DC By the Book

Excerpt: Nicky lives in a squat row house on Twenty-first Street in the Kingman Park neighborhood, the same house he grew up in, the one his dad bought in 1945 for thirty thousand dollars. Today it’d be worth quite a bit more – farther down Benning Road, white families have been buying up houses in these old middle-class Black neighborhoods like overpriced, fixer-upper candy. Every time her mother or aunt comes back, they talk about how much the neighborhood has changed. But this street always looks exactly the same to Bird . . .

Excerpt: Outside, the street is dead quiet. The District has been under a strict curfew since the Beltway quarantine. It’s illegal for her to even walk on the sidewalk without a permit, and this is the sort of neighborhood where the police love to harass people for no reason at all.

Excerpt: In this neighborhood, “pizza” means Domino’s or Papa John’s. She sighs; she has complicated feelings about Northwest, but it sure as hell has better food.

Excerpt: She throws open the car door – unlocked, all this time? – and falls to her knees on the front lawn. Her front lawn. Only now, clutching her stomach and coughing up vomit, does she recognize where Roosevelt has taken her. The yellow quarantine tape swims in her vision, disguising and changing the yellow stucco house where she’s lived most of her life. There’s something hidden there, there’s something terrible, she thinks, but doesn’t know what.

Excerpt: No other quarantine signs in this upper-middle-class neighborhood, not like Nicky’s stricken Northeast streets.

Excerpt: The foyer reeks from antimicrobial foggers, a throat-searing stink of burning tires doused in a cat piss and Pine-Sol that makes Coffee stumble back against the doorjamb.

Excerpt: The C&O Canal runs from the heart of DC to deep rural Maryland, and Coffee’s meeting place is a few miles over the DC-Maryland border. Bird sneaks onto the towpath in Georgetown before the ten o’clock curfew, dressing in a hoodie, baggy jeans, and a pair of Nicky’s old Nikes laced tight. This disguises takes her over her neighbor’s fences, until she reaches Rosedale Street and saunters onto the sidewalk like she owns the thing. No cars follow her. She only passes a few hardy runners on the towpath, but they vanish a half hour before curfew. She jumps at every squirrel scampering through rotting leaves, at ever duck paddling through the water.

Excerpt: Bird has loved sitting on the canal in the summer, light streaming through the trees and the soft gurgle of water flowing past. Even in the stink of July, when the algae floats die in one great Malthusian jamboree, she has loved flying down the towpath on her bicycle, geese scrambling out of her way and clouds of gnats bumbling in confusion behind her. She would go with Nicky and Mo and little Aaron toddling behind on his tricycle. They would barbecue by the river and avoid the geese and complain about the mosquitoes as the sun went down.

Excerpt: So she sits on the scuffed linoleum beside his cot, where half a decade ago two would-be-forever lovers carved RJ luvs Cherry 2008 right beside the horns of the school mascot. She’s never been inside the high school before, and only passed it a few times on her way to Caps games in RFK. Now the gym, originally the home of the Eastern Ramblers, hosts over fifty kids exposed to toxic gas.

Excerpt: She falls asleep like that, touching him, her head on the edge of Aaron’s cot, lulled by a chorus of a hundred breaths and the hiss of steam through bulky pipes.

Excerpt: The honking rises into a chorus, competing Morse codes of Washingtonian road rage, months of frustration sublimated and redirected at the human-scale target of her mother’s white Mercedes. Coffee whips around and gasses the car. The traffic hasn’t moved very far, but a few of those drivers sounded willing to kill for six feet of forward motion