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The good news, from Maya’s perspective, was that the prosecution had only one piece of solid physical evidence to use against Belen. The bad news was that the evidence was a head.
He was going to be one of those cops who did the “ma’am” thing with her, wasn’t he? Maya hated the “ma’am” thing.
she was thirty-six, which she had to admit was probably “ma’am”-worthy,
Maya appreciated the cautious pessimism.
Courthouses were among the last places where all strata of society still brushed shoulders—rich,
Had Craig sold out? Maybe. But he hadn’t come cheap.
He thought about saying hello, but figured, Then what? He never knew what you were supposed to say after hello.
well-appointed innocence.
She was nostalgic for an imaginary future.
“Would you believe me if I said that it’s good to see you?” True or not, Maya appreciated the olive branch.
“When I’m flirting with you, you’ll know it.”
What tactical martyrdom!
Rising tides had never lifted all boats,
Avni had said sunlight was good, warm was good, those sensations placed you inside your body, inside the actual physical feeling of being you.
beefy, blond, work-hard, play-hard types.
They made jokes about manifest destiny as they drove down the coast.
“One-way streets are one of the most effective tools local governments use to preserve racial segregation.”
Historically, when cities like Chicago, Detroit, or L.A. have wanted to act like nothing racist is happening but still subtly encourage all the black people, or all the Latin people, or all the Japanese people, or what have you, to stay in the same space, they’ve turned two-way streets into one-way streets to do it.”
segregation through subtle inconvenience.”
Maya found his pretentious streak endearing.
garrulous.
Sex was both the cause of their closeness and its effect.
“You should go,” he said. “And I really hope you didn’t kill him.”
That was bullshit, but anytime you said “studies have shown,” people believed whatever you put after.
She’d been one of those random capitalization people.
No politician ever lost an election by being too tough on child rapists.
He was white, with curly blond hair and an easy 250 pounds of unwashed bulk.
family. They won’t visit, they won’t even call. But they’ll send a check.”
she gobbled up the fresh air.
The only people who didn’t want to be rich, he was sure, were people brainwashed into thinking that they never could be.
Being rich was a mind-set. There was no better sign that a person didn’t have money and was never gonna have money than if he thought it was a big joke to make fun of a person who did.
When was the last time that Jae had seen a movie where the hero was a businessman?
the Hollywood liberals, up on those hidden cliffs above Beverly Hills, felt so ashamed about the poor people nearby that they locked themselves away in their mansions and made movies that glorified the very victimhood that they couldn’t stand to be near.
apostasy,
Rube Goldberg
It was best to let him blow off steam when he got in one of these moods.
“The road to hell,” Trisha said sadly, “is paved by white people trying to help.”
“You ever think about all the fucked-up shit we end up doing because we tell ourselves that we’re helping?”
dirty messages might not lend themselves to being read so literally.”
Bananas, orange juice, strawberries. She tried to savor a taste that she might not experience again for a very long time.
You had to really care about someone to fight with them this hard. You had to deeply care about someone’s opinion to be this offended by how totally wrong they were.
All in all, jail wasn’t so bad.
a death-pat. He’d traveled to a cheap country with a good exchange rate to obliterate himself until, eventually, his heart stopped.
After five hours no one—not Maya, not her parents, not anyone else—could reasonably claim to be better informed than if they’d just taken a nap.
“Who cares what they say about me?” she said. He looked at her like she really was the lunatic they made her out to be. “I do.” And it nearly broke her heart again.
Maya had no more sympathy for supposedly “good” people whose decisions had led, time and time again, to the misery of others.
She was not a godless woman.
What sort of lunatic God would put these people in a room together?
As always, they were most together when they were disobeying the rules. —
Now she could boast of having been a defendant as well as a juror. Her particular expertise would be in even higher demand. Craig elected to raise her hourly rate.
