by Emma Patz
Before we’re brought into the room with the one-way mirror, we wait in an empty office at the back of the station. We all look alike, which is to say, we all look like the suspect: white, gangly, with tired eyes and fried curls.
“What do you think this one did?” I ask Jen, who I’ve gotten to know in my months on the lineup circuit.
Her eyes dart to the other girls in the room, as if the suspect could be among us, though we both know she isn’t. Suspects wait in separate rooms. This is the way it’s always been. “Maybe she didn’t do anything,” Jen says. “Maybe she’s innocent.”
“Grow up,” I want to tell her—but I don’t. I’ll probably have to see her again the next time a white girl with shitty hair goes off the deep end, and I don’t want things to be awkward. The lineup community is just too small for that.
I nod at Rebecca, who’s too busy rehearsing her ‘blank stare’ to notice my greeting—and then at Gigi, who’s hunched over her phone, texting in the far corner of the room. We’re technically not supposed to have our phones back here, but she’s dating a cop so she doesn’t care about the rules. She met him doing lineup work. He spotted her through the one-way mirror, picked her out from all the other girls with unwaxed eyebrows and pending grad school applications and said, ‘that one.’ Once, she told me that they like to roleplay during sex. “He pretends to be a cop and I pretend to be a criminal,” she explained.
How creative! I thought.
There’s a knock at the door and an officer peeks his head into the room. “You ladies ready?”
As we follow him through the halls, I hang back until I’m walking in-step with Gigi. “When Joe ‘arrests’ you, do you use his real handcuffs?” I ask.
“Nah. Just the fake ones from the sex shop.”
“Like with the cheetah-print fur?”
She nods. “Otherwise, it would just feel wrong.”
The suspect is waiting for us with her public defense attorney, tapping her palm against her thigh like she’s keeping tempo for a middle school jazz band. We’re not supposed to talk to the suspects, so instead, I offer her a half-smile. I’m nervous, too, I want to tell her.
The officer hands us each a numbered placard, and as we file past him into the room with the one-way mirror, I watch Jen pull her shoulders back and Rebecca drop her chin. Even Gigi puffs her chest out, a little.
As for me, I make sure to hold my placard still, steady.
This right here is why we do this. Why we call out sick from our waitressing shifts and hire babysitters for the afternoon. It’s not for the twenty-five-dollar stipend, but for the few, fleeting moments where anything is possible. Where we could be chosen—even in error.
Emma Patz is originally from the Greater Boston Area, and holds a Bachelor of Science from New York University. Her most recent work explores attachment, emotional displacement, and sapphic intimacy, and has appeared in Heimat Review, Spellbinder Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently based out of Los Angeles, CA.