The car rides to swim class were the quietest parts of summer. Aside from the small talk Josephine threw out from the backseat of the Ford Crown Victoria, the only noise shared between her and her mother was the raspy crackle of the tinfoil that clutched her clammy peanut-butter-and-jelly. In the mornings, her mother played the local news—newscasters blitzed through the shootings, robberies, and fires that her mother forbade her from watching in movies. It was the same thing in the evenings, except her mother took more phone calls. But her mother always drove with the radio off. She said it helped her see the road better.

“I want to take speech classes,” said Josephine, trying something different by initiating conversation.

“Why.” None of her mother’s questions ever came out as questions, except for when Josephine was in real trouble.

Josephine crinkled the tinfoil a bit. “Everyone thinks I talk weird.” 

“Weird-ly. Everybody thinks you talk weird-ly,” her mother corrected. They spoke Creole around the house, but in the car, Josephine wanted to prepare to talk English to the kids at the pool. It was this switching back and forth that made some consonants gummy and awkward. Her R’s and W’s stuck to the roof of her mouth like peanut butter. 

“And you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t talk like that.”

“I do, though—”

“Who say you talk weird?” She didn’t even wait for her daughter’s response before pressing: “Who says that? Is it that boy Sunny? You shouldn’t talk to him so much. You don’t know if you can trust him.”
“You don’t know him.”

“I don’t know his family.”  Josephine wanted to reply with We’re his family, but she had tried that before, and it had only ended in a long tirade on relationships, trust, getting an education, a good job, and marriage.  

“What should I call Sunra’s mom?” Josephine asked.

“‘Her,’” said her mother.

“Not ‘Auntie’?”

“Eat, Josephine.” 

Josephine took another begrudging bite. 

“What are you going to bring your father for his visit?”
“I don’t know.” Josephine didn’t feel like thinking too hard about the gift, given that she and the Ford Crown Victoria were the only things her father had left them. 

“Josephine, you have to get him a gift. A seashell. A card. I don’t care.”

“I’ll get him something when we go to the beach tomorrow.”

“Oh-oh. Who said we are going to the beach?”

“I need to get him a gift, right?”

“I will think about it.”

They pulled up to the rec center that, as Josephine’s mother always complained, was just out of reach of public transit. Josephine flip-flopped to the locker room and put away her change of clothes. She hung back as the other girls left, then checked her hair in the mirror to make sure the braids were still tight. She walked out to the small grassy field in the middle of the square-shaped building. There was still some pre-time before first exercises. Josephine moved quickly through clusters of kids to the oasis at the center: a single picnic table, where Sunra was sitting beside a stack of board game boxes, all cracked and withered from the sun’s rays and the countless, chlorine-coated campers’ fingers. 

“Good morning, Sunra,” Josephine said, plopping her lunchbox onto the table and her body onto the bench. Sunra grunted a little hello in reply. He was only a couple months older than Josephine, but he always carried himself as world-wearier.

“Sunra. Sunra.” Still no response from him. He was listening in on a group of boys sitting nearby, staring at the pine trees so they wouldn’t notice.

Josephine pressed him: “Sunny.”

“I told you not to call me that,” Sunra replied immediately.

“You don’t hate ‘Sunra’ anymore?” Josephine asked as she extracted the weathered Connect 4 box from the stack. It was always Connect 4, as every game was missing pieces, but with Connect 4, it mattered the least.

“I mean, it’s my name. Only Auntie calls me Sunny, and that’s because she can’t remember my name.” Whereas their father had left Josephine an old Ford sedan, he had gifted his son the name Sunra, after some weird jazz artist. Josephine’s mother always complained about the “weird jazz music” her father used to always play when they were in the same house together. She just wanted to listen to Michael Jackson and Prince, but he wouldn’t let go of talk about “arkestras” and maggot brains. 

“Who would want to listen to that” her mother would say. “I don’t need the future. I don’t need space. I need him now.” 

From the way Sunra always complained about his “weird name,” it sounded like her mother got the light end of the stick. And it was more than Josephine could say about her own name—when she asked her mother where it came from, her mother replied, “It sounded nice and respectable.” That is to say, it was lame.

Sunra always acted like he didn’t want to play, but once they got started, he was always dead set on winning. Josephine almost never let that happen. She’d give him all the turns he needed to get close to winning, and then shut him down with one disc.

“You’re not even trying to win,” Sunra sighed.

“It’s a draw. We both win,” said Josephine.

“It means we both lose.” 

Josephine stopped tap-tap-tapping her piece on the table and looked at Sunra, who had his eyes fixed once again on the group of boys behind her back. She couldn’t see them, but she heard them.

Hey, hey. Hey! Listen up. SNAPS is the—Chris, shut the fuck up for a second. SNAPS is the name of the game; the name of the game is SNAPS.

