Courtship: A 'Snowflake' Novel

by Nia Forrester

  “What’re you doin’ here, for real?” he asked again his voice quieter. “At this party.”

  “Same as you. Babysitting.”

  Prophet laughed. “Who you think I’m babysitting?”

  “Manny, probably. Dee told me all about him. About how … unpredictable he is.”

  “She’s one to talk.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” She shrugged. “But that’s part of her charm.”

  “Manny’s too.”

  “Then they’re in there somewhere being charming together, I guess.” She inclined her head in the direction of the loud house, happy that she was no longer in there herself, or milling around with the crowd in the backyard. She liked it precisely where she was.

  “And we’re out here.”

  “Yeah,” she said, blushing again. “We are.”

  His eyes fell to her lips as she spoke, making Jada wonder whether her lipstick was smudged, or might be too bright. She didn’t usually spend a lot of time obsessing about whether guys thought she was pretty or not.

  But tonight, she was thinking all kinds of stupid things, like hoping the streetlight didn’t hit her face at a weird angle and make her look ghoulish, and that her hair hadn’t turned dull and lusterless from the humidity.

  In maybe an hour or so, Dee would come looking for her, and she might never see Prophet again, unless she “made an impression” and made him want to seek her out or ask Dee about her. And he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be easily impressed. He seemed like the kind that girls tried to impress.

  “You know there’s a pretty good chance she won’t come back, right?”

  “Who, Dee?” Jada shook her head. “No, she’ll definitely come back. She wouldn’t leave me.”

  “You sound sure.”

  “I am. She’s too terrified of my father. And she told him we’d be back by midnight. She wouldn’t leave me or let anything happen to me.”

  Prophet grinned full-on at that. His teeth were bright in the dim light.

  “You have a curfew?”

  Sticking out her chin, determined not to let the fact that she had concerned parents be cause for embarrassment, Jada nodded.

  “That’s good.” His smile faded. “’Cause girls like you shouldn’t be out at places like this too late.”

  “What’s ‘girls like me’?” she asked.

  “Girls who’re in AP English.”

  Jada smiled.

  “This whole entire city probably needs a curfew,” he added.

  Then before she could object, or even knew what he was up to, he was taking off his button-down and handing it to her.

  Hesitating only for a moment, Jada took it and pulled it on over her top. It smelled like that new earthy, masculine cologne that girls were going crazy over, and had begun spraying on the sleeves of their sweatshirts so they could get a whiff that reminded them of their boyfriends.

  “Lemme …” Ibrahim reached over and helped her button it up high enough that her red top wasn’t visible at all anymore, and then he folded the sleeves to her elbows. When his fingers, brushed against her arms, she remained very still, concentrating on the sensation, memorizing it.

  Once the sleeves were rolled up, her eyes met his, and Jada swallowed hard. Suddenly, the meaning of the gesture, him handing her his shirt and then helping her cover hers made sense when coupled with his comment about ‘this party’ and ‘places like this’. As did the significance of his blue plaid button-down over the plain white tee, and his blue-and-white K-Swiss sneakers. The blue football jersey guy. The blue t-shirt Manny was wearing. Blue, everywhere she looked.

  “I didn’t kn…”

  Ibrahim shrugged. “Why would you?”

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice a near-whisper.

  “It’s not just Dee,” he said. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to you either.”

  4

  Then

  It wasn’t always like they said on television. They were always trying to make things sound all dramatic. To be affiliated, you didn’t have to shoot a stranger in the head or get beat within an inch of your life. Being associated with a set—as opposed to becoming a member, which was something else entirely—wasn’t easy, but it was easier than something like that should have been.

  For Prophet, it had happened just by kicking it with dudes he had known all his life—his friends, friends of his brothers, dudes his father did business with. And as he got older, he performed a series of seemingly small tasks for them, moving packages from one place to another, sitting around on rooftops and paying attention to movement in the streets—the movement of people it was important to track, the movement of undercover detectives who were never quite as undercover as they thought they were.

  And gradually, he began to get paid for that work. Some of the older dudes slid him a few dollars here and there, and then even more dollars so that over time the pay was more than decent. Much too decent to pretend the work itself was innocuous.

  But Prophet didn’t ask questions. His discretion and incurious nature were respected, as was his preference to move alone. He moved faster, and more stealthily if he was on his own, and he focused better on his surroundings if not accompanied by some swaggering, shit-talking, big-mouth. When people questioned his long-wolf quality, his brother Manny spoke up for him.

  This nigga cool as ice, he’d say. Cool as ice.

  And soon everyone else adopted that mantra when describing him.

  Prophet? That nigga young, but he cool as ice.

  Cool or not, when you did his kind of work, it was important for people to know who you were with. Because it was sometimes the only shield you had. Your colors were your identification and protection. But those things were a double-edged sword. Wrong colors, wrong place, and things could go very, very badly, very, very fast. Those were the stories that most often made the news—red car riddled with bullets; twelve-year-old in a blue Little League uniform shot and left paralyzed—the irrational, mindless shows of force.

