“Whoa, whoa. Slow down. What kind of thing is it?”
“A … couples thing.”
Ibrahim leaned against the phone carrel bracing himself with a forearm.
“When exactly this weekend?”
“Saturday? I mean, if it’s too little notice and you can’t make it work …”
“I can make it work,” Ibrahim said, not knowing whether he could make it work.
“Cool.”
He heard the smile in her voice and that made him smile, too.
“So, what kind of thing exactly is it? A couples thing but …”
“Roller-skating.”
Ibrahim rolled his eyes. “Sounds like fun.”
Jada laughed. “You are such a liar, Ibrahim Carter.”
He grinned.
“I know. It’s corny, but Chloe’s really into it. She’s even on some kind of team. But it’s at one of those places that we can hang out for hours and hours without the management looking at us funny and expecting us to leave. Mostly people just sit around with their skates on, eat french fries and go into the back to make out with their boyfriend.”
“Is that your plan?” Ibrahim asked. “To sit around, eat french fries and go to the back to make out with your boyfriend?”
“I wasn’t aware I had one,” Jada said.
She ‘wasn’t aware’. It sounded like a phrase she may have heard one of her parents, or a teacher use.
“For real? You weren’t aware? Maybe I need to be a better communicator.”
There was a brief silence, during which he could picture her face. The way she pulled in her full lower lip, biting back the smiles that tended to escape eventually. A large part of why he loved kissing her was that full lower lip. That, and the way she kind of purred when he pulled it between his lips, arching her back, pressing her chest against his, pushing her pelvis forward.
The last time he’d taken her out he’d only had Nasim’s car for an hour, so they went to the closest strip mall near her house, one that had an inner courtyard. From the grocery store that anchored the mall, Ibrahim got a bunch of grapes to snack on, and Jada asked for a bag of chips. They sat in the courtyard eating, not talking much but just enjoying being together.
You know what I like about you? Jada said out of nowhere.
What?
That even though you’re doing your healthy thing. She indicated his grapes. You’re not preachy about it. You don’t try to make me feel bad about eating this crap. She held up her bag of chips.
Ibrahim had shaken his head. Why would I want to make you feel bad?
Jada shrugged. I don’t know. Some people are like that. They try to force you into stuff. By shaming you.
I would never do that, he told her. Force you into anything. Or shame you.
At that, she said nothing more, just leaned in and kissed him, putting both her hands up to his head, cupping it and holding it in place while her lips and tongue played with his.
Ibrahim remembered the taste of her, the mix of saltiness from her chips, and sweetness from his grapes. When he thought about kissing Jada—and he thought about it a lot—he thought mostly about that kiss. It had been just like her—the salty with the sweet.
“So, we’re going then?” Jada asked him now.
“Yeah, we’re going.”
“Okay. Cool. I’ll let you get back to work now.”
“Thank you.”
“Jeez. I only took up like ten minutes of your precious time, Ibrahim,” she said.
“Well, these toilets won’t clean themselves,” he said returning her teasing tone.
Jada gave an explosive bark of laughter that made him smile.
“Nah. But for real though …You can take up all the time you need, Jada,” he returned. “Any time you need it.”
“‘Kay,” she said, her voice quieter now. “Turns out I don’t need any more right now, so … g’night.”
“G’night.”
“But … Ibrahim?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you mean that? What you said?”
“What’d I say?”
“About being my, you know, being my …”
He laughed. “Yeah, I meant it.”
“Okay. ‘Night.”
And then she hung up, but not before he heard the poorly disguised note of pure joy in her voice.
Replacing the receiver, Ibrahim leaned against the carrel for a few moments and took a long, deep breath.
~~~
“It is good, yes?”
Klara and Ibrahim met up on the tenth floor for dinner. When they got to ten, it meant that they were done because the building had twenty floors; and if she started at the top and he at the bottom, and if they worked at roughly the same pace, they would almost always meet somewhere in the middle.
It humbled Ibrahim that sometimes, she would show up on the ninth floor, and once even on the eighth floor, meaning that this woman, who had easily thirty-five years or more on him, worked faster and more efficiently than he had.
When they worked together, Klara brought food from home for her dinner and always shared it with him. Like Raj, she insisted that there was enough for them both and gave him generous helpings of bigos, a cabbage dish that Ibrahim liked, or liver and onions, one that he did not. When he was inside, he read something—he couldn’t recall whether it was Elijah Muhammad’s book or something else—that warned that organ meats were particularly unhealthy, that they stimulated and activated dormant cells that could turn cancerous.
But cancerous cells notwithstanding, Ibrahim always ate the liver and onions, because it was offered with such generosity of spirit, Klara’s bright blue eyes shining when she extended it to him on one of the plastic plates she always brought along, and because she looked up and smiled just from the pleasure of watching him eat her food. While they ate, they seldom spoke except when she asked him, as she had just now, whether he enjoyed the meal.