She already knew who they were—Jody, Chris, Elliot, Aiden, and Wayne. There were about seven huddles in the grass every morning, like the girls who talked about horses, the handful of Chinese-American kids, the sporty ones—as the only two black kids in the program, Josephine counted herself and Sunra as a huddle too. But the Snaps huddle was the tightest—no one entered, no one left, and all because of that game no one else could understand.

She heard one of the boys snap his fingers three times, pause, then snap them three times more. Then murmurs as the rest of the boys—and Sunra, though he wouldn’t show it—tried to decipher the snaps. The rest of the boys were captivated. Their minds raced, trying to crack the code. It had to be a person, a place, or a thing, like the hardest of all the Wheel of Fortune categories. Sunra was supposed to take his turn, but where Josephine found Snaps pointless, Sunra was immediately tantalized by its exclusion.

I think I got it. Wait—Wait—Chris, shut the fuck up, Chris, it’s not Vanessa Hudgens. Let me think. Is it Vanessa Carlton? No? Fuck!

“It’s your turn, Sunra.” He didn’t respond. 

Can you give us a hint? Shut up, I’m not stupid, I just want a hint—A place. Like, a country, or a building? A restaurant? Fuck.

 “Sunra.” Still nothing. “Sunra.” He dropped a disc into the board without looking at it or saying a word or participating in the only time she could share with her family, or with anyone else at this swimming pool.

So, she asked him: “What are you getting Brandon for his visit?” 

“You mean Dad?” An instant reply. “Why, is he visiting? He’s visiting? Who said?”

Who said Applebee’s? Is it Applebee’s? Can I hear the snaps again? Fuck.

“Maman told me.”

“Damn, Auntie,” Sunra scoffed, clearly hurt.

Is it Jollibee? No way it’s— It is?! Yeah, I know what Jollibee fucking is, why wouldn’t I know what it is? Why would you pick Jollibee if you didn’t think anyone would guess it? Fuck!
“I think he called Maman and said he’d be over this weekend,” said Josephine. When Sunra didn’t respond, she kept trying to connect on the one thing they both had in common: “She keeps telling me to get a gift for him—”

“Then get a fucking gift for him!” Sunra suddenly shouted, loud enough for the boys behind him to stop their chatter. All the eyes in the area suddenly felt like they were on them. Sunra smacked the discs in his fist onto the table. Josephine jumped; the grid jumped and fell on its side, sending discs clattering and rattling across the table and onto the grass. Josephine moved to pick up the pieces, and there was silence until the whistle blew to pull all the students inside. Counselors were herding the kids back into the rec center pool. Bodies drained into the indoor pool room and so did the sounds they carried. 

“You’re really annoying sometimes, Jo,” said Sunra. He stormed off without picking up a single piece, leaving Josephine to clean up the pieces by herself, among other voices and other blues.

The car rides to swim class were the quietest parts of summer. Aside from the small talk Josephine threw out from the backseat of the Ford Crown Victoria, the only noise shared between her and her mother was the raspy crackle of the tinfoil that clutched her clammy peanut-butter-and-jelly. In the mornings, her mother played the local news—newscasters blitzed through the shootings, robberies, and fires that her mother forbade her from watching in movies. It was the same thing in the evenings, except her mother took more phone calls. But her mother always drove with the radio off. She said it helped her see the road better.

“I want to take speech classes,” said Josephine, trying something different by initiating conversation.

“Why.” None of her mother’s questions ever came out as questions, except for when Josephine was in real trouble.

Josephine crinkled the tinfoil a bit. “Everyone thinks I talk weird.” 

“Weird-ly. Everybody thinks you talk weird-ly,” her mother corrected. They spoke Creole around the house, but in the car, Josephine wanted to prepare to talk English to the kids at the pool. It was this switching back and forth that made some consonants gummy and awkward. Her R’s and W’s stuck to the roof of her mouth like peanut butter. 

“And you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t talk like that.”

“I do, though—”

“Who say you talk weird?” She didn’t even wait for her daughter’s response before pressing: “Who says that? Is it that boy Sunny? You shouldn’t talk to him so much. You don’t know if you can trust him.”
“You don’t know him.”

“I don’t know his family.”  Josephine wanted to reply with We’re his family, but she had tried that before, and it had only ended in a long tirade on relationships, trust, getting an education, a good job, and marriage.  

“What should I call Sunra’s mom?” Josephine asked.

“‘Her,’” said her mother.

“Not ‘Auntie’?”

“Eat, Josephine.” 

Josephine took another begrudging bite. 

“What are you going to bring your father for his visit?”
“I don’t know.” Josephine didn’t feel like thinking too hard about the gift, given that she and the Ford Crown Victoria were the only things her father had left them. 

“Josephine, you have to get him a gift. A seashell. A card. I don’t care.”

“I’ll get him something when we go to the beach tomorrow.”

“Oh-oh. Who said we are going to the beach?”

“I need to get him a gift, right?”

“I will think about it.”

