I could lean on Ella, it seemed. Everything around me had holes in it, and she was something solid. It wouldn’t hurt me to rest awhile. I moved closer to her. She wrapped a thick arm around me, and next thing I knew she was tapping me awake.
    Out the window, the Swerlins’ place. Time to step out in the cold and back to my room.
    “You stay out of trouble,” Ella insisted. “You hear?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    She hugged me — so like Mom’s hugs used to be: safe, firm, and loving.
    “You come visit me,” she told me. “You’ll like Boston. There’ll be a place for you there. I can promise you that.”
    But Boston seemed big and far. Like a dream. A place to visit in my sleep, like the memory of Mom’s arms.
    “I don’t know,” I said, edging away. “I don’t know.”
    “Well, think about it,” she said, pushing open my door. The chill of the night caught me. I hurried the few paces to the Swerlins’ front