"But I don't get it." Leala put her hair into a ponytail. "How could a male African American teenager with no weapons be a threat to a police officer who's armed?"
----
Harmony's older brother was found dead, and the cop who killed him wasn't charge...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
⚜
The next few days following the fight have been hell. I was thinking of pulling out of this entire thing.
There was a mysterious fire that started at my house last week; another brick was thrown through a window; someone even spray painted racial slurs on the outside of my house that took hours for us to scrub off. Now I understand why Mom wanted us to stay out of all this.
"I don't know, Calo." I played with my hair to avoid his intimidating eyes.
"What do you mean by," he made his voice sound girly, "'I don't know, Calo'?"
I huffed. "I just don't know."
Calo has been trying to convence me to do another protest but I'm afraid; I just didn't want him to know because then he'd call me a wimp or something.
Calo put his warm hand over mine. "I'm sure you know, but you don't want to tell me." I focused on his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "I'm trustworthy. Your secret's safe with me."
I stared at our hands. "I'm just. . . I'm scared," I finally admitted.
"Scared of what?"
I felt a cool liquid on the back of my neck. I slowly turned to find out that a white teenager with red hair and freckles spit on me.
"Aye, did you spit on her?" Calo's tone was much rougher than it usually was with me.
"Yeah. And?" The teenager rolled up his shirt's sleeves.
Calo licked his lips. "You do understand that spitting on a woman, or anyone for that matter, is unacceptable."
"Oh." His eyebrows rose. "Thanks for stating the obvious, genius."
Calo jumped off of the bench and launched at the red-haired guy before I could even blink. "Calo!" I forced myself to try and break up a fight between two people who were undoubtedly stronger than me. "Calo, stop!" While in the middle of my struggling, the teenager punched me in the face. "Goddammit," I cried out while holding my busted lip.
"You sick motherfucker." Calo pushed the guy one last time before I heard his loud footsteps following behind me. Once I felt like we got far enough away from the guy, I turned to face him. "What the hell, Harmony?" Calo's reached for my lip, but I backed away. "Why aren't you talking to me?"
"Oh, I dunno. Maybe it's because my goddamn lip is busted because of some stupid fight that you got yourself into." I touched my lip with my index finger and red blood was on my fingertip.
"No one asked you to try and break it up."
"Oh, well I'm sorry for caring about you!" I threw my arms in the air.
"Harmony, calm the fuck down."
"I can't do this, Calo! I just can't." I put my hands into my hair with frustration. "This is all too much." I began to sob before I could even stop myself.
"I'm sorry." Calo wrapped his arms around me. "I'm so fucking sorry. I pushed you further than you should've gone. I went into this whole thing without even thinking about how you felt. I am so goddamn selfish."
"You are." I laughed half-heartedly.
"Damn." Calo pulled away with a smile. "That hurt."
"Hopefully as bad as my lip."
"Let's go get you some ice." Calo reached for my arm.
⚜
"So. . . you're gonna give up?" Mom rubbed circles in my thigh with her thumb.
"Well. . . yeah." I continued to stare out of the window. "These peaceful protests have been doing nothing to change things, and I don't want to go violent because all that will do is put a bad image out there for us blacks."
"You went all this way advocating for change to just quit when things got tough?" Mom shook her head, disappointment glowing in her brown eyes. "I thought I raised you better than that."
"But you were the main one who wanted me to stop in the first place. Why the change of heart?"
"I never should've pushed so hard against you. The same crap has been happening all around us yet we never had that one Martin Luther King Jr to speak up and let the world know what should be fixed." Mom stopped rubbing my thigh. "Harmony, I believe you're that Martin Luther King Jr for us."
"No, I'm not." I closed my eyes before frustrated tears poured out of them. "For one, I'm a girl—a teenage one to be more specific—and Martin was fearless, strong, smart, could speak in front of a crowd without seeming nervous, and he was courageous. I'm the complete opposite."
"Honey, courage is the resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not the absence of fear."
That night I couldn't sleep. Mom's words kept echoing through my mind. Was I a courageous individual? How do I know if I was courageous if I'm always afraid?
Glass shattered above my head. I quickly rolled off of the couch. I heard loud snickering along with, "You might as well quit while you're ahead, nigger!"
I didn't allow a single tear to fall. This is what being courageous is. Being afraid but still able to push through and not lose hope due to the amount of pressure constantly on your back.
I will change the world if it's the last thing I do.