  Contrary to popular belief though, they weren’t animals. Unless there was an all-out war afoot, and as long as people respected territorial boundaries, common sense prevailed. A pretty girl showing up at a certain kind of party in red would draw attention. But then most people would do what Ibrahim had done—size her up, see who she was rolling with, and conclude, as he had, that maybe she didn’t know. Maybe, she was just that naïve.

  And if she had wide-open dark eyes filled with Bambi-like curiosity; if she smiled shyly and let her gaze drop to the ground when you looked at her; if she talked about writing a paper on Huey P. Newton and Black Radicalism for her AP English class? Well, that would be all the confirmation you needed. She didn’t know.

  And her greatest misstep was having come to the party with dumb-ass Dee, who did know, but had probably been too self-absorbed, too preoccupied with getting her boyfriend back that she didn’t think about how she was walking her little cousin into a sea of blue, dressed in a top the color of blood.

  ~~~

  “My father is going to kill her.”

  “Told you,” Prophet said. “When those two get together, it’s like …”

  “Nothing else matters,” Jada finished for him.

  Then she got that dreamy look in her eyes that girls always got when they thought something was romantic.

  It was past one a.m. and though they had relocated from the space between the parked cars to leaning against the gate in front of the house, where they would be clearly visible if someone were looking for them, there was still no sign of either Dee or Manny.

  Prophet didn’t want her to panic, but he thought it was obvious they had gone off together somewhere else entirely and lost track of time.

  “If push comes to shove, I could take you home.”

  “Would you?” Jada looked hopeful.

  He shook his head. “This is where you’re supposed to say, ‘thank you, but I think I’d better wait for my cousin.’”

  She lo
oked puzzled. “But you offered.”

  “And you don’t know me like that,” he countered.

  Jada rolled her eyes.

  “I don’t know how you even make it through this world,” he said almost to himself.

  But she wasn’t in this world. Not his world anyway. Maybe she was from the one where you could go to parties and meet guys and talk to them for a few hours, and then get in a car with them and drive away, confident that you would get to your intended destination unharmed.

  “We’ve been out here talking all night,” she said laughing, like he was the deluded one.

  “We’ve been out here talking, so now you know me?”

  “A little bit, yes. I know you have two brothers. I know their names …”

  “I told you all that. How you know any of it is true?”

  Jada ignored him and kept talking.

  “And that you hate Cap’n Crunch, but because you hate going to the grocery store even more and it’s your brothers’ favorite you wind up having it every day.”

  Prophet grinned, already having forgotten how that topic came up in their hours’ long conversation.

  “I know you’re really smart by the way you listen more than talk. I know that when you think something’s stupid or questionable, you bite your lower lip to avoid saying it’s stupid or questionable. And I know by the way your brow knits just the tiniest bit when you say their names that even though you’re the youngest, you feel responsible for your brothers and worry about them.”

  The grin fell from Prophet’s face.

  “I know you don’t have a mother, even though you didn’t say so, because something in your eyes changes when I mention my mother. But I know that when you had your mother, you loved her very much. Because you ask me questions a mother would ask. I think those questions were once asked of you.”

  His eyes were fixed on hers. She didn’t look away and didn’t even miss a beat.

  “I think there’s a lot you question about the world, about your world, like the way you questioned the label, ‘Black radicalism.’ I know that you have ideas that you’ve probably never shared with anyone; because you don’t think they’d understand them and you’re not sure you understand those ideas yourself. And I know …” Her voice slowed and softened. “I know you’re the kind of guy who takes the shirt off his back to give it to a girl he isn’t even sure knows enough about anything to see past his colors to know the kind of person he really is.”

  Prophet’s heart wasn’t just beating hard now, it felt like it was hammering against his ribcage. It felt like he could hear it, like she could hear it.

  His lips parted as he prepared to speak, when out of nowhere, there was Dee, and Manny.

  “Jada!” Dee practically shrieked, as though she wasn’t the one who had gone MIA. “Where you been? We have to go … Damn!”

  ~~~

  “You comin’ or what?”

  “I can’t. I ain’ got no ride. Why you don’t come over here and get me?”

  “Nah. Forget it.”

  “Prophet, I said I would come. I just need the ride.”

  “You know I don’t have a car, Breonna. Just forget …”

  “Borrow your brother’s car. Or …”

  “Forget it,” he said yet again. “It’s late anyway.”

  “So what? I can still …”

  “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  He hung up before she could say anything else.

  He didn’t really want to see Breonna. What he wanted was to sleep, and to un-see Jada. She said she was seventeen.

  About to turn eighteen, she added a little too quickly.

  What’s ‘about to’ mean?

  In ... At the beginning of next year, she said finally.

  Prophet had smiled then. He suspected from the way she said it that “at the beginning” was probably more likely sometime like March or even April. She’d looked down at her red sneakers and scuffed the toe against the asphalt a little, uncomfortable with even the minor untruth.

