The Cave Dwellers by Christina McDowell (readict books TXT) 📕

this is happening,” she says, then inhales and passes the joint back.

“Well, it happened. The vodka and Purple Kush are numbing the pain though,” Marty says, examining the joint.

Bunny puts her hands in her pockets; there’s an ice storm coming. “Do you think it really matters where we go to school? Where we end up?”

Marty breathes in the cold air, looks up to the sky. “Did you know that the probability of any one of us going to St. Peter’s Academy is less than getting struck by lightning?” He inhales the last of the joint, then kneels and rubs the roach into the dirty snow.

“Are you serious?” Bunny laughs.

“I did the research,” Marty says. Standing up, he puts his hands in his pockets.

“I would have rather gotten struck by lightning,” Bunny says.

Marty leans against the back of the bench, the marijuana pushing him into a deeper analysis of self. “It matters to me,” he says, dropping into a more serious tone, “even though, if you look at it, at the probability—we’ve technically already won the lottery of life.”

Bunny looks at Marty, and she feels a pang of guilt. “It’s my fault,” she says, “I should have never filmed you guys.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it, Bunny, we all took part.”

“But I wasn’t on camera, and it wasn’t my phone.”

Marty sniffles and straightens his back to sober up a bit. “Well, the truth is, my dad’s position at Howard is probably enough to get me in there. And give or take a year, I’ll just transfer somewhere else if I want. At the end of the day, I dunno, it matters and it doesn’t—where we go to school. But I let my grandparents down, that’s what’s eating me.” Marty shakes his head.

Bunny looks at him in wonder and in silence. She feels the opposite. She feels a kind of hereditary, genealogical disdain for her grandparents. And the shame feels invisible; she doesn’t know how to respond.

“So I won’t work for the CIA or the State Department, big deal. Sucks more for Billy, man,” he says.

“What? No it doesn’t. Why do you say that? Billy doesn’t even want to go to the academy.”

“Yeah, but his father’s a public figure. Billy got trolled the hardest today, and it’s only gonna get worse,” Marty says.

“I haven’t talked to him since earlier so I don’t really know what’s going on.”

“He’s been acting distant since even before the overdose—just super irritated a lot. What’s going on with you guys anyway?”

“Nothing… it’s… we broke up, I guess, but we’re talking… more like fighting, still. It’s the pressure from his dad, I know it. And then I did something that upset him, and it just brought up a lot of shit about our families and… expectations about who we’re supposed to be, you know? But I think he might be starting to come around, given that his dad is probably going to prison.”

“Yeah, General Montgomery’s always been kind of a dick—but, fuck, you think he’ll actually go to prison?”

“If the president doesn’t pardon him.”

Marty shakes his head. “First Audrey, now this, what’s next?”

Bunny takes a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket. Puts an unlit cigarette to her lips.

“Bunny and her cigarettes, so old school,” Marty teases.

She stops herself. So old school. Bunny looks at the cigarette and snaps it in half, then takes the whole pack out of her pocket and stomps on it.

“Whoa, what’d I say?”

“Nothing. I’m done, all right? I’m done smoking cigarettes,” Bunny says.

“Okaaay.” Marty looks at her with skepticism. An awkward moment passes. “What are you doing here anyway? Why are you all alone in an abandoned graveyard? It’s a little creepy, Bunny. Are you okay?”

“Got into a fight with my mom… thinkin’ about Audrey, wanted to hang among the ghosts of America’s past, I guess.”

“So you came to Mount Zion? This is my side of the tracks,” Marty teases, “your people are buried over there.” He nods toward the other side of a chain-link fence where Oak Hill Cemetery is—equipped with twenty-four-hour security cameras and where Bunny’s ancestors are buried, still segregated from Mount Zion—a dark, visceral reminder of the priorities of preservation in American history.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to be on my side anymore,” Bunny says. She looks over at Marty. She wants to tell him about Anthony; she wants to talk to him about what it’s like being the only kid of color in her class; she wants to know what he thinks about the murders, about Anthony, whether or not he thinks he did it; she wants to know what he thought of Audrey’s flaunted wealth; she wants to know whether he believes white people have an unconscious fear that if America were to obtain true equality, would the Black man do to the white man what the white man had done to the Black man? But in this moment, she is afraid to ask. She knows Marty is wealthy; his family lives in a cozy town house down the street crammed with overflowing bookshelves and the law degrees of his professor parents. Worried she might offend him, or say the wrong thing, Bunny finds herself resisting—it feels far too intimate—easier perhaps with Anthony, the two of them in different buildings, separated by a fake ID and a television monitor, where by circumstance she has more power, not just because of her family but because she is physically free. And she wonders if even thinking about all of these things makes her a terrible person.

“Do you miss Audrey?” Marty asks.

“Sometimes,” Bunny says honestly, “but she could be a real bitch.”

Marty laughs. “All right, you’re being honest. We weren’t that close… but it’s still sad.”

Bunny looks up, white flakes clustering in her strawberry eyelashes. “Do you think he’s still out there?”

“Who?”

“The person who murdered her family.”

“They arrested that guy though,” Marty says.

“Yeah, but do you really think he did it?”

Marty exhales, exhausted, stoned, drunk. “I dunno, Bunny.… But, you know, my parents are skeptical. They told me not to