Courtship: A 'Snowflake' Novel

by Nia Forrester

  Maybe the subterfuge was silly when she could have just asked her cousin outright to take her over there, but she still wasn’t sure what this was, and what she was to him. And never mind silly, it was also risky since he made it clear he didn’t think his neighborhood was a place she should be hanging out.

  His call was a welcome surprise but her parents would want to know more about him if he showed up at her house. They would ask intrusive questions about what he did, where he went to school, and how his parents were employed. Jada worried, of all things, that Ibrahim would probably tell them the truth. He just seemed like that kind of guy—forthright and honest unless there was a compelling reason not to be. He might not think that the possibility of her parents’ disapproval was a compelling enough reason to lie.

  “I could take the train,” she offered. “Meet you kind of halfway somewhere?”

  “Halfway to Crown Beach?” he asked.

  “No, I meant halfway between us. Like in town somewhere.”

  “Yeah. We could do that.” He suggested a place, near a BART station and she quickly agreed.

  Already, in the pit of her stomach, she felt a tiny ripple of anticipation. At the minor rebellion of planning to meet a boy her parents didn’t know; and at the fact that the ‘boy’ in question wasn’t a boy at all, but Ibrahim, who felt like very much a man.

  They set a time, and then without further chitchat, he said he would see her later.

  “Who was that on the phone?”

  Just as Jada hung up, her mother walked by on her way to the kitchen, still twisting her long hair up into a bun. She had gotten her hair from her mother, who even at her age hadn’t cut it.

  Jada rarely saw it down, and even then, only by accident first thing in the morning. Her mother was so traditional that to spot her with her hair loose was almost akin to seeing her in her underwear (which was unthinkable), and something reserved for moments behind closed doors with her husband.

  On Saturdays, because Jada needed the fuel for the long, grueling hours of basketball practice, her mother got up to make her a large breakfast. And afterwards, they went browsing the stores in the mall if Jada didn’t have plans with Lisa and Chloe.

  This weekend, she and her friends had no plans, and her mother would pick her up unless she told her otherwise. Jada decided to risk the truth, or at least some part of it.

  “It was a guy I met,” she said. “At a party.”

  “Oh?” Her mother stopped, a bemused expression on her face. She fastened the final hairpin, waiting for Jada to continue.

  “He’s nice. Asked if I wanted to hang out this afternoon. I think … I was thinking I might.”

  Jada watched as her mother considered this. She could practically read her mind.

  She’s eighteen now.

  She’s almost graduated.

  I suppose other girls her age have young men. And I haven’t seen her with that nice boy, Kyle at church lately.

  “Do I know him? What’s his name?”

  Jada hesitated.

  But there may come a time, at least she hoped there would, when Ibrahim might be less of a secret.

  “Ibrahim. And no, you don’t know him.”

  Her mother brightened a little, probably because the name was biblical.

  “And how old is Ibrahim?”

  “Nineteen.”

  Her mother nodded, approving. Had he been even one year older than that, Jada knew the reaction might have been very different.

  “So, I’ll probably come back here after practice and get ready then head out to meet him.”

  “Where?” her mother asked.

  Jada told her location of the meeting place she and Ibrahim had discussed, and her mother nodded again. She didn’t dare tell her they were leaving there and going all the way to the beach.

  First of all, Jada wasn’t much of a swimmer, so that alone would prompt unnecessary worry. And second, beaches conjured up images of revealing clothing, something that might give her mother pause about letting her go “hang out” with someone she didn’t know.

  “Remember your curfew,” she said, continuing on to the kitchen. “I don’t want you out too late.”

  “I won’t be,” Jada said.

  When she was alone again, she heaved a deep sigh, feeling as though she’d cleared a meaningful obstacle. Had her father been her interrogator, she wouldn’t have gotten off as easily. Her mother, having come to parenthood later in life, sometimes seemed unsure of where to erect boundaries. She had been forty-five when Jada was born—a happy surprise to a couple who believed they would never have children, and whose friends already had children well into their twenties.

  Her mother and father were sweetly overprotective, and much gentler toward her than Jada saw her friends’ parents behave with them. They never raised their voices, and seemed impressed and delighted by just about everything she did. In fairness, she was also just the kind of child who rarely did things that parents would have cause to object to.

  The only difference was that while her father realized the dangers of the world that might prey on her, her mother—who had only ever been a housewife—was most concerned that she not hold Jada back from living a life that was in step with her peers. Just so long as those peers came from good church people, like Lisa and Chloe and Kyle did.

  Ibrahim must, to her mother, sound like he was certain to be “in church.”