  Seventeen. He was glad he’d asked. If she was older, he would have kissed her while they were sitting there on the curb between those cars. But seventeen though …

  When Dee and Manny finally showed up, Dee’s hair was flat in the back and her t-shirt looked like it had been crumpled up into a ball before she put it back on. Manny was chewing on a toothpick sticking out of one corner of his mouth and had that lazy-eyed, just-got-laid look. Prophet guessed he and Dee had been in a car somewhere all the time they were gone. Reaffirming their commitment, or whatever.

  Panicked by the late hour, Dee hadn’t even given him and Jada enough time to say ‘goodbye’, ‘cool to meet you’, or anything else. She just dragged her by the arm down the block where her car was probably parked.

  Prophet watched them go and when Jada looked back over her shoulder, putting a hand up to the collar of his shirt, which she was still wearing, he’d shrugged to let her know that he didn’t mind if she left with it.

  After that, all Manny was interested in was coming home, which was cool with him. But while his brother had gone in and fallen directly asleep, Prophet was hyped-up and restless. He tried television for a while but couldn’t focus. Breonna was his next idea for how to mellow out a little but now he was relieved that she couldn’t make it over to the house.

  Pacing back and forth in the living room, he turned the television on again, but didn’t watch it. He knew what he was feeling was frustration, but not sexual frustration, exactly. It was a sense of wanting some hard-to-name thing. He wasn’t sure how long he paced before there was a pounding on the wall, coming from his father’s room.

  And then his voice, annoyed, impatient.

  Prophet! Take your ass to bed! Or go si’down somewhere! Hell is wrong wit’chu makin’ all that noise?

  It was only then that he noticed it was almost three a.m. He stopped pacing, turned off the television and went into his bedroom to try to get some sleep.

  It seemed like only minutes had passed, but it had to have been hours before he opened his eyes again. Cool hands had crept up under his sheets and were making their way across his chest. A warm body was arranging itself alongside his. At first he was too groggy to be puzzled, then another hand reached under the waistband of his boxers.

  Bolting upright, heart pounding Prophet pulled back to find Breonna looking at him, her expression mildly amused. It was still dark outside.

  “Just me,” she said, holding her hands up.

  Prophet ran a hand over his face and shook his head a little to clear it.

  “What you doin’ here?” he asked, his voice rough from sleep. He looked toward his bedroom window. It was still dark out.

  “You called me,” she reminded him.

  Glancing at his clock-radio, he made a sound in the back of his throat.

  “Almost three hours ago. And you ain’ have a ride.”

  “I got one.” Breonna started peeling off her top, a pink t-shirt with a picture of a popular girl-band on the front.

  “Bree …”

  “What?”

  Under the shirt, she was wearing a white cotton bra. The kind female athletes wore.

  “You didn’t need to …”

  “When my man calls, I come,” she said, reaching for the waistband of his boxers once again.

  She said it casually, but Prophet knew she was testing him, prodding at the boundaries of their relationship to see just how far he would let her go.

  “You know I’m not your man. So let’s just get that shit straight right off the top.”

  She sighed, looked away from him and turned onto her back. “You know what I mean.”

  “I’ma get some sleep. You don’t need to …”

  She sighed again, but when she spoke, sounded resigned. “I came all the way over here. And you mean to tell me …”

  “But why you gotta make it so easy, Breonna?”

  “What?” She sat up, her hair swinging and cascading to one side.


  “I called you, and you couldn’t come. I didn’t volunteer to come get you even though I could. What’s that tell you?”

  Her lower lip trembled a little.

  “Don’t make it so fuckin’ easy,” Prophet said again. “Anything worth having don’t come just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  At that, Breonna turned away from him and swung her legs over the edge of his bed. He saw now that she had already removed her jeans, or sweatpants or whatever. One of his brothers, or his father had to have let her in.

  Before she could stand, he grabbed her arm.

  “Look,” he said. “I didn’t mean …”

  “Yes, you did,” she said. But she had relaxed already and wasn’t trying to pull away.

  He could still have her, he realized with a kind of sad wonder. Even after what he just said, he could still have her if he wanted to.

  “C’mere,” he said, pulling her toward him, lifting the sheets so she could get under them again. “Where was you at all night?”

  “Nowhere. My auntie’s,” Breonna said, arranging herself in front of him. “Just … chillin’. Where were you at?”

  “A party. Over there by … It was wack, anyway.”

  Seasons. That’s the only reason I’d want to move to the East coast, I think. To see the summer turn to fall, and then to winter. I have this picture in my head. Probably some fantasy from books or watching TV or something. Of me playing in the snow like a little kid.

  He and Jada had been talking about whether people on either coast romanticized the other—New Yorkers secretly wondering whether Californians had a cooler life and vice versa.

  And then she had turned and looked at him, biting in the corner of her lower lip, her pert nose wrinkling as she did. Her eyes were shining, her black, black hair beginning to expand and halo around her head from the moist night air, no longer as straight as it had been just a couple hours before when he first saw her.

  I kinda like being from here, she’d said. I don’t think it’s cooler in New York or anywhere else probably. Except for the snow. Is that small-minded and stupid? To not care about living anywhere else?