“It’s not safe,” Ayanna thought she could hear the man say. It was hard to tell. The crowd was getting louder. More people were saying they heard music, some said they could smell things like cake baking in an oven. One of the few people ahead of Ayanna had sweat through the back of his shirt. It clung to him and so did the dirt kicked up by so many people walking on the road. Most of the people up here were taking pictures of the door, making videos of themselves, talking quietly and earnestly into their cell phones. They were on the very edge of where cell phones stopped working. A teenage girl in front of her stepped closer and the screen fritzed black.

Ayanna shook her head. Her mother pushed a man and leaped to scale the gate. He tried to pull her down. She swung and clawed at him while scrambling. Opal pushed him into the gate, hard enough to rattle it, and there was a thud when his head hit the metal. He seemed dazed and he staggered. Ayanna longed to melt into the crowd. I don’t know this woman and I don’t know why I’m here, she willed herself to think. Instead, Ayanna walked closer. Tried to pull her mother down and took a surprise kick to the chest. It winded her and she leaned back for a second and gasped. The second time, Ayanna pulled roughly, no longer caring about being nice.

“You can’t act this way.”

Her mother turned. “Olivia?” She reached for Ayanna, her eyes bright, her smile bigger than Ayanna had ever seen it.

Then she squinted and the smile melted. “Ayanna?”

Ayanna closed her eyes for a second underneath her mother’s gaze. Tried to think of what to say. And in that hesitation, her mother leaped up again, began pulling at and squirming over the gate, not caring about scratches or pain. Finally, she was over the fence and running toward the door. Opal fell and was still for a moment. Near the door, there was one plant, an allium maybe, purple and green, that stood proud and thick. Despite everything happening, Ayanna realized it was probably one she had planted. It had persisted here, all these years.

“Do you know her?” the security guard asked. He stood up. Still seemed a little disoriented. His eyes were red and distant.

“That’s my mom,” Ayanna said. “She’s drunk.”

“She’s in deep shit,” he said.

“I know.”

“We have to stop her from going in.” He rubbed his head. In the scuffle with her mom, he had lost his blue baseball cap. Ayanna could see scratches from her mom’s nails and the slight impressions of the cap on his mostly bald scalp.