  Ignoring the tiny ping of guilt at taking advantage of her mother’s naïveté, Jada went in to get ready for practice, and decide which among her three swimsuits to wear later that afternoon.

  ~~~

  “Your mother says you have plans this afternoon.”

  Jada stiffened in her seat. It was bad enough that her parents had switched things up without telling her, having her father come get her from basketball practice. But now it appeared she may have underestimated her mother entirely.

  She seemed completely comfortable with the news that Jada was going on a date with an as-yet-faceless young man named Ibrahim, but apparently, she was cautious enough to share the news with her husband, and then to have him come collect their daughter from basketball, giving him the perfect opportunity to ask his questions.

  “Yeah. Just meeting a friend.”

  “And this friend, where do you know him from?” her father asked as he maneuvered smoothly into the stream of traffic outside Crestlawn.

  The school had been aptly named, located on a small crest of a hill in the Glenview section of the city. The buildings and compound had once been part of a monastery and nearby convent. The former monastery was now the administration offices and gym, and the building that had been the convent was where all the classrooms were.

  Between them was a large field that had been converted for track, and football and other outdoor sports. Every incoming class of freshmen was treated to gory and highly questionable stories of dead babies, the product of immoral affairs between priests and nuns, born in secret then murdered to hide the sin that produced them.

  Now, the site was home to one of the best schools in the city, and one of the most integrated. Parents from all across Oakland vied to get their children into Crestlawn, seeing it as a good pathway to the Ivy League. Jada wasn’t interested in the Ivy League. She had, since she was about nine, known that she wanted to be a nurse, and would go straight to nursing school in the fall if she kept her grades up.

  “A party,” Jada said, her voice croaking. “I met him at a party.”

  She was already imagining that her responses would be inadequate, and her father would call off her date with Ibrahim until he could do his due diligence. And if he did that, she had no way to reach Ibrahim except through Dee. If she couldn’t do that in time, he would be waiting for her, she wouldn’t show up and he might never call again.

  Please, Daddy, she thought. Please don’t.

  “You don’t go to very many parties,” her father observed. “When was this one?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It wa
s a while ago,” Jada said, struggling to sound casual.

  “Where?”

  “I forget. A friend’s house.”

  Her father glanced at her, and she knew he wasn’t buying it. She was failing the test, miserably.

  Her father took a deep breath and Jada waited.

  “Well, in future, if you’re to see this young man, I’d like him to come to the house to pick you up,” he said. “No more of this meeting him in town business. It’s not the way I’d like things to be done. Not if a young man wants to see my daughter.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Jada said, silently releasing a sigh.

  “In fact, I’ll drive you into the city this time.”

  She held her breath again. What if he wanted to wait to meet Ibrahim? She resisted the urge to object, knowing that if she did, it would only make her father more curious than he already was.

  “Okay,” she said instead. “That’d be great. Thanks, Daddy.”

  She was already revising her outfit, wondering whether she could wear the shorts and tank top she had planned.

  No, she decided. She couldn’t. Her father would cough up a lung if he saw her leaving the house to meet someone dressed that way. He didn’t know she was going to the beach, and would think she was just dressing immodestly. Her brain began spinning out contingencies. Maybe instead, she would take a large purse, the kind that could comfortably hold her beachwear.

  But, as it turned out, the revision of her plans was unnecessary. When she and her father got home, her mother remembered she needed to run to the store. And they only had one car.

  Trying not to look relieved, Jada dumped her basketball bag near the front door.

  “I’ll be ready to go in an hour, if you still want to drop me off,” she said.

  “Drop her off?” her mother said, looking perplexed. “She’s planning to take the train, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  Jada shrugged, keeping her expression neutral. “I could, but Daddy said …”

  “You’ll take the train,” her mother said with finality. “That way there’ll be no need for your father and I to wait around for you.”

  Jada watched as her father studied her.

  He was the more perceptive of her parents. He might acquiesce this time, but he wouldn’t forget. Now, he would add to his mental to-do list, that he absolutely must meet this ‘Ibrahim’.

  13

  Then

  Nasim letting Ibrahim hold his car for the day to take Jada to the beach was the second big solid he had done him recently. The first was hooking him up with his new job. The job didn’t seem like a favor when he first heard about it, to be honest. It seemed like a joke.

  Nasim’s uncle, Samuel, had a cleaning service, which was basically a fancy way of saying that he had a van full of cleaning supplies and a crappy office on the eastside from which he booked jobs in and around the Bay Area. Every morning at five a.m., and again in the evening around eight, Nasim’s uncle drove the van, and a crew of six to eight cleaners forty-five minutes south on I-880 to the neighborhoods around Stanford University that were beginning to see a new breed of entrepreneurship creep in.

  According to Samuel, just about everywhere, a bunch of young scientists were working on making new kinds of computers and technology at all hours of the day and night. What Samuel referred to as “offices” were mostly small, poorly-equipped spaces—some offices, sure, but also bungalows in residential areas that had been converted to workspaces. Occasionally, the scientists were still there when the cleaning crew arrived. They were serious-faced young men (but almost no women) who looked like they had probably always been the smartest, but never the most popular kids in school.

  If the spaces were vacated when the crew arrived, they left behind mountains of trash to be hauled away. Not just pizza boxes and Chinese takeout cartons, but bulbs, tubes, wires, and sheets of hard plastic, the kind of refuse that had to be disposed of carefully, and on a daily basis. Standard cleaning services didn’t always take care of that stuff, but Samuel did, so he was making a niche for himself.

