Courtship: A 'Snowflake' Novel

by Nia Forrester

  He wasn’t never goin’ nowhere, Ibrahim said.

  At that, Jada smiled.

  Don’t go tellin’ her that, though, he said quickly.

  I wouldn’t.

  You sure? he teased. I know how y’all are.

  How are we … all?

  ~~~

  When the empanadas were done, Ibrahim realized that he had spent all the money he would have used for transportation on food. Now, he had enough for a call or two, and that was about it. If no one picked up, or the phone took his money, he would be screwed. Working public phones were becoming a thing of the past, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk losing his coins, so he decided to head back toward the jail.

  If push came to shove, he would use one of those in the lobby of the facility itself or bum a call off the staff at the front desk to hit up his brother’s pager. A simple logistical challenge was sending him back to the place he had just half an hour ago promised himself he would never see again.

  He was half a block away when the white Impala screeched to a halt next to him, almost jumping the curb. Instinct had him poised to take a dive behind a nearby shrub, but then Isaac came tumbling out, and tackled him with a bear-hug.

  “Goddamn! Look at you! Nigga you cock-diesel!”

  Zac smelled like stale liquor. He was unsteady on his feet, perspiring and stunk like last night, but Ibrahim embraced him nonetheless.

  Ducking his head to check out who was driving, Ibrahim saw to his relief that their pops wasn’t who was behind the wheel. Instead, it was Nasim, an OG from around the way.

  “Where all your shit at?” Zac yanked open the back door for Ibrahim to get in.

  “There’s nothin’ from there I need to keep,” he said, reaching back and patting to make sure his bundle of letters was still in his back pocket.

  “I hear that.”

  Once he was inside the car, Nasim gave Ibrahim a curt nod, but said nothing. He didn’t speak for the entire drive, but Zac made up for that with non-stop chatter, filling Ibrahim in on what he’d missed, and letting him know that they had a house party planned that night to celebrate his return.

  “Nah,” he said. “You ain’ have to do all that.”

  “What you mean?” Zac’s face creased in displeasure. “My baby brother come up outta the joint and I’m s’posed to act like that ain’t shit? When you took my charge? Hell nah. We ‘bout to get lifted tonight, boy.”

  Ibrahim didn’t argue though over the last few months, he had begun to wonder why it was so important to get “lifted” to have a good time. He had gotten high the night before the court date he knew would result in a sentence of incarceration, and not since. Even though getting high in jail was far from an impossibility. Now he felt clearheaded and focused and kind of liked it. Turned out jail had its purposes.

  He had been expecting to get sent up for much longer, but the lawyer his father hired had argued successfully that Ibrahim had only been at best in “constructive possession” of the “narcotics in question” none of which had even been retrieved and checked into evidence. In English, that meant they hadn’t found drugs on him, but claimed to have seen where he ditched them. And when they allegedly recovered them, somehow the little vials with blue tops hadn’t been checked in as proof that a crime had been committed.

  With broken chain of evidence, it was a very weak case, and the detective’s testimony alone was what sent Ibrahim to jail. And even that was weaker than the court or lawyers expected, because when the cops showed up to arrest one Isaac Carter at the home of one of his “known associates” Ibrahim Carter had surrendered instead.

  The lead narcotics squad detective, a Detective Michaels, that took him in had given him a long, hard look but said nothing. He knew it wasn’t Ibrahim he’d seen the toss the stash earlier that day. He was on the block often enough, working that neighborhood long enough, that he could recognize Zac on sight. He knew with almost complete certainty that it had been him who tossed the stash during a foot pursuit.

  You sure ‘bout this, padnah? he’d asked Ibrahim as he escorted him to booking.

  Ibrahim hadn’t bothered to respond.

  This was what you did for family. His record was clean, the case was flimsy, and with good representation, he had a more than decent chance at three to five. Zac would have gone away for much longer.

  But Ibrahim didn’t get five years. He didn’t even get three. He got only one. And that was only because Detective Michaels had given identification testimony that was little more than lukewarm.

  The defendant, he said on the stand, in answer to the standard identification question, bears a strong resemblance to the man I pursued.

  Bears a strong resemblance? Ibrahim’s lawyer had asked, looking like it was an early Christmas.

  Yes. That’s what I’m prepared to testify.

  The prosecutor knew better than to press the point on cross-examination, and the judge, who was more than hip to this game, having presided over maybe hundreds of possession-with-intent cases, all but rolled her eyes. She knew, like just about everyone in that courtroom knew, that something was afoot with the detective’s testimony.

  And Michaels knew that the person facing charges should have been Isaac but didn’t want to perjure himself. He also knew it would have been impossible to get any conviction if, even as Ibrahim claimed he was the guilty party, the police department accused someone else.

  Ibrahim thought he saw the man subtly shake his head in disbelief as he left the stand. He might work the streets, but he didn’t fully understand its code. Or maybe he understood it fine, but still thought it foolish for an eighteen-year-old with a clean record and a degenerate for a brother to send himself to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

  At the house when Isaac leapt out of the car and headed inside, loudly announcing Ibrahim’s arrival like the approach of a young king, he lingered behind a moment to thank Nasim for the ride.

  “Ain’ no thang,” Nasim said, speaking his first words to Ibrahim since he picked him up.

