Policed

CHAPTER 1-1

CHAPTER 1

KENNEDY ROLLED DOWN the car window. “How about next time we don’t wait until halfway into the semester to go out. Deal?” When Reuben didn’t respond, she glanced over at him in the passenger seat. “What are you thinking about?”

His face lit up with his usual bright smile. “Nothing. Just next year.”

“Almost sophomores. Can you believe it? And we haven’t gone insane yet. Well, at least you haven’t.” She had to laugh. It was embarrassing enough that she went to meet with a campus psychologist once a week. If she couldn’t find at least some humor in her situation, she was in big trouble. In fact, it was Reuben who had encouraged her to take her mental health more seriously, and she was forced to begrudgingly admit something she was doing must be helping. She’d only had two panic attacks all semester. Not too bad considering everything she’d gone through this school year.

But she didn’t want to think about any of that. Not tonight. It was only Thursday, not even the weekend yet, but she and Reuben had just finished their chemistry midterm and were on their way to the Opera House to see the Elton John musical Aida. They’d been planning for weeks on this date.

Ok, so maybe not a date. Not a real one. Then again, Reuben had texted her yesterday, said he had something important he wanted to tell her tonight. Said she couldn’t let him back out. Couldn’t let him change his mind and stay silent. She’d lost several hours of sleep trying to figure out what he was about to divulge.

Maybe that’s why he was quiet this evening. Beneath his cheerful personality, Reuben could be almost as serious as Kennedy. Her roommate Willow was always teasing both of them for being so studious. Always asking when Kennedy would start dating Reuben for real, but of course, Kennedy never had a good enough answer.

“He’s either stuck in the Victorian era, or he’s gay,” Willow would quip. Kennedy had gotten used to her roommate’s teasing, though. And tonight she wasn’t going to spoil the atmosphere with negativity from anyone or anything. Wasn’t that what her counselor always said? Only let positive energy in, or some psychobabble like that. She figured if seeing the campus quack helped her sit through a calculus lecture without turning into a wheezing, sobbing mess, it was worth the hassle and the time. Besides, as soon as Kennedy mentioned the words post-traumatic stress disorder to her missionary parents, they threatened to fly all the way to Massachusetts from China to help her get connected with the services she needed.

Or the services everyone else thought she needed.

It was funny how she was the one who survived a kidnapping and two separate attempts on her life, and everyone assumed she was a big, blaring psychological mess. What about her roommate? What about Willow, who had slept with every single boy in the theater department by now? Who was going to shrink-analyze this karma-fearing, yoga-practicing, granola-crunching pothead roommate from Alaska and tell her all her deviant behavior was the result of early childhood trauma or rubbish like that?

And what about Reuben? There wasn’t much Kennedy wouldn’t give to gain unbridled access to his psyche, to figure out what caused those quiet, moody spells that sometimes came over him. He hardly talked about his family or upbringing in Kenya unless it was to boast about the birth of his most recent niece or nephew back home. Of course, there were other things she’d want to know too, but they would have to wait until he was ready to tell her.

Like tonight?

The two of them had been through so much together since they met at their freshman orientation last fall. Two kids who grew up on different continents, both living oceans away from their families, doing their best to stay afloat in Harvard’s rigorous pre-med program.

She didn’t know when it happened. Maybe one night when they stayed up late working on calculus at the library. Maybe one day in the student union as they scurried to finish a write-up for chem lab. Maybe during one of Kennedy’s panic attacks, when Reuben’s calm assurance brought her back to reality, helped her recover from the scars and wounds of last semester.

She didn’t know when it happened, but Kennedy knew she’d found true friendship. Closer than she’d ever experienced before. Nobody could make her laugh like Reuben. Nobody else would argue literature with her like he did. After spending their first semester at Harvard studying calculus and chemistry side by side, they decided to both enroll in a children’s literature course during their spring semester. Together, they had discussed the stereotypic gender roles of the Alden children as they raised themselves in an abandoned boxcar and analyzed The Giver until there wasn’t a single phrase in Lois Lowry’s weirdly dystopian novel that they hadn’t dissected. One day Kennedy realized she’d found more than a best friend.

She’d found a soul mate.

She only hoped that whatever secret he was planning to tell her tonight was the same secret she’d kept hidden, even from herself, until recently. A giddy, nervous energy zinged up her leg. She really should pay more attention to the road. After growing up on the mission field in Yanji, China, Kennedy hadn’t learned to drive until her pastor taught her over Christmas break. She had just gotten her license and still wasn’t used to Cambridge driving, with all its funny rotaries and ridiculously congested streets. That was another reason she and Reuben had chosen to go out on a weeknight. Traffic wouldn’t be so bad. Besides, they were borrowing Willow’s car, and the chances of Kennedy’s roommate staying in on a weekend were about as high as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book getting detention for failing a math test.

“So, did you finish reading My Side of the Mountain yet?” Reuben asked.

Kennedy was grateful to hear the usual conversational tone in his voice. “We weren’t going to talk about school, remember.”

“I thought that only applied to math and science,” he replied. “By the way, how’s your sociology class going?”

Kennedy didn’t know why she’d done it, but she let her roommate talk her into taking one of Professor Hill’s courses on the American racial divide to fulfill a humanities requirement. On the one hand, it was nice getting to know Willow and a few of her friends better, but the course itself wasn’t at all what she’d been hoping for. After reading the catalog description, she assumed the class would be about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Million Man March. She quickly found out Professor Hill was far more interested in citing every single instance of perceived discrimination that had occurred across the nation in the past three months than delving into America’s segregated history.

Kennedy shrugged. “It’s all right. I’ve gotten A’s on most of my papers, but I think that’s just because I’ve learned how to write the way she wants and skew everything from the right angle. Actually, the left angle.”

The pun was lost on Reuben, who spoke English as his second language, but Kennedy didn’t mind. She’d spent the past ten years in southeast China and didn’t understand a decent amount of slang or the majority of pop culture references either, so she could empathize with him. She often felt that she had more in common with Reuben, an exchange student from Kenya, than she did with her American peers. On more than one occasion, she wondered if she would have ever made it through her first year at Harvard if it weren’t for his friendship.

“What kind of papers do you write for that class?” he asked as Kennedy merged onto Soldier’s Field Road.

“A lot of fluff, really. Every week, we have to take something that happened to us personally and explain the racism implicit in the event. Like once, do you remember when you forgot your meal card at the student union and you didn’t have any other ID? I wrote that up about how since you’re black, the cashier automatically assumed you weren’t trustworthy and wouldn’t let you give her your student number, blah, blah, blah. Three pages of drivel about the racial injustices implicit in our interactions with the gray-haired lunch lady who knits socks for her grandkids on her breaks.”

Reuben laughed. “You really said that?”

She shrugged. “It was for the grade.”

“Do you believe it?” he asked.

“No. But it’s what Hill wants to hear, and it’s a pretty easy class, so I won’t complain too much. It’s kind of a joke though. I mean, they take all these cases where people just run into bad luck or something, and they turn every single one of them into an example of racism.”

“Like the meal card?”

Kennedy nodded. “Yeah. I mean, if I forget my card and she says I can’t give her my number, I figure she’s having a bad day. Or maybe her boss is telling her to stop doing that anymore. Either way, I don’t assume it’s racism. But if she refuses to let a black student give her the number, all of a sudden she’s a bigot.”

“So do you think America still has a problem with racism?” he asked.

Kennedy had asked herself that same question several times in Professor Hill’s class. “Maybe sometimes, but not like it used to. Take Pastor Carl. He and Sandy got married in the South back when blacks and whites hardly ever even dated. They’ve shared some of their stories with me. It wasn’t pretty. But this is a different era. I mean, you look at Carl and all he does, and he’s the last person to point fingers and say some big, burly white man is keeping him down.”

Kennedy frowned. Had she offended Reuben? Before taking Hill’s class, she wouldn’t have even asked herself that question, but now all the guilt she’d absorbed from being told how anyone with her complexion had inherited an incurably racist constitution, she wasn’t so sure. “I know it can be harder for black people to have some of the same opportunities, especially when we’re talking about kids from inner cities. But my guess is most of that’s related to poverty and education and things like that. It’s a socioeconomic issue, not a racial one.”

Had she expressed herself correctly? Why did she feel so nervous? If anything, Hill’s class made her feel more uncomfortable talking about race with a black man. Or what was she supposed to call Reuben? She couldn’t say African-American, since he wasn’t a US citizen. Why did it have to be so complicated? She decided to steer the conversation in a new direction. “What about in Kenya? Is there much racism there? Or reverse racism against whites or anything?”

“Not really. The white people who travel to Kenya are either tourists who come with lots of spending money or missionaries who start up schools or hospitals, so white and black relations are pretty good. There’s still a lot of prejudice between different tribes though.”

Kennedy kept her mouth shut so she wouldn’t say something ignorant. Up until now, she hadn’t thought about how Kenya’s tribal past would still have implications on its society today. She glanced at the clock on Willow’s dashboard and then saw blue and red flashing lights in her rearview mirror. Some cop was trying to pass. She merged over to the right.

“What’s he doing?” she mumbled when she saw the police car switch lanes with her. She checked her speedometer. She couldn’t have been speeding. Traffic was too congested. “Is he blinking at me?”

A familiar, unsettling quiver started in the base of her abdomen. No, she couldn’t give in to anxiety right now. She had made so much progress moving on from the trauma of last semester. She was healthy. Whole. She could see a policeman without giving in to flashbacks of her abduction. She could get pulled over without her mind convincing her she was back in a car chase, fleeing for her life while bullets shattered the windows around her.

Couldn’t she?

She slowed Willow’s car down to a stop. The police pulled up directly behind her.

Great.

“I wonder what I was doing.”

Maybe Willow’s registration had expired. It sounded like something her roommate would let happen.

“What’s taking so long?” Kennedy glanced in the rearview mirror. The policeman still hadn’t gotten out of his car. She turned to Reuben. “I’m really sorry. We might be late. Maybe I should hop out and explain to him we’re in a hurry.”

Reuben raised his eyebrows. “I think we better stay here.”

She sighed. This was supposed to be a fun night out together. Well, at least it would be memorable. She wondered what Willow would say when she heard they’d gotten pulled over in her car. She didn’t know anything about traffic laws and write-up procedures. Would the ticket go to her or Willow? Kennedy would find a way to pay it regardless, but she didn’t want it to count against Willow’s record in any way.