“She was already…gone. I was out of my mind, not thinking about my jacket. Just knowing I didn’t want to leave her like that, but also knowing I had to get outta there. They weren’t going to believe me…Chris left. And he’d been saying it was my fault. I realized he probably killed her, and him leaving meant I’d be the main suspect once he got to his dad.” Tears fill his eyes. “Sometimes I feel like we’re cursed.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say, even though I know the feeling. We’ve never caught a break. All those years praying, going to church, looking over our shoulders when we didn’t do anything wrong.

“Nah, you don’t hear me. See all these books.” Jamal points around to the scattered books I hadn’t noticed are from the collections we’ve rotated in and out to Daddy. W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Thurgood Marshall, Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Then a week’s worth of newspapers.

“They all say the same thing over and over again—it doesn’t matter when they were written. The laws might change, the systems might look different. All these books say what the problem is. Working ten times harder to get half. Seems to me, all the blood that’s been spilled ain’t our debt. But we paying it over and over again. And the world acts like there’s something wrong with us. They hate us so damn much.”

Jamal’s voice is cracking, desperate words that have been suffocating him.

“Four hundred years, and we still ain’t American to them, T. All that blood. We built America. Black labor built the greatest nation in the world for free. They ripped us from our family then, and they do it again with new laws disguised as change. I’ll be in prison doing that labor for free.”

“But we have a superweapon: Innocence X. A real chance. Not like before.”

“If I turn myself in, I’m getting the death penalty. Unless what, I plead? Unless I say I did it, I killed Angela? Then I get what, life without parole?”

“It won’t be like Daddy.”

“It will be!” Jamal’s hand grazes over the newspapers and they whoosh, floating to the floor. “Them cops weren’t ever going to think I didn’t kill…Angela.” Jamal gets choked up. “Not when the sheriff’s son says different. Not when I ran. Not with Angela gone.”

“But you had to know…leaving your jacket…they’d come after you.”