They pulled up to the rec center that, as Josephine’s mother always complained, was just out of reach of public transit. Josephine flip-flopped to the locker room and put away her change of clothes. She hung back as the other girls left, then checked her hair in the mirror to make sure the braids were still tight. She walked out to the small grassy field in the middle of the square-shaped building. There was still some pre-time before first exercises. Josephine moved quickly through clusters of kids to the oasis at the center: a single picnic table, where Sunra was sitting beside a stack of board game boxes, all cracked and withered from the sun’s rays and the countless, chlorine-coated campers’ fingers. 

“Good morning, Sunra,” Josephine said, plopping her lunchbox onto the table and her body onto the bench. Sunra grunted a little hello in reply. He was only a couple months older than Josephine, but he always carried himself as world-wearier.

“Sunra. Sunra.” Still no response from him. He was listening in on a group of boys sitting nearby, staring at the pine trees so they wouldn’t notice.

Josephine pressed him: “Sunny.”

“I told you not to call me that,” Sunra replied immediately.

“You don’t hate ‘Sunra’ anymore?” Josephine asked as she extracted the weathered Connect 4 box from the stack. It was always Connect 4, as every game was missing pieces, but with Connect 4, it mattered the least.

“I mean, it’s my name. Only Auntie calls me Sunny, and that’s because she can’t remember my name.” Whereas their father had left Josephine an old Ford sedan, he had gifted his son the name Sunra, after some weird jazz artist. Josephine’s mother always complained about the “weird jazz music” her father used to always play when they were in the same house together. She just wanted to listen to Michael Jackson and Prince, but he wouldn’t let go of talk about “arkestras” and maggot brains. 

“Who would want to listen to that” her mother would say. “I don’t need the future. I don’t need space. I need him now.” 

From the way Sunra always complained about his “weird name,” it sounded like her mother got the light end of the stick. And it was more than Josephine could say about her own name—when she asked her mother where it came from, her mother replied, “It sounded nice and respectable.” That is to say, it was lame.

Sunra always acted like he didn’t want to play, but once they got started, he was always dead set on winning. Josephine almost never let that happen. She’d give him all the turns he needed to get close to winning, and then shut him down with one disc.

“You’re not even trying to win,” Sunra sighed.

“It’s a draw. We both win,” said Josephine.

“It means we both lose.” 

Josephine stopped tap-tap-tapping her piece on the table and looked at Sunra, who had his eyes fixed once again on the group of boys behind her back. She couldn’t see them, but she heard them.

Hey, hey. Hey! Listen up. SNAPS is the—Chris, shut the fuck up for a second. SNAPS is the name of the game; the name of the game is SNAPS.

She already knew who they were—Jody, Chris, Elliot, Aiden, and Wayne. There were about seven huddles in the grass every morning, like the girls who talked about horses, the handful of Chinese-American kids, the sporty ones—as the only two black kids in the program, Josephine counted herself and Sunra as a huddle too. But the Snaps huddle was the tightest—no one entered, no one left, and all because of that game no one else could understand.

She heard one of the boys snap his fingers three times, pause, then snap them three times more. Then murmurs as the rest of the boys—and Sunra, though he wouldn’t show it—tried to decipher the snaps. The rest of the boys were captivated. Their minds raced, trying to crack the code. It had to be a person, a place, or a thing, like the hardest of all the Wheel of Fortune categories. Sunra was supposed to take his turn, but where Josephine found Snaps pointless, Sunra was immediately tantalized by its exclusion.

I think I got it. Wait—Wait—Chris, shut the fuck up, Chris, it’s not Vanessa Hudgens. Let me think. Is it Vanessa Carlton? No? Fuck!

“It’s your turn, Sunra.” He didn’t respond. 

Can you give us a hint? Shut up, I’m not stupid, I just want a hint—A place. Like, a country, or a building? A restaurant? Fuck.

 “Sunra.” Still nothing. “Sunra.” He dropped a disc into the board without looking at it or saying a word or participating in the only time she could share with her family, or with anyone else at this swimming pool.

So, she asked him: “What are you getting Brandon for his visit?” 

“You mean Dad?” An instant reply. “Why, is he visiting? He’s visiting? Who said?”

Who said Applebee’s? Is it Applebee’s? Can I hear the snaps again? Fuck.

“Maman told me.”

“Damn, Auntie,” Sunra scoffed, clearly hurt.

Is it Jollibee? No way it’s— It is?! Yeah, I know what Jollibee fucking is, why wouldn’t I know what it is? Why would you pick Jollibee if you didn’t think anyone would guess it? Fuck!
“I think he called Maman and said he’d be over this weekend,” said Josephine. When Sunra didn’t respond, she kept trying to connect on the one thing they both had in common: “She keeps telling me to get a gift for him—”

“Then get a fucking gift for him!” Sunra suddenly shouted, loud enough for the boys behind him to stop their chatter. All the eyes in the area suddenly felt like they were on them. Sunