Conviction (30 page)

I say, “I’m fine.” I pull my arm away, and doubt flickers across Maddie’s face.

“We’d said—we’d said six, right? Did I miss something? We were all waiting for you, and I told my parents…” She reaches up to push some of her hair behind
her ear. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No.” I turn back to my locker, my heart lodged in my throat. What is there to tell her? It’s too late to take everything back, and there’s nothing I can say
that’ll change a thing about who I am.

“Braden—” Her hand goes uncertainly toward mine, hovers a second, and then pulls back again. “Are you okay? Are you going to tell me what happened? Say
something.”

“I said I’m fine.” I turn back around and meet her eyes. “I just—I don’t think we should talk anymore.”

“Are you—are you breaking up with me?”

The words are a stake through my heart. “There’s nothing to
break up
,” I say, putting the words in quotes with my fingers. “It’s not like we were together,
Maddie. It wasn’t anything big. I was just being stupid.”

The bell rings. Maddie stares past me, blinking rapidly, hugging her arms around herself. The halls fill with people, and I wish right then that I were any one of them besides myself. I say,
“You should go to class.”

“Can’t we—”

But I’m already walking away, already erasing the look on her face from my memory. I wish she’d never trusted me. I should’ve just left her alone. “You’ll get in
trouble if you’re late.”

T
he night before Alex testifies, I hear Mr. Buchwald’s red Miata pull up to our street, and he’s at the door before I can disappear. He
comes in with takeout dinner and loosens his tie and the buttons on his sleeve, and says, “Tonight we’re going to prepare you for cross-examination.”

Laila Shah is going to rest her case soon after the jury hears from Alex Reyes tomorrow, and after that, Mr. Buchwald will present his. Before me, he’ll bring out the woman whose dog Frank
Reyes killed and who will say he was reckless and impulsive, a different weather guy who’ll say my dad’s account of the fog sounds reasonable, a neighbor who’ll testify that Frank
Reyes threw parties that turned loud and sometimes violent. He’ll bring out Frank Reyes’s record to show he was caught with marijuana when he was nineteen and the year after was
arrested for reckless driving, and he’ll question Jordan Dadier, who accused Frank Reyes and the LAPD of using excessive force during an arrest. Dadier will show medical bills and pictures of
the broken cheekbone and bloodied face he’ll say he got after Frank Reyes beat him, and he’ll tell the jury that the department threatened and harassed him when he tried to file a
complaint. Jimmy will show up clean-cut and in a suit and testify—anything, I guess, for an old friend—that my dad was calm and relaxed when he left his house. An expert medical witness
who bills a thousand dollars an hour will question the coroner’s findings.

And then me. Mr. Buchwald hasn’t come right out and said it, not in so many words, but I know my testimony’s going to matter most.

Mr. Buchwald wolfs down his dinner, a foil-wrapped burrito dripping whole pinto beans onto our table, and hammers me with cross-examination questions, interrupting me midsentence and quoting me
back at myself and raising his voice. At first I try to wilt under his questioning and fumble my answers, hoping he’ll decide I’m not good at this and he’ll do better without me
after all, but he just gets louder and louder until his words feel like an assault and I’m rattled enough to tell him what he wants. I tell myself it’s just practice and that what I say
doesn’t matter yet, and I try to talk softly so Trey can’t hear. We go through the whole process another time, and then he flips a switch and suddenly he’s smiley and nice, trying
to get me to go back on what I’m saying because he’s being nice about it. That one’s harder. Apparently I trust too easily.

After that, he makes me bring down three different shirts and pants so he can decide what he wants me to wear to my court date. He picks gray pants I rarely wear anywhere but church and a light
blue dress shirt. When he’s finally satisfied, he asks if there’s anything else I need to go over before April 30. I tell him I don’t have a ride to the courthouse, and this time
I raise my voice enough for Trey to overhear. If I were braver, I’d just ask him again to come. And maybe if I were a better brother he’d come because he wanted to.

Mr. Buchwald tells me to look in the phone book to find a cab. “And come early,” he says. “We don’t want you stumbling in like a tardy freshman. That’s not how we
need the jury to view you.”

I think about all the footage I’ve seen that I wasn’t supposed to watch, about how God saw me do that. How all this time I used Maddie to try to hide. “I still don’t
think it’s a good idea for me to get up there.”

Mr. Buchwald takes off his glasses and sets them on the table. He leans back in his chair so the two front legs hover above the ground.

“Braden, let me tell you how I see you,” he says. “Let me tell you why I believe you’ll be a phenomenal witness. A pep talk, if you will. Think of it as a pregame huddle.
You aren’t skittish and emotional like the woman who claimed your father nearly hit her, or smarmy like Tucker Walker. You’re not angry and vengeful like Molson. You’re wholesome,
dependable, and responsible. You’re confident in your own rightness. A devoted son. The jury will look at you and be reminded of their own sons. You are your father’s mouthpiece. And I
have every confidence that you will convincingly illuminate for the jury the fear you and your father felt.”

“But I’m not—”

He lets the chair thud against the floor. “Juries are sympathetic to fear,” he says. “They’re human, after all. I can all but guarantee that at some point during this
trial, each juror has asked himself what he would have done were he similarly threatened. No one wants to live in a world where a man can’t defend himself or his family. We can debate
technicalities over fog all day long, but in the end, no one else was there that night besides you and Reyes’s nephew. If we can convince the jury that you and your father were afraid, then I
believe the case is ours. If the jury doesn’t believe you, of course—then I may as well rest my case before I call a single witness to the stand.”