  Ibrahim nodded his thanks again and had just opened the door when the older man spoke again.

  “Where you just been at,” he said. “Don’t embrace that as your certain future, cuz. It don’t have to be. You can leave it where it is. In the past.”

  Ibrahim didn’t know what to say. Because Nasim wasn’t exactly out of the game his damn self. He had just, by Grace, survived it longer than most.

  Words like those sounded like he was encouraging Ibrahim to seek a new path, something he had been thinking about while he was inside. Something he only allowed himself to hope for when he read Jada Green’s girlish script, describing a life that sounded and felt bright, clean and brand-new. Each letter from her made the spark of possibility shine brighter.

  She wrote about basketball practice, making honor roll, and arguing with her mother about getting highlights in her hair. She agonized over a lie she told to a friend, about gossip she helped spread about someone who was not a friend, and the dress she would hopefully wear to senior prom. She told him, naively, that she hoped he was sleeping well, eating well, and that he was safe.

  I know prison isn’t safe, she wrote, with all the faux-sophistication that only sheltered eighteen-year-old girls have. I mean, I’m not that stupid to think it is. But I hope you are, Prophet. That’s what I pray for every night. That you’re safe.

  That letter, those words, he read over and over, and over again. Of all the letters she’d written him, and of all the words in that letter, those were his favorite.

  He had tried not to feel anything about it, or about her. Because despite all the possibilities her letters stoked for him, she herself felt like an impossibility. The kind of life he would have to have to deserve a girl like her felt very much out of reach.

  And between the opening of his cell this morning, the ride back home to his neighborhood, and now the news of the party this evening, he was already feeling the hope of a new life begin to dissipate like wisps of smoke.


  But here was Nasim, saying this thing about leaving jail in his past.

  It felt like a sign.

  8

  Then

  “I’m starting to think he’s blowing me off,” Lisa said.

  Starting to think? Jada forced herself not to say the words aloud. He’s already blown you off.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have done … all that, so soon,” her friend continued, playing with one of her long box braids, wrapping and unwrapping it around her forefinger.

  ‘All that’ referred to Lisa having gone down on her boyfriend, Earl, behind the cafeteria. Except, calling Earl Lisa’s boyfriend was probably a little bit of a stretch. He was one of the most popular guys in the senior class, tall and athletic, with naturally curly hair that—in Jada’s opinion—distracted most girls from the fact that he wasn’t really that good-looking.

  Lisa claimed he looked like Al B. Sure, but apart from having a complexion one shade lighter than a sandy beach and a headful of curls, Earl looked nothing like the popular R&B crooner. And besides, Jada had come to think of all those pretty boys as being as insubstantial as a sheet of tissue.

  Even Kyle got on her nerves now.

  They had been going together since seventh grade and he had been her boyfriend in the way one has boyfriends in the seventh grade—lots of furtive making out and tentative groping. The most they had done until tenth grade was sliding hands down each other’s pants. Jada still remembered her breathless excitement when his fingers first touched her ‘there’, and the little gasps she issued almost against her will.

  After that, she counted down the days till eleventh grade which was when she decided they would finally “do it.” And they had, near the end of that school year. It was a bloody, fumbling farcical experience that at first, Jada was sure she would never want to repeat. But of course, she and Kyle later tried again, and it was much, much better.

  And only two-and-a-half weeks after that, at a party she went to with her cousin, Desiree, she met Prophet.

  Poor Kyle, though he hadn’t even been at the party, didn’t stand a chance. Jada immediately began to regret doing it with him, not because the act itself hadn’t lived up to her expectations or anything (because eventually, it definitely had) but because the moment she saw Prophet, it was like something inside her bloomed. And just like that, the intimacy with Kyle felt premature, like she had miscalculated by giving herself to him, when her rightful partner was just around the corner. It was a stupid feeling, of course, and she had been trying to talk herself out of it ever since, but feelings, however stupid were almost impossible to deny.

  The very next day after the party, she had called Kyle up and they went to the park, just to sit and read and talk like they sometimes did. They bought popsicles from a truck that was always there, catering to the parents and small children who played in the grass, and then Jada broke the news.

  I don’t think I’m ready for something this serious so soon, she told him, while she peeled the wrapper from her treat. I mean, soon we’re going to be thinking about college, and …

  She let her voice trail off then braved a look in his direction.

  Kyle nodded, pursed his lips and squinted a little.

  I’ve been thinking the same thing, he said.

  But she could tell from his voice that he hadn’t been, and that he was saving face.

  I mean, I think we should still hang out and everything, she said, momentarily panicked at the thought of prom.

  Kyle shrugged. I guess we could, he said noncommittally. But what would be the point of that?

  Since then—ages ago now—he had been standoffish with her, stopping short of not speaking at all, which would have been awkward since they had all the same friends. Jada knew she had hurt him, but it was his pride more than his feelings that were bruised.

  Still, he had probably been imagining some future where they maintained a long-distance relationship while in college then returned to get married and buy a cute little house like their parents had and started a family.