Her English was heavily accented, and he wondered whether that made her embarrassed to speak because she didn’t say much. That never bothered any of The Mexican Girls. They were more likely to get impatient, as though the failure to understand something they said could only be due to the listener’s own stupidity.
“It’s good,” Ibrahim confirmed to Klara. “One day I have to bring you something I cook.”
Klara laughed. “You cook?”
“Learning,” he said.
“What do you cook?” she asked, a note of playful skepticism in her tone.
Ibrahim listed for her all the dishes he had learned, either from Raj’s recipes scribbled on computer paper, or from the cards he had started picking up in the grocery store.
“Very good.” Klara sounded impressed. “You are good boy. You cook for your mama?”
Ibrahim shook his head, moving a particularly large piece of liver to the side of his plate to dispose of discreetly when he got a chance.
“I don’t have a mother,” he said.
“Oh. I am sorry.”
“It’s been a while.”
A while, yes. But sometimes it felt like yesterday.
They fell silent again.
“You get paid by check, too, right?” he asked after a few minutes.
Klara nodded, looking vaguely suspicious for a moment.
“It’s a racket, man,” Ibrahim said. “Seeing all that money come out of your check. I might ask Samuel to take me back off the books.”
“No!” Klara said, grimacing and shaking her head. “No, you must not.”
“Why? Way I see it, people who work jobs like ours shouldn’t pay taxes.”
“You want roads to drive on, yes? Lights on street? Garbage collectors to come pick up trash? Police to come when you call? Then you must pay taxes.”
Immigrants, Ibrahim thought, not unkindly. Even more than most Americans, they bought into the whole doggone system. Thought the government really was there to look after people.
“I would never call the police,” Ibrahim said of
fhandedly. “Not for almost anything. And also … the garbage barely gets collected where I live at.”
“Then do it for you,” Klara said. “Pay tax because you are a man and you want nothing for free. Because even if the price is unfair, you are a man, and willing to pay for your own. For whatever you take.”
Ibrahim said nothing. He liked the sound of that.
“And when you get check, you don’t go to check-cashing,” Klara said sternly. “Put it in bank. Put some money in bank, put some in pillow.”
Ibrahim laughed. “In my pillow?”
“Yes,” Klara said, serious faced. “In pillow. Not in pillowcase.”
Ibrahim’s smile dissolved.
This lady. She’s seen some things. She knows some things.
“Promise,” he said, nodding. “No check-cashing. Bank, and pillow. That’s where I’ll put my dough from now on.”
Klara smiled finally, and then nodded.
“Good,” she said. “You are good boy. Here … more liver and onions.”
She reached over and transferred a heaping spoonful from her plate to his, giving him the best and biggest pieces.
25
Then
It was too loud. Jada had forgotten how loud it always was at Skate Obsession. She had forgotten the flashing lights and the scores of younger kids who were likely to be there, screaming at the top of their lungs, squealing at every fall, clutching each other’s hands as they spun around in circles avoiding the dance skaters, and clinging to the wall, trying not to wind up on their butts.
And most of all, she had forgotten how ridiculous her friends sometimes were when they got together in a group.
There were four other couples: Chloe of course, whose birthday they were celebrating, with her boyfriend, David; Lisa, and Earl who had taken a night off from his not-quite-clandestine hookups with Laurel; Kyle who had brought Christine along; and finally, Chloe’s childhood best friend, Marlene and her boyfriend Russell.
When Jada and Ibrahim entered, hand in hand, all the other girls had looked up with newly-interested eyes. Lisa hopped up from the table to greet them noisily, eager to show everyone else that she was ahead of the game, and fully-acquainted with the dark stranger who was infiltrating their group for the evening. She hugged Jada, and then Ibrahim, who gamely played along, giving Lisa the loose, one-armed hug, of someone hugging their grandmother’s church-sister.
When Jada introduced Ibrahim around, the guys all immediately started flexing, doing the things men did when they wanted to assert their alpha male status—spreading their arms and legs wider, taking up more room, slouching a little in their seats, trying to look cool. Earl didn’t even speak, just tipping his chin up in a scant acknowledgment.
Jada felt the moment that Ibrahim sized up and then emotionally retreated from the whole childish scene.
Since then, he had been sitting and dispassionately watching everyone—the guys yelling at each other to be heard over the din, the girls dancing as they skated, trying to look seductive.
Jada skated with her friends and tried to focus on having fun but couldn’t help occasionally checking on Ibrahim out of the corner of her eye. He was sitting near the other guys, but not talking to any of them, oblivious while they performed for him. From their body language, Jada could tell they knew in their own sophomoric way that they were only pretenders to the confidence, self-possession, and other full-grown-man traits Ibrahim already had.
He blinked lazily, bored, while they got louder and more rambunctious. Even Kyle, who Jada knew resented Ibrahim’s mere presence, seemed unable to help himself and joined in the attention-seeking.
As she positioned her feet heels inward, toes outward, and held hands with her friends in a circle, all of them spinning round and round, Jada still managed to keep an eye on Ibrahim. Finally deciding it was silly to make him her entire focus while celebrating one of her best friends turning eighteen, she shut her eyes and let her head fall back, trying to feel the music. The sensation was what Jada imagined it would be like being one of Saturn’s rings. Spinning and spinning in a never-ending perfect revolution.