  Curiosity, and novelty was part of what Ibrahim kept going back, because it sure as hell wasn’t the five-and-a-quarter an hour he made. He liked rising early in the morning and being picked up in front of his father’s house, piling into the van already occupied by The Mexican Girls, as he thought of the collective of his co-workers, and one middle-aged Polish woman.

  They all sat on the floor in the back, and once the entire crew had been picked up, Samuel made a pit-stop at a 24-hour diner and bought them each a breakfast sandwich of greasy egg-and-cheese slapped between white toast, and a small bottle of orange juice. Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, Samuel bought Ibrahim two sandwiches, reasoning aloud to the complaining girls and women, that as men, Ibrahim and he needed more calories.

  Swaying back and forth in the van as it cruised down the highway, some of them slept. Most mornings, The Mexican Girls gossiped among themselves, mostly in Spanish, which Ibrahim understood a little of. But other times, they tried to draw him into their conversation, especially when it was about the curious behavior of the men in their lives, and they wanted a male opinion.

  Nah, he might say when they told him about some boyfriend’s latest transgression. You need to dump his ass. I’m tellin’ you right now, from that mess right there? He ain’t about nothin’.

  You want to help me raise my son? the girl might then challenge him. You sayin’ you want to be my papi chulo?

  And then they’d all laugh.

  Soon, Ibrahim realized that women never really wanted the advice they claimed to want, especially when it came to men. They just loved who they loved, and that was the end of it; no matter what experience and common sense might tell them about their man being the wrong one to love.

  Still, he liked the easy banter of those morning drives. And he liked being the designated ‘good guy’ who gave them advice, even though most of the time he wasn’t sure just how good he, or the advice he gave, actually were.

  The Polish woman, the eldest of all the cleaners, just smiled and listened, though it wasn’t clear that she even understood much of what was being said, either in Spanish or English. She looked sad occasionally, like she was thinking of another time and place, but never like she wanted to join the conversation.

  Whenever Ibrahim looked her way, her blue, blue eyes twinkled, and she smiled at him, like a grandmother might. That look made him miss something he had never had.

  Samuel never joined in the conversations but tuned the radio to an oldies station and listened to a rotation of James Brown, the Four Tops and Smokey Robinson. Sometimes he sang along, and if they recognized the music, The Mexican Girls did too, belting the words out loudly and in accented English, making fun of the songs, even as they enjoyed singing them. Most of the girls were close in age to Ibrahim and two of them were very pretty and knew it.

  They flirted with him, but all he ever did was smile, and pretend not to notice he was being seduced. He knew better than to mess with Mexican chicks. The eses didn’t play that. Ibrahim could imagine a carload of them showing up at his crib to set him straight. And if they came, they would come heavy.

  Breonna had some Mexican in her, he was pretty sure, though he didn’t know which side of her family. Funny, how he had known her pretty much all his life but didn’t know anything about her really. Had never even seen either of her parents, just the one raggedy aunt who was a crackhead that everybody simultaneously felt sorry for and was disgusted by. His father told him Breonna’s aunt used to be beautiful, but it was hard to see it now.

  There had been one more time with Breonna since the night of his party. After that second time, he felt guilty about it and decided to stop all that with her. With everyone, probably. He decided to give celibacy another, more earnest try. While he was talking to Jada, he couldn’t see other chicks, and do to them the kinds of things Breonna let him do.

  With Bree there were few boundaries. She succumbed her body in whatever way
he wanted it, a gauzy, dreamy, distant look in her eyes that Ibrahim used to think meant pleasure. But the last time, he found himself wondering whether their sex had ever given her pleasure, and whether maybe that distant look was her way of absenting herself. He thought he knew what was responsible for that shift in his thinking, even though not too long ago, he would have sworn she liked having sex with him. Liked sex, in general.

  The thing that made him guilty about it wasn’t just that he was trying to holler at Jada. That last time he was with Bree, when she got that look on her face, out of nowhere he remembered a cat named Eric who he met in the joint.

  He was a funny-looking dude, who though he had the face of a geeky, harmless type, had the body of a weightlifter. When he talked, Eric did this thing where he kept shoving his glasses up on his nose, and grimacing as he did like Steve Urkel on that new sitcom, as if the motion caused him discomfort.

  Ibrahim didn’t know what he was in for at first, because that wasn’t the kind of thing you asked. But one night when they were watching television, him, Eric and two other dudes, some actress came onscreen and out of nowhere Eric started giggling uncontrollably, saying how the actress looked like a girl he used to know.

  One of the other dudes asked him what was so funny. I know you ain’t gon’ front like you fucked her, he added.

  He didn’t have to spell it out. Eric was so funny looking there was no way he could have gotten with a chick who even half-assed resembled the actress on television.

  Oh, I fucked her alright, Eric said, nodding emphatically. And then he kept giggling, putting a hand up to hide his yellowish teeth.

  Tell us what’s so funny you crazy motherfucker, one of the guys said. What? You couldn’t get it up even for a piece like that? That’s what’s funny?

  Eric stopped laughing just as suddenly as he started.

  He began by speaking slowly, but as he went on became more animated, like he wasn’t even in control of his words anymore. He described in painstaking detail, down to the shoes she was wearing, the time he had been with the girl who looked like the actress on television.