  Kyle was a “good boy” as her mother called him. From a “good family” that sometimes showed up at the same church Jada and her parents went to. They weren’t avid churchgoers, who joined committees and choir such, but they were solid enough. Jada noticed how pleased her parents and his had looked whenever she and Kyle made their way over to each other after service, standing as close together as was socially permissible, trying not to seem like they were ‘together-together’ though they clearly were.

  But now, Kyle was in her past.

  As was Lisa in Earl’s life, though she had yet to catch on.

  “He better not have told anybody,” Lisa said, her tone fretful. “You know. About … what I did.”

  Of course he had.

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” Jada said, squeezing her friend’s upper arm to reassure her. “Earl’s not an asshole like that.”

  Except he kind of was.

  Or maybe not an asshole, but just young. Like most of the guys at their school. They couldn’t help it.

  “Well, I’m about to cancel him anyway,” Lisa said. “Because if he’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t know that after something that serious happened between us, he should be extra nice to me?” She made a pfft sound. “Then he might not be the one.”

  “You might be right,” Jada said, relieved.

  Lisa was not the friend who wanted to hear brutal truths.

  Back in 6th grade when some boy Lisa liked made a play for Jada and she told her about it, Lisa hadn’t spoken to her for three weeks. The best one could do with Lisa was hope she led herself to the right answer so that all you had to do was reinforce it.

  Just about every one of their friends—including Lisa though she wasn’t ready to admit it—knew that Earl was sniffing around a white girl with chestnut hair and blue eyes named Laurel, who only dated Black guys. Laurel’s dating habits intimidated the white guys, earned curiosity from the Black guys, the venom of Black girls, and mad props from her gaggle of less adventurous white girlfriends.

  Laurel told everyone she was named that “after the Canyon” because her father was in the film business. Kyle had whispered to Jada once that the only films that got made in Laurel Canyon were porno. So, that was what Lisa was up against—her ‘boyfriend’ was trying to get with a girl who, however unjustly, came with the promise of a lot more than a blowjob behind the cafeteria.

  “So what’s up with you?” Lisa asked, stretching out and propping herself backward against outstretched arms.

  She had finally exhausted all conversation about herself—her favorite topic—and was giving Jada a cursory show of interest.

  They were in Jada’s bedroom and supposed to be doing homework. Sometimes, after basketball practice, Lisa came home with her, and they got to hang out until Lisa’s parents showed up to get her around six o’clock. Homework usually got taken care of in less than an hour and the rest of the time was spent like right now, gossiping about their love lives, and others’ love lives, reading magazines and if Jada’s parents weren’t home, watching music videos in the living room.

  “You not trying to get with nobody?” Lisa asked. “It’s been a minute since you and Kyle broke up.”

  “Nah,” Jada said. “I don’t like anybody at school right now.”

  And for what had to have been the millionth time, Jada forced herself to swallow the urge to tell Lisa about Prophet. If there was anyone from school she would tell, it was Lisa, who was impudent and rebellious, and would love the idea of writing to some guy in jail.

  In jail.

  It sounded so awful. Who would do that? Write to some guy who was locked up, who they barely knew? Definitely no one in Jada’s world. Except her cousin, Desiree. But even she didn’t know about the letters.

  She had been the one to tell Jada in the first place that Prophet was locked up, mentioning in passing that he “took a charge” for his older brother and was in Glenn Dyer. It was the most Jada had h
eard about him in weeks, so she had listened closely, making note of the name of the jail.

  Later she had gone to the public library and called from one of the public pay phones, asking for the general information number for the facility and then calling it right then and there. She wrote down the information they had given her about how to write to an inmate and slipped the paper inside her algebra textbook. That night, she had written Prophet the very first letter.

  I heard what happened to you, she said. And I was thinking about what I would want, if I were the one where you are. I think I would want to hear a little about what’s happening in the outside world.

  Normal things. Not like stuff you could easily see on the news. So I’m going to write to you about those kinds of things. And you don’t have to answer. Unless you want to.

  Reading it back to herself, it sounded clumsy, but Jada couldn’t think of a better way to say it. She didn’t want to ask whether she could write to him, because what if he said ‘no’? Given the way things had gone the last time she’d seen him, it wasn’t out of the question that he would. And she didn’t want to sound like she expected him to write back just because she wrote.

  So, she let the clumsy words stand as they were, and the next day mailed the letter from the post office near her school. Her heart raced just from seeing the postal worker stamp it and set it in the bin next to her.

  It took almost two weeks for Prophet to respond. And thankfully, he had been smarter than she, and only listed the return address as GDJ. She hadn’t considered what would happen if her parents saw a postmark and return address from a jail. Her mother didn’t work so she was always the one to pick up the mail when it came. The letter from Prophet had been lost among a small pile of brochures from colleges and professional certification programs Jada was considering, so it hadn’t attracted notice.

  Wow, Prophet wrote in a clean, crisp script. You’re about the last person I would have expected to hear from. But you’re also the only person I heard from since I been here. Except for my brothers and father who come see me. Getting letters would be cool. Hearing about the outside world would be cool, too.