The Girl

I went to the courthouse the other day for the first time in my life. I was shuffled in to a courtroom with two dozen pews quite full of people. I looked around the room of course to check out who else was in the miserable state of irony that I was in, having been charged with a ticket for riding my bike on the sidewalk two blocks down from my boyfriend's apartment.

They were mostly young men of color, except a girl sitting across the room who caught my eye. She wore a white dress with short sleeves, pretty plain actually. Her hair was black and neatly pinned in a pony tail and a strand of delicate pearls hung around her neck. She kept her head down so it was difficult to see her face. She appeared deeply emerged in the book she was reading, possibly too emerged for it to have been truly of genuine interest. She looked up once in a while to scan the faces around her and then for a moment she appeared at a loss of what to do with herself, before opening her book again to duck back into her camouflage of literary engagement.

A police officer announced a few names. A few of the men responded and walked up to the podium, took some pieces of paper and walked out of the courtroom. I looked back at the girl to see whether she would respond to things happening like normal people do. She was looking up alright, her book still held open by her thumb, the binding sitting snugly between her thighs. The others in the room went back to staring at their feet, quieting their children, and playing with the paper slips we were given to sign, but she continued staring straight ahead. The cop walked to the side of the room, but her gaze didn't budge. I couldn't stop staring at that point, not until I figured out what was captivating her.

Suddenly, her head dropped, breaking the spell, but something else fell onto her lap. She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand and I realized that of course, it was tears. Tears. Surrounded by benches full of anxious people fondling pieces of paper. She was lost in her tears. Tears that obviously had nothing to do with her petty crime and reason for being here or her silly book, tears that obviously could not be understood by anyone sitting in this room, tears that she is completely and utterly alone with for the indefinite time that we will all be stuck here. For what felt like several hours, I stared at her in pity.

And then, a man walked into the aisle beside her and broke my view. He was an older man, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts like most others in the room, not particularly attractive, with a small protruding belly. He reached out his hand, looked straight at her blotchy face, smeared with her hopeless tears, and smiling, introduced himself as if it was the most natural thing in the world to chat up the only person crying in a room full of people. She appeared shocked for only a split second after which she smiled back. He talked to her. She talked back. A few minutes went by and her tears have dried. They were chuckling now. The officer hushed the room to be quiet. She smiled at the man and returned to reading her book, not as engaged as she appeared before, but more convincingly so. He had saved her somehow.