Dating : Facts

Harvey’s Diner is twelve blocks down and three to the right from Grace Elementary. I walked here after the potluck was over. Andrew is relieved I’m staying out of the house. I need to reach out to Johanna Ortega in the fall.

“Cream and sugar, miss?” A wiry, sweet looking girl no older than seventeen sets the cup of coffee I’ve requested down on my table, and holds up two white ceramic containers. I nod, and she sets them down before me. Turning on her heel, the long braid down her back swishes against the sanded wooden surface.

Sofia often wore her hair in braids down her back.

I look up from scribbling in my notebook to find two other tables occupied in the back room of the 24-hour diner. A television is on in the far right corner of the room, behind one of the occupied booths. In it sits what looks to be a man, his shoulders slumped over his placemat.

A teenage couple sits in a booth to the left of me. They take turns snapping pictures for social media, and by the time they’re done, their food has grown cold.

I need to delete my Facebook account. Dr. Roulin is right, it heightens anxiety. Too many people speculate on Sofia’s death.

“BREAKING: Trial concerning Officer shooting Grace Elementary student will be moved up to August, prior to the return of classes in the fall.” Maria Hydell sits behind a polished metal desk and moves around blank pieces of white paper to make herself look important. She’s run out of new information to give me, and keeps regurgitating the same facts I already know.

Sofia Carreira, age eleven, was shot first in the leg, then again in the back, killing her, on April 16th, 2015. She was walking across the street to her father’s taco truck after school when Officer Donald O’Reilly fired two rounds as her back was turned. She turned to face him before he killed her. Officer O’Reilly and his partner, Officer Matheson, were responding to a call regarding a possible threat to the campus. Officer Matheson has an eight-year old son that attends Grace Elementary. His name is George. The call was later found out to be a prank. There was no threat to campus. Sofia was holding a roll of lifesavers in her pocket when she was shot. I gave her the roll of lifesavers two hours prior. She turned to face him.

My pen falls out of my hand as my fingers begin to cramp, and I notice someone is crying. My eyes squint as they adjust to looking farther out into the diner past the page I’ve been scrawling on, and I see that the teenage couple has left. Their food picked over and largely uneaten. No tip. That only leaves the man sitting in the booth right up against the television. Maria Hydell is still onscreen, and his eyes move from her, down to a bowl in front of him.

I pack my notebook and pen carefully into my purse, take out a ten-dollar bill, and leave it on my table. I take out a five, and leave it on the table the couple was occupying earlier.

I’m preparing myself for my trek home as I pass by the man’s booth, and he begins to choke on his own breath. I wonder if he’s as upset about Sofia as I am. “The news has had this effect on me lately, too.” The words tumble out of my mouth before I have the chance to think them through. I pivot to face his booth. He’s leaned back in his seat, and I take this as an opportunity to sit across from him.

I see now that the bowl in front of him contains what used to be cold cereal, it looks to be a room-temperature mess now. A silver spoon sits on a napkin next to the bowl. The entire setting is untouched. He sits with his head so far down that strands of his barely-overgrown hair cover his eyes. He has on a grey shirt beneath a blue and grey flannel. Both have unidentifiable stains and variably sized holes in them. His pink hands sit like chipped seashells in his lap. He has torn the cuticles on his fingers to the point that they bleed into his nails. He is, all in all, a crumpled man.

He looks up as Maria’s voice comes through the television set above us again, and I get a good look at his face. His eyes are rimmed with red skin beneath a pair of smudged glasses. A patchy blonde beard dabbles at his jawline. He looks ten or fifteen pounds lighter in the face than his pictures make him out to be, and he looks more like a boy than the cold blooded-killer that I’ve imagined him to be for the past five weeks and six days. It is Officer Donald O’Reilly.

“You’re — ”

“Going to jail.” My sentence is again finished for me in a manner in which I did not intend it. He wipes his nose on the sleeve of his flannel, and a bit of snot dribbles into his corn flakes.

Most white Officers suffer minimal reprimands following the shooting of a person of color. They ultimately fade from headlines and live their lives. She turned her head. She saw the same eyes I am now.

I’m stunned into silence and my spine becomes a metal rod as my waitress reenters the room, collects the tips on the two tables I’ve left her, nods her head at us, and leaves. I have thought for the past five weeks and six days what I would say to this man if I ever came across him. I have pages written down and torn out of my notebook dedicated to him. All I can think to ask with him sitting before me is;

“Why did you do it?”

He replaces the sleeve to his nose with the napkin his spoon was sitting on, then moves it up to his eyes. He coughs.

“I made a mistake.”

A mistake results in burnt cookies. A mistake results in me inputting a 77% rather than an 87%. A mistake results in a twenty-five minute detour when I forget about rush hour. A mistake does not result in a little girl’s death.

“That’s not good enough.”

I stand and collect my purse to go, coffee bubbles in my throat, threatening to spill over into his lap. My hands slip over the slick straps of my belongings and I bite my own flesh to keep from tearing his.

“I know.”

I look at him as my feet settle firmly on the floor in the new white shoes I’ve bought for today. His patchy beard is the same reddish brown as Andrew’s, lighter on his cheeks, and darker the further it gets to his jawline. He scratches it, and his hand covers his mouth as he shuts his eyes in what I can only see as pain.

It takes everything in me not to reach out and snatch his hand away from his lips and tell him he doesn’t deserve to grieve her. Not to throw his place setting across the room and rip him from his seat. Not to expose him to anyone who will listen.

I pick up my purse and leave.