Courtship: A 'Snowflake' Novel

by Nia Forrester

  But not just about the outside world. Maybe sometimes you could tell me a little bit more about you.

  The thrill Jada got from knowing that he was curious about her was almost as profound as if he had made a bonafide declaration of love. Part of her didn’t even get why it was so exciting to have him say he wanted to hear about her.

  Just like she hadn’t gotten why, that night they first met, the hairs on her arms had literally stood on end when he came close.

  Once they started talking, the party seemed too loud to have the kind of conversation they had been having. Prophet led her outside to find somewhere to sit and wait for Desiree to be done with his brother. It was crazy how willingly she had followed.

  Jada had at first gone to lean against someone’s car when he held her forearm and laughed.

  Nah, he said. Don’t do that. ‘Round here, folks get beat down for less.

  And she had laughed as well though she knew he wasn’t entirely joking.

  So instead they sat on the curb. And there they stayed for almost three hours. Talking.

  “Dang, that’s depressing,” Lisa said now, pulling her back to the present. “You’re not crushin’ on nobody?”

  “Nope,” Jada said cheerfully. “Not crushing on a soul.”

  And it wasn’t exactly a lie. Not exactly. Because what she felt for Prophet, she already knew, was far, far more than a crush.

  “Dang,” Lisa said again.

  9

  Then

  The thing about their house was that it was always so damn loud. Jail was loud, too, but not like this. In jail, the sounds were almost always of aggression or assertion. Staff yelling orders at inmates, inmates yelling curses at each other, and the occasional unmistakable sound of a scuffle, and of flesh on flesh—sex, violence, or some combination of both.

  Even in the middle of the night, it was loud. Dudes having nightmares or hallucinations, or crying out for their mothers, for wives, children; or for a God they believed had forsaken them. If things grew quiet, it was a menacing quiet which meant that something very bad was about to happen, or already had.

  The last time it got quiet while Ibrahim was at GDJ, it was because some dude had offed himself in his cell, managing to fashion a noose and hang himself during the night from one corner of his bunk. Word was, his cellie woke up to find him purple-faced, tongue protruding, eyes fixed and staring at nothing. He’d screamed for staff to come right away but it was too late. Ibrahim didn’t recall hearing the screaming, because there was always screaming, but he heard the rustle and rush as the COs descended to try to attend to the by then, long-dead man.

  Everyone spoke in hushed whispers on the block for the rest of the day. It wasn’t just the death that had gotten to them—just about everyone there had seen plenty of that—it was the determination. The way they heard it, the dead guy’s feet had been touching the ground, his knees buckled but still touching the ground, because the bunks weren’t that high. And for his cellie not to have known what was happening, he must have gone quietly.

  All anyone could talk about was how he had to have really wanted to die to pull that off, resisting the instinct to simply stand up, or reach up and loosen the self-inflicted obstruction to his next breath, to make a sound, any sound. Rumor had it, there weren’t even the expected scratch marks on dude’s neck, which usually happened when in a last gasp of remorse, suicides reached up, trying belatedly to loosen their noose.

  That mothafucka musta said, ‘get me the hell up outta here’, one of the loud-mouth dudes announced. Can’t say I don’t understand how he feel.

  And he kept talking, just harping on the same point till another inmate told him to shut the fuck up. Maybe because though they didn’t say it, there were many more of them who only wished they had the balls to pull off a final exit from their own wretched lives.

  Ibrahim wasn’t among them, though. He only wished for the day he would get out or jail, and execute a plan to make sure he never went back in. Ever.

  Within a day after the suicide, it was loud on the block again and Ibrahim came to understand the incessant noise as their way of reminding themselves that though they were caged like animals, they were still alive, still here, and still, maybe mattered to someone.

  Now that he was home, he thought about how his family’s house was loud in a different way. His brothers and father yelled to each other from different rooms, communicating in the crass way that had gradually developed after Ibrahim’s mother died five years earlier. Ibrahim was about to turn fifteen when she passed, of complications from sickle cell.

  Before her passing she had struggled with the illness her entire life, her complications becoming more acute, more painful after each pregnancy. By the time she died in the hospital—her organs simply giving in after a severe flare-up—she had grown thin and weak, and moved like a woman twenty years older.

  Her name was Eve, which felt right to Ibrahim since she had been to him, the first woman in his world. When she was alive, his father had been a different man, his brothers had been different; he had been different. Then, they had all tried to accommodate quiet, order, and femininity in their home. And because she was so fragile, they had learned from her that all women should be treated as something precious and fleeting.

  Over time though, once she was gone, they had all reverted practically to the way of savages.

  He only saw it now because he couldn’t stop thinking about Jada, and taking out her letters and re-reading them, though he hadn’t even been home for a full day. Jada’s way of communicating was quiet, soft, and feminine, like his mother’s had been.

  Ibrahim remembered Jada’s voice in his head as he read her words, the way she spoke slowly, like she was wrapping her lips around each syllable. He imagined her reading the letters as she wrote them, and the way she had tilted her head backward and lifted the thick mass of dark hair off her neck with the flick of a wrist.

  She had been the object of all his fantasies while he was away. But he wasn’t sure how wise it would be to make her part of his reality now that he was out.

  Ibrahim issued a loud belch and felt a shard of heat rip through his chest.

  The empanadas that had tasted so good going down were sitting in the bottom of his gut now, like a lump of clay—heavy and hot, sending flames up toward his throat. He should have known he would get heartburn from all the spices, after so many months of bland, tasteless food.

  Lying across his bed, he thumped the center of his chest with the side of a fist, willing the burning sensation away.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He looked up.

  His father was standing at the doorway of his bedroom.

  Levi Carter was a big man. Beefy and broad, with skin that was almost coal black. People called him a variety of nicknames that were both homage to, and ridicule of his dark skin. If it was the latter, they certainly didn’t say it to his face.

  “Heartburn. Had some Mexican food while I was waitin’.”

  His father grinned and nodded. “Gotta pace yourself,” he said. “Go easy on that stuff. Don’t have too much right out the gate.”

  Then he stood there, and Ibrahim lay there.

  They had never had much to say to each other.

  Just before his mother died, Ibrahim had still been young enough to cling more to her than to his semi-absent father who had been largely incapable of dealing with his wife’s decline. Or he was just unable to deal in general, Ibrahim, didn’t know.

  And now she was long gone, Levi sometimes still seemed stumped about what to do with, or about his quiet, inscrutable youngest son. Ibrahim was equally stumped by his father who had a day job as a supervisor with Bay Area Rapid Transit. His side hustle, which was never discussed openly in their house, was buying and renting out properties as stash houses to dope boys who paid more than the monthly mortgage each week and paid in cash.

  Given that, it wasn’t surprising that Isaac and Immanuel had gotten in on the game, nor that they woul
d induce Ibrahim to do the same. Their father, probably realizing how hypocritical it would have been for him to object, turned a blind eye, and only stepped in to intercede when—as had happened to all of them now—they were picked up by the police.

  There had been a moment—a brief one, but a moment nevertheless—when Ibrahim considered asking his father why he did what he did. But he thought he knew. Medical bills. That had likely been what got him started on this path; the extra dough needed to pay for his wife’s expensive treatment, only some of which was covered by insurance.

  And of course, once there was lots of money coming in, it was difficult to stop, even when circumstances changed. The job at BART was now little more than a fig leaf, something his father probably kept so he could tell himself he wasn’t really a co-conspirator in the drug trade.

  “So, what you got planned today?” Levi asked. “Now that you’re a free man.”

  It was a sad effort at camaraderie.

  Ibrahim’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Haircut, shower. Clean clothes.”

  His father gave a short laugh and shook his head. “That’s a good start.”

  He turned away from the door and left Ibrahim alone once again.

  If only his old man had said something to him like Nasim had said. Something like, this is your chance to do something different, Prophet. Or, I made some mistakes, but don’t think you need to make the same ones.

  He had been hoping his father would rise to the occasion. But he never had. Even on the last day of his wife’s life, when Ibrahim and his brothers were at the hospital all day, Levi had arrived too late.

  It was true that she had been the one to tell him there was no need to miss his shift. But anyone with an ounce of emotional intelligence should have known that she didn’t mean it. Still, Levi had gone to work. And when they beeped him later, it was to send him a simple message: she passed.