She had almost begun to enjoy herself when Jada opened her eyes once again and despite promising herself not to, checked on Ibrahim. Except he wasn’t there.
Surprised, she wrenched her right hand free of Lisa’s, almost flinging her friend toward the wall, and throwing the circle entirely off its axis.
“What’re you doing?” Lisa screamed.
Everyone else in the circle pulled up short, and suddenly enough that they had to grab each other for support, almost collapsing in a tangled mass.
“Sorry!” Jada said, barely glancing over her shoulder as she skated toward the edge of the rink and their table. Only once she was nearer did she see that Ibrahim was making his way to the exit.
Fumbling with the laces of her skates, trying to get them undone, she finally abandoned the attempt and yanked them off from the heel, running after him in only her socks.
“Ibrahim!”
He turned at the sound of his name and looked her over. His brow furrowed when he saw that she was without shoes, then realization entered his eyes.
Coming slowly toward her, he shook his head.
“I wasn’t leaving,” he said. “I was just going outside to get some air. And some quiet for a minute.”
Jada studied his face then reached for his hand, tugging it lightly.
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
She could see him about to say something, like maybe that he would meet her out there. But then he probably noticed the near-frantic look in her eyes, because after a second, he nodded and went back to the table with her to wait while she put on her shoes.
~~~
“Want to go back in when it’s time for the cake?”
Ibrahim’s eyes were amused. “There’s going to be cake?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s a birthday party.”
He smiled, then nodded. “Sure, we’ll go back in when it’s time for cake.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Never.” But he didn’t sound convincing.
“Why? Is there no cake when there’s birthdays in the hood?” She pronounced the word ‘hood’ with a hint of irony.
“Yeah, sure. If the birthday girl is thirteen and under, sure.”
Jada laughed. “Sometimes I think you’re messing with me. Pretending we’re from, like, different planets or something.”
“Close to it.” He nodded slowly, thoughtfully, eyes still fixed on her.
Jada sighed.
She looked across the parking lot at the line of cars that were pulling in, slowly, because spaces were scarce. People spent hours and hours at Skate Obsession, and it closed in the wee hours of the morning. It was the alternative to going to a nightclub, and it sounded wholesome and acceptable whenever mentioned to a parent as the place where you were planning to hang out with friends.
But the truth was, there was alcohol consumed at Skate Obsession, and even weed if you wanted some. Probably even harder drugs, though Jada had no direct knowledge of that. Halfway through the evening, the guys would probably slip out back and return with bloodshot eyes or smelling like malt liquor. Sometimes the girls indulged as well, if they wanted to do things with their boyfriend that they could later plausibly deny to themselves having wanted to do.
Jada never did. She was too afraid she might see visions of her disapproving father’s face floating in front of her if she took a puff of a blunt, or more than the smallest gulp from a forty. She just wasn’t rebellious by nature. And if she wanted to do something with a boy—or in this case, with Ibrahim—she couldn’t imagine denying later that she wanted to do it, because what was more likely was that she would want to do it again.
“Tell me about your planet, then,” she said.
Ibrahim was leaning on the car next to her, his arm brushing her arm. Their extended legs also touching, his in stiff dark jeans, hers in denim as well, t
hough a lighter stonewash fabric. Jada thought she could feel the warmth radiating from his skin.
She often wondered what it would be like to be with him like that—skin to skin, and nothing between them. But Ibrahim, strangely, exasperatingly, didn’t seem like he was in any hurry to make that happen.
“Tell you about my planet,” he repeated slowly. “What d’you want to know?”
“When you were … away, I wrote to you all the time. You can probably recite my daily schedule from memory by now. But I don’t know much about your life, and what you do … well, what you did, before you got … sent away.”
“A lot of stuff I shouldn’t have.”
“Like what?”
“I could tell you.” He turned a little to look directly at her while he spoke. “But that’s not the kind of thing I want to be in your head when you think of me.”
“It won’t be. I just …Okay, let’s start with this; what they sent you away for … Did you do it?”
He grinned at that, like he thought she was cute, or quaint. “I went away, didn’t I?”
“People didn’t always do what they get locked up for.”
“True. But most of the time? They did.”
“I’m not asking about them. I’m asking about you.”
He seemed to think about the question for a while, then finally he looked at her again.
“Let’s put it this way, I wasn’t innocent when they sent me away.”
“But I mean …”
“Jada,” he said, shaking his head. “Let’s just leave it at that. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, sighing.
“Hey,” he said when she turned away. “What’s on your mind?”
“You,” she said honestly, giving a wry laugh.
He smiled. “You’re funny. Why’re you thinkin’ about me? I’m right here. What about me?”
“How different we are … how every time we do something like this together, I feel like I’m some stupid, naïve kid and you have all these experiences … and you’re just suffering through the whole ordeal.”
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