I’ve never seen Alex in anything but a baseball uniform, and to court he wears glasses and a collared shirt that make him look like more of a nerd than I would’ve
pegged him for—like someone who probably plays chess—and a baseball cap, which is one of the things that Mr. Buchwald’s forbidden me to wear. The hat says
LA ABRA
on it. Judge
Scherr makes him take it off, and Alex does it as contemptuously as possible. He slouches and crosses his arms over his chest. He has a deeper voice than you’d expect looking at him, and
twice Laila has to ask him to move closer to the microphone so he can be heard. And every word he says, every little gesture—all of it drips with disdain.

He and his uncle were close, he tells the jury. Like brothers. The night of February 9, his uncle had driven him into San Jose to hang out with a cousin of his, which they did every week because
the cousin had moved recently for school and was homesick. Sometimes he and Frank slept over. That night they didn’t, and they were driving home when Frank heard the dispatch come over the
radio, which he always left on. They were right by where the other driver was, so he went. He flicked on his sirens and sped up.

Laila pauses him there. “Alex, what was the visibility like that night?”

“Foggy. Like every single person has already said. But you could still see a freaking
person
walking around in front of you.”

“Could you clearly see the suspect’s car?”

“Clearly.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Blue Range Rover. Tinted windows. Lots of bumper stickers.”

“Did your uncle recognize the car?”

“Right away.” His lip curls, a half sneer. “Not hard when your license plate is M-R-T-R-Y-N-R.”

“Did your uncle plan to confront Mr. Raynor?”

“I mean, he planned to give him a ticket.”

“Did he plan to engage in any sort of conflict?”

“No. He just wanted to get it over with.”

“How do you know?”

“My uncle’s not a hard guy to read. He always acts the same way when he just wants to get something over with. He goes like this”—he jostles his shoulders up and down the
way guys do sometimes before they go up to the plate, like when you’re psyching yourself up. “And he said, ‘Hey, I could eat a barn, after this, you want to stop and get Mickey
D’s or something?’ That’s the other thing he always does when he has to do something he doesn’t want to. He eats. I said yeah, sure, whatever, we’ll get french fries
or whatever if you want, even though I don’t normally eat that crap. He sat there for another second or two and then he got out. He went around to the passenger side. I was waiting for him in
the car and my buddy was texting me, so I was kind of looking up and down. I could kind of hear them talking, but not really.”

“Did your uncle, at any point, draw his gun?”

“No. I would’ve been watching if it was something like that.”

“What happened next?”

“I heard the other car start. It didn’t take long, so I thought he just let them off with a warning or something. But then they hit him with their car and knocked him over. I could
hear him yelling. The car went up, like on a curb. Then it stopped and then it backed up and went up over him like that again. They made a U-turn over the highway and went through the middle and
got away.”

“Did it look like an accident?”

“It wasn’t an accident. They had to swerve to hit him. They had to drive the wrong
way
to hit him, and they hit him twice. When I got to him, he kept trying to grab my hand
and saying he needed CPR, but I don’t know CPR. I got down next to him and tried, but he kept trying to scream because it hurt him. I called nine-one-one, and he told me to call again, so I
called again. But he was having trouble breathing and then he couldn’t talk anymore. So I tried to breathe into his mouth, but he kept jerking his head around like he wanted to get away and
he was crying, so I stopped. I told him it would be fine. I told him we’d go get his stupid french fries like he wanted. The paramedics showed up, like, five hours later, it felt like, and at
first they were moving fast and actually trying to do something for him, and then they all just gave up. They just stood around putting him on a stretcher and looking at each other and looking at
me and I heard he’d stopped crying, but no one would tell me he died, so I thought he was wondering the whole way in the ambulance why I wasn’t there with him and I kept texting him to
tell him I was on my way. When I got to the hospital, they told me he died. And that’s it.”

The camera shifts then so the jury’s in it, and in the jurors’ box, the woman sitting all the way on top reaches up and wipes her eyes. And I freeze up then, not just because Mr.
Buchwald’s told me how dangerous it is when the jury responds emotionally to the opposition, but because I know the look on that woman’s face. It’s the same way I felt playing
Ceres when Rory told me about Adrian’s sister being sick right before I gave him that home run, how for a second or two before you come back to yourself, you stop caring about justice because
some tempting, false emotion stabs you somewhere where you’re weak.

When the prosecutor’s finished, Mr. Buchwald comes up again for his cross-examination. I’ve seen enough of these by now to know how it’s supposed to go, what you’re
trying to achieve. The lawyer’s the one telling the story, not the witness. There are a lot of yes-or-no questions and you want to lead the witness as much as you can. You want to violate
personal space and make him uncomfortable, you want to badger him into contradicting himself, you want to go so fast and pick so mercilessly at everything he’s said that he stumbles and looks
bad. You want him to break.

In his cross-examination, Mr. Buchwald tries. He barely waits for Alex’s answers before going onto his next questions, and a few times when Alex starts to answer, Mr. Buchwald talks over
him, saying, “I must remind you, Mr. Reyes, that you’re under oath.” But Alex doesn’t stumble even once. He watches Mr. Buchwald with a detached, disdainful coldness, and
nothing catches him off guard.

When it’s over, I sit in my dark bedroom, blue-tinged shadows rearing up on the wall from the glow of my screen, and I feel so sick with fear I nearly pick up my phone to text Trey. If he
were here, I could tell myself that things will be all right again. But it’s two in the morning and he’s out God knows where; I heard his car leave before I started watching.

I try to imagine telling the judge about everything I’ve seen, what the fallout would be. Whatever trouble I’d get in, I don’t know if it would be worse than having to testify.
I back up the video again and pause on a screenshot of the woman crying. Would someone like her believe me that Frank Reyes had it in for my dad? That out there on that road in the fog, with no one
watching, that whatever anger and resentment had been knotting up inside him uncoiled and lashed out into a violence my dad had no choice but to defend himself against?