  He rushed back to the hospital then, but it didn’t matter. That was Levi for you: always a day late, always a dollar short.

  ~~~

  “G’on get you some fresh kicks, young ‘un.”

  Ibrahim looked up from the barber chair.

  His hair had grown long inside, the cornrows extending well below his shoulder blades. He had just gotten them cut and his hair was almost entirely shaved off. Other cats were into that gheri curl mess, or huge ‘fros, but he wasn’t feeling all that. He wanted to shed everything of jail, and the months preceding it. To look and feel like someone entirely new.

  Manny had just pressed a knot of cash into his palm, and he took it, sliding it into the front pocket of his jeans.

  “You think I need some fresh kicks?”

  Ibrahim looked down at his feet, at his scuffed Nike Cortez. He’d worn them in court the day he got taken in to serve his sentence, and so that was what he had worn out this morning.

  “Yeah. Out here lookin’ like a damn hobo,” Manny said.

  Ibrahim laughed. “You g’on take me?”

  “Nah. I got someplace to be.”

  Immanuel dapped him up then slid on out of the barbershop. Ibrahim watched the back of his brother’s head as he left.

  Manny hadn’t asked him anything about jail. While he was there, he had only once asked him if anyone was “messin’ with” him but not since he had gotten out. Both his brothers had experienced it themselves so it was doubtful he would tell them anything they didn’t already know. And the day he went in, they told him everything they knew.

  Mind your business.

  Mind your mouth.

  Stick close to the set.

  Each week, one or another of them had come to visit. But still, Ibrahim hated how routine it felt. Like jail was just another rite of passage, a thing that everyone went through sooner or later, like getting a woody in the morning starting when you were around thirteen.

  Ever since he could remember, his brothers had looked out for him. He didn’t scrap a lot growing up, and had been kind of quiet, kind of a momma’s boy. Never weak, but the kind of quiet that made other kids think they could test him. Ibrahim’s instinct had always been to fall back unless the conflict was unavoidable. But Isaac and Immanuel taught him that if someone tried to test you, even if it was for no reason, then yeah, conflict was unavoidable.

  Sometimes you had to fight just to let people know you could. And sometimes you had to let one or both of your brothers get a couple licks in just to let everyone know that if they came for you, you would come back for them later, and you wouldn’t come alone.

  Ibrahim had learned those lessons the same way he had lessons in school—with his head, but not his heart. He didn’t have the anger and fire in his gut that you needed for a life in the streets.

  He remembered too well what it was like to climb up next to his mother in bed while she was ill. How it felt when she pulled him against her side, as she flipped through magazines, asking him whether he thought this dress, or that hairstyle would look pretty on her. Whether he would take her to some of the far-flung places on those glossy pages when he grew up.

  And he remembered when later, the discomfort was so great that she couldn’t hold the magazines herself, and would instead ask him to read her something, anything to get her mind off the pain. He was powerless over her pain, but he did small things, like learning to modulate his tone so that it was quieter, like he was reading a bedtime story. And sometimes, because he read to her in that tone, she would relax and eventually fall asleep.

  Because he remembered these things, he wondered whether his mother’s softness had in some ways made him a little soft, too.

  He didn’t want to rule East Oakland or run drugs until he bled out one night in the street over someone else’s beef. He wanted to fashion another, different life for himself; and because he knew his father and brothers loved him, he couldn’t for the life of him see why they didn’t realize this about him and help him get that life.

  When he was done at the barbershop, he walked over a few stores down in the same strip mall and bought himself a pack of plain white t-shirts. And down a few stores more, got all-white K-Swiss Gstaads. Then he sat in a Burger King and ordered himself some lunch, trying not to think about the garbage there might be in the meat, and the fries. He was going to get this clean eating thing right, he just needed to figure out how.

  While he ate, Ibrahim sat near the plate glass window of the fast food restaurant, meeting and catching the eye of several girls who walked by. He grinned at them, his gaze following their swishing butts as they walked. It would be a lie to pretend he didn’t miss sex. But abstaining now that he was out was an act of will, an act of choice. An exercise of his growing mental strength.

  He looked away from the girls and reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, unfolding it to read.

  Do you ever feel like you’re living in a dream? Jada had written. Like the life you have now is the dream, but not in a good way? Like maybe your real life, the one you’re meant to have, is out there waiting for you, but you don’t know how to find it?

  10

  Then

  “Come where?”

  Desiree’s hand paused midair as she was about to apply her last layer of translucent powder. Her lips were a light, blush-pink, making the most of her fair, peach-like complexion.

  “I want to come to the party with you.”

  “And have Uncle and Auntie kick my ass? No thank you very much. I been down that road, remember?”

  “It’s not like I’m about to tell them, Dee. They’re in San Francisco for the whole entire night. Probably won’t even come back until around noon tomorrow.”

  “And that’s about when this party’ll be over,” Dee laughed. “You ain’t ready for this kinda party, Jada. I’m tellin’ you.”

  She was more than ready, she was eager.

  Prophet was home.

  She knew only because she overheard her cousin on the phone with his brother making plans for tonight. The news took her by surprise because she had been writ
ing to him, and even though he didn’t write back as often as she wrote, his release date was something she would have expected him to share.

  “So you’re just gon’ leave me here all night by myself?” she tried.

  Dee turned to look at her. “What? You ain’ a baby. Just lock up real tight and watch something on television.”

  “Dee. I want to come.”

  Sighing, her cousin came to sit next to her on the edge of the bed. “It’s … Manny’s brother … You remember Prophet, right? From that time? Well he just got out of county and when somebody get out it’s a whole different kinda thing. I mean, sometimes it can get off the chain a little bit.”

  “If it’s a party, I expect it to be off the chain. I want to come.” This time Jada added a whine to her voice for effect.

  She hadn’t told Desiree—or anyone—that she had been writing to Prophet. It would’ve caused too much family drama. He wasn’t the kind of guy a girl like her—straight-A student, active in athletics, and with a so-called bright future—was supposed to be interested in.

  That was only confirmed when he told her ‘Prophet’ was his street name. If he even had a ‘street he probably hustled with his brother, Desiree’s boyfriend. Jada remembered thinking that he seemed as different from Manny as night from day; and that it was hard to imagine him standing on a corner, leaning into cars or supplying little plastic vials to desperate people with eyes like zombies.

  “If I want to stay over with Manny, though …” Dee was beginning to consider logistics, so that was progress.

  “I’ll get a ride home,” Jada said easily.

  Dee laughed. “With who? You think I’d put my cousin in a car to ride off with any one of those fools at that party? I mean, why you even want to come anyway?”

  “Because I’m bored,” Jada lied. “There’s never anything to do over here.”