“Not guilty,” I say into the microphone, and it echoes in the courtroom. “Your Honor,” I add, forgetting.

“Do you understand the charges brought against you?” he asks, and Mandy is about to answer for me when I say, “No, Your Honor.”

I don’t know what Brewer was working on, or how much of it was directed by Bear. I thought he was trying to reduce something, but the judge said homicide anyway, not self-defense, and there was the cop, and Birdie, and all I can think of is that I will never, ever get out of this. I am about to spend the next thirty years in jail. Just like my dad. Just like any other Jenkins.

Where the fuck is Bear?

The judge looks at Mandy, about to ask her more questions.

“Miss Donovan,” he says, “it seems to me here that the charges are pretty straightforward. I’ll ask you again if you have any doubt in your client’s ability to stand trial for the charges that have been brought against him.”

“No, Your Honor,” she says. “However, we have just met.”

“Have you discussed the charges with the defendant, Miss Donovan?”

“No, Your Honor. I was brought up to speed yesterday,” she says. “The original attorney recused himself from the case,” she says.

“I see.” He watches the back of the courtroom, behind me, over my head, while again there’s a whip of air as the door buzzes open and closed.

“Pardon the interruption,” the judge says, and then calls to the bailiff, “What in the hell is going on back there?”

I hear Birdie’s voice. I hear it, and my heart leaps so hard I think I will choke on it. I feel my knees buckle.

“Jeez Louise,” Birdie says in her sharp, sassy little voice. “You don’t have to hang on so tight.”

All at once, the bailiff, the officers on guard at the front of the room, and everyone sitting behind me who was listening just a minute ago are up and scuffling at the back of the room. The original officer who came with me and Kateri—the boy cop—cuffs me right away, forcing my arms behind my back. He holds me that way, the way you’d hold a dog in a harness.

Hurt stands with his feet planted apart, gun drawn and aimed at my mother.

THIRTY: KATERI

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Kateri stands when she sees who they have—that they have brought Pearl Jenkins into the courtroom, alive, beaten, and bald.

She has a few weeks of hair growth on her head. Longer than a buzz cut, and fiery red like Birdie’s. The hair has grown into and around the wounds to her skull, the worst at the very back, where the skin has not come together right and where the bone has been broken. Her clothes hang on her, damp and filthy, but when she looks up at Shannon before the judge and then at Kateri, her eyes are bright, sharp.

“He didn’t do it,” Pearl says.