Last Night Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE: Tell It to the Judge 1

  2

  3

  PART TWO: Rumors and Time 4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  PART THREE: Think Like a Teenager 14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  PART FOUR: Invisible Boy 22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  PART FIVE: The View from Here 35

  36

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Karen Ellis

  About the Author

  Also by Karen Ellis

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2019 by Karen Ellis

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  mulhollandbooks.com

  Twitter.com/mulhollandbooks

  Facebook.com/mulhollandbooks

  First Edition: February 2019

  Mulholland Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Mulholland Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  ISBN 978-0-316-50571-0

  E3-20190204-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20190201-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20190116-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20181030-DA-NF-ORI

  For my children, Eli and Karenna, beloved inspirations.

  PART ONE

  Tell It to the Judge

  1

  Wednesday

  For the real event they’ll be starched versions of themselves, in blue gowns and tasseled mortarboards, but Crisp likes this better: the sea of kids in ripped jeans with rings and tats in full flare; teachers scattered in the back rows of the vast auditorium, casually enjoying the fruits of their labor. A party mood, with mostly just the elders paying attention to his rehearsal of the valedictory, The Speech he practiced at home, over and over, for his mother and grandparents.

  Center stage, he finishes: “…and that is why my years at Stuyvesant have been not just formative, but inspiring. Aut viam inveniam aut faciam—I shall either find a way or make one.”

  An explosion of applause tells him that he was wrong—people were listening. Adrenaline nearly lifts him off the stage, and there he is, floating over everyone, smiling, laughing, reaching down to feel a thousand fingertips graze the palms of his hands. Feeling like the new balloon at next year’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, representing…what? A brown-skinned, fro-headed hybrid of a young man with high-tops clean and white, the way he likes them, and—here’s the kicker—something to say.

  He levitates through the rest of rehearsal and then the 687 other seniors are dismissed until morning, when the official ceremony will take place.

  Outside in the buttery June afternoon, Crisp unlocks his bike and flies along Chambers Street and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Dodging pedestrians with pinball precision, the lightweight bike so attuned to him that it feels like part of his body. Ignoring dirty looks and riding fast, faster across the wingspan suspended between two urban shores. Energized by the fact that a lifetime of New York City public schools is behind him. Wondering how, if, he’ll fit in next year at Princeton. The sharp tip of that thought bursts his bubble and he feels the air begin to seep out of him. Of course, it won’t be easy. He slows along the bridge’s off-ramp, merges into traffic, and comes to a stop at the intersection of Tillary and Adams.

  “You.” A short, burly cop standing in front of the corner diner waves him over. “Come here.”

  “Me?” Crisp points to himself, his mind whirring.

  “You deaf?”

  “No, sir.” Crisp pedals onto the sidewalk, comes to a stop near the officer, and hops off his bike. “Did I do something wrong?”

  The cop rips a curled printout off his ticketing device and hands it to Crisp with a dead-eyed stare.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Can’t you read?”

  Crisp looks at the ticket and there it is: a hundred-dollar fine and a court summons for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. He swallows the bitter foretaste of a percolating anger.

  “Officer Russo,” getting the name off the lopsided tag beneath the badge, “I rode over because you told me to.”

  “It’s against the law to ride your bike on the sidewalk. You oughta know that, kid.”

  “But you told me to come over. When I was riding in the street.”

  “You saying you didn’t ride on the sidewalk just now?”

  “No, but—”

  “You think I’m blind?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t do it again.” Russo begins to move away.

  Color flushes out of Crisp’s fingers, he’s gripping his handlebars so hard. He shouts, “Who do you think you are? Franz fucking Kafka?” He inches his bike closer to Russo and jerks it to a stop.

  “What’d you call me?”

  “Franz Kafka is a who, not a what. Sir. But you wouldn’t know that—fucking idiot.” He’d meant to think that last part, but somehow the words hissed out.

  Forehead sweaty, jowls shaking, Russo whips out a set of handcuffs.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

  “Oh, I am not kidding you, son.” He snaps open one bracelet and latches it to Crisp’s left wrist.

  “‘Son’? You think you’re my father now?”

  Muttering the standard Miranda warnings, Russo yanks Crisp’s right hand off the handlebar and clinches the second bracelet. The bike crashes to the sidewalk.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “Assaulting an officer. Resisting arrest. And now—” Russo glances at the fallen bike. “—littering.”

  “Assault? How?”

  “Verbal assault with threat of physical violence.”

  “What? This is insane!”

  “Trying to mow me down with that bike.”

  “I did not!”

  “Tell it to the judge.”

  2

  A rhythmic snapping echoes onto the Dreyfus family rooftop. Lying in the sun, Glynnie opens her eyes and something Ms. Abrams said in class last week returns with a jolt. She said, “It used to be that identity was internalized before it was externalized. These days it’s the reverse, it seems to me.”

  It seems to me. Glynnie lops off that final clause in her mind, as a favor to Ms. Abrams, who all year tormented everyone by denuding bo
ld statements with self-doubt. Making these big, interesting statements and then, wham, killing them with a weak finish. It was the last English class Glynnie would ever, ever take in her life—hallelujah. Another week of freedom before being packed off to fucking Outward Bound.

  She closes her eyes and conjures Ms. Abrams’s face: oval, freckly, a face that never managed to carry authority all through senior year. It isn’t that Ms. Abrams is too young or isn’t smart; it’s that she’s unsure of herself.

  Glynnie brings the roach to her lips and nearly burns her fingers lighting it. Waves out the match. Breathes deeply, holds in the smoke, lets it out in a wandering cloud. Feels the shiver pass into her brain, loosening her thoughts. The lift. The expansion.

  Yes, that’s it. That’s Ms. Abrams’s problem: She’s insecure.

  Snap snap snap.

  Ms. Abrams’s face fragments like cracked glass. Glynnie opens her eyes again. She lets one bare foot drop off the chaise onto the wood deck, thinking she might investigate the sound, but then she sees what it is, where it’s coming from, and lies back down to continue letting the rays soak unfiltered into her skin. The air just a bit chilly on her nipples, puckered in little salutes to the sun. So good to be out here, topless, alone, on a warm blue day after the long winter and meandering spring.

  Snap snap snap.

  Sitting up, she can make out, in the near distance, several figures milling around inside the caged recreation area on top of the Brooklyn House of Detention, though she can’t see any detail. Just a bunch of guys shooting hoops. Exercise hour. Happens every day. But something about the sound of the ball seems different today—sharper, angrier, with every bounce crackling through her nerves.

  “Identity was internalized before it was externalized,” Ms. Abrams said.

  Glynnie suddenly understands, really gets what the teacher meant. She reaches her arms out to the sides, flexes her fingers. Yup. It used to be that people had time and space to think, but not anymore. You’d have a chance to know who you are before you wondered who you should be. That’s what Ms. Abrams was talking about last week. Finally, at the bitter end, the woman teaches her something that might be worthwhile. Chaucer never penetrated, that’s for sure.

  Internalized identity. What, she wonders, is hers? She knows what it looks like from the outside—her demographics, her family—but from the inside?

  The other night she overheard her father on the phone talking to whoever, a Scotch in his hand: “Seven million—that’s what our brownstone’s at now. Give it a year to reach eight.” His voice oozy with intoxication equals booze plus self-satisfaction.

  Fucking bourgeoisie. Worse: one percenter. Not her fault she’s his kid.

  Between the Dreyfus manse and the House of Detention two blocks north, a patchwork of windows reveals the lives of condo tenants—million a unit, Glynnie’s dad once guessed, maybe two. Seven floors in all, possibly a dozen units per floor—half a full block of “gold coast real estate” was how her dad described it to whoever he was talking to that time. Whoever the Scotch was talking to. Sober, Nik Dreyfus didn’t brag about money things; compared to his fancy clients, he was practically poor.

  Glynnie hates it, really hates it, all this…this greed…hypocrisy. It doesn’t represent her. It’s not how she feels. She feels agitated, restless, bored. But what does any of that mean?

  She takes another toke and extinguishes the blunt on the side of the chaise.

  A window shade in one of the condos across the street blinks shut. Towering behind it, an entire universe away, that snap snap snap atop the House announces something less serene. Glynnie stares past a woman watering a condo roof garden and at the shadows milling inside the basketball cage that looms higher than the nearer building by at least three stories. Dark figures whom she imagines darkly (there you go, Ms. Abrams: finally, a poetic turn of phrase from the class fuckup), distinguishable only by slight variations in height.

  And then: “I see you!” A voice sails out of the cage. A real voice. Male, plump with intent.

  She holds a hand above her eyes to block the sun.

  He’s standing up against the fence, facing her direction. The basketball is no longer dribbling, she realizes, and in the unanticipated silence the shadow turns into a young faceless brown man with a six-inch fralo (fro meets halo—her own word; I’m a poet, don’t you know it). The bulge of basketball pinned between arm and hip. The sky above him a springtime cerulean she wishes she could lick clean of its wispy clouds.

  She shouts, “I see you, too!” Testing her instinct that this is a direct communication traversing worlds, that she isn’t nuts and he’s actually talking to her.

  “Save some for me!” His voice is bold, edged with what she reads as humor, but she isn’t quite sure. She doesn’t like not being sure; she wants to know. Save some what? Weed? Or is he referring to her breasts? She suddenly feels as naked as she is but refuses to cover herself up. This is the body she was given at birth; it’s a gift that belongs to her, and she’s proud of it, and Shut the fuck up if you think it means anything else.

  Bracketing her mouth with both hands to direct all her voice at the cage, she yells, “Come over, why don’t you?” Knowing he can’t, because he’s locked up for some crime he committed…allegedly.

  A lull, a pocket of surprise. Another man joins him at the fence. And then laughter. But what kind of laughter? At themselves and their predicaments, being caged in—though she imagines they don’t find that very funny—or at her? She isn’t ready to finish this; she needs to know.

  “What?” Standing up, spreading her wings. “Can’t you fly?” Half naked, open armed, she twirls across her rooftop. Sun queen, temptress, high-school graduate at long last. Then, just for the hell of it, she leans over her mother’s Italian planter, where a bush of English roses is about to bloom, and spits.

  3

  Crisp presses the hard curve of the basketball into his ribs, and looks at the half-naked girl on the roof across the way getting stoned in full view of everyone. There’s something about her that reminds him of someone, but he can’t think who. What, he wonders, would happen to her if she was locked up and missed the last arraignment roster of the day?

  Bullshit.

  He knows exactly what would happen; half the kids at his school are just like her. Her parents or somebody would make sure she got onto that roster so she wouldn’t have to wait her turn to get her charges read out, the judge’s decision on bail or no bail, release or more detention. No way would anyone with a roof-deck like that (out of the pages of a magazine, with its cushions and sun umbrella and flowerpots and trees—yes, even trees) let their lily-white princess spend a night in jail, which is exactly what happens when you’re not on the afternoon’s last roster. No way would anyone let her stand in this cage if she was in his shoes.

  Double bullshit.

  No way would she even get arrested to begin with. Because she’s white. And a girl. And rich—he can see that just by looking at her right now in the context of her environment, his sociology teacher Alan might say.

  “Huh,” Crisp mutters. He palms the ball and triple dribbles it hard.

  That’s exactly where he is now too: in the context of his environment as seen through the lens of race and socioeconomics. And that lens doesn’t read anyone as half black, as he is, or half poor, as he is. He knows who he is and where he is: stranded in jail with a bunch of other boys and men trapped in their dark skins, missing out, watching that girl dancing around on her rooftop, flapping her arm-wings, feeling the sun and the air on her skin, without any reason in the world to think she’d ever get her liberty taken away.

  He wants to shout back at the roof girl, “Sure I can fly! Yes I can!” But what’s the point? He’s here, she’s there. He turns his back and throws the ball to the first man-boy he sees across the cage.

  And then he realizes what he recognized about her. It was a certain singsong in her voice when she said that last thing—“What, can’t you fly?”�
��that was familiar, and suddenly he remembers. She’s a friend of his friend from school. Over the winter break a bunch of Stuyvesant kids hung out with a bunch of Brooklyn Friends kids, and yeah, right, her. She was cool. She did a rap on his name, made him smile.

  He claws his fingers through the chain-link fence and shouts across the roofscape, “Glynnie? Yo, Sarah Bernhardt!,” which is what he called her that night because of the nutty expressions she made when she sang. She had an unusually flexible face.

  She stops dancing and wraps her arms around herself to cover her breasts and her jaw drops open, and he knows she remembers him too.

  She yells, “Crisp Crespo, the Crisco King of Coney? What the fuck!” She jumps around and shakes her ass at him and cracks up laughing, and he can’t help it. He laughs right along with her.

  PART TWO

  Rumors and Time

  4

  Friday

  The phone won’t ring but Detective Lex Cole stares at it anyway, then hates himself for waiting for Adam’s call and looks away, then turns back to the silent screen clenched in his hand: that cruel rectangular void.

  He switches the phone to vibrate, puts it facedown on his desk, and checks the new case log on his monitor—nothing in since he last looked. After an initial flurry of activity at the start of the night shift, it’s as if the whole southern end of Brooklyn went to sleep all at once. Now it’s just him and Toby Rios left in the 6-0 squad room. His colleague must have opened a window because suddenly a brisk salty breeze and the rhythm of nearby waves fill the room.

  “Think I’ll step outside a minute,” Lex tells Toby.

  When Toby lifts his head from whatever file he’s reading, a sheen of light from the overhead bounces off his pate. “Sure thing.”

  As soon as Lex stands, his right calf muscle cramps, followed by a note of craving he immediately silences—that old song of pain wanting relief and the slippery slope of getting it. Out on the surf that afternoon, he felt the vibration of a wave coming up behind him and turned to carve his board into it: flashes of silver light, an exhilarating lift out of time. He rode the swell as it chased him back to shore. As the wave shrank, he felt, irrationally, as if his mastery had subdued it. Right away another one crept up, powerful, ready to teach him a lesson. Turning to meet it, he thought he glimpsed Adam standing on the beach, watching him—handsome Adam, pale with his thatch of black hair, light and dark like a two-tone cat. It wasn’t Adam, though: it was another man who vaguely resembled him. In that single, hapless moment, Lex’s calf seized and he nearly lost his balance. A moment of injury in its full innocence; the treachery always came later.