Spray-painted in brown on the marble courthouse wall were the words, “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” The bottoms of the letters bled. And beside them was a painting of a woman sitting at a table with a glass of water.

Jasmine gazed out the corner of her eye at her artwork, then down at her stained, fraying sneakers. She stood between two police officers, one of them clutching her backpack. And before her stood Sergeant Geraldine Scott. Her badge reflected the flashing red and blue lights of the cars.

She stared at Jasmine with all the emotion of a shark.

“This is the seventh government building you’ve vandalized,” she said, her words clipped and crisp.

“I don’t recall breaking anything,” Jasmine muttered through her teeth.

The sergeant’s eyes flicked to the woman in the graffiti. Her cheekbones were sunken, the lines of her eye sockets sharp and jutting. One bony hand pressed against her sweating brow. Her fingernails were dark from dirt. She gazed slack-jawed into her chipped glass of murky water.

“Who’s this supposed to be?” Sergeant Scott asked.

Jasmine felt her will crack ever so slightly. Pain trickled through. It threatened to fill her chest and crush her heart. Her downcast eyes studied the cuffs around her wrists, the paint spotting her fingertips.

“My sister,” she murmured. “Erica.”

“Is she sick?”

“Was.”

The sergeant breathed in sharply through her nose, then exhaled a long, loud stream. She slid her hands onto her hips. “And you think she’d like this? Watching you deface public property?”

Jasmine pursed her lips to smother her chuckles as the pain continued to rise. It lapped the edges of her heart. She glanced over at her backpack of spray cans—the ones Erica bought for her on her sixteenth birthday, a month prior to her diagnosis. Didn’t she tell Jasmine to “go on, go paint the town and all that”?

“I think she’d call it an improvement.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Sergeant Scott snapped.

“You don’t see me laughing.”

The sergeant’s shoes clicked against the concrete. She loomed over Jasmine, her face a mask of adult disappointment.

“You know you’ve made matters worse for yourself. You’re gonna be up to your elbows in fines. I hope it was worth it.”

The pain had by now swallowed Jasmine’s heart whole. She could feel it bucking, pounding the walls of her chest, struggling for breath, desperate to escape.

She sniffed. Her eyes burned with tears she refused to shed. The corner of her mouth quirked as she said, “Made you look.”

Sergeant Scott recoiled, just the slightest stiffening of her spine edging her away from the cuffed teen. But the moment was short lived. She jerked her chin at the officers with a huff.

“Get her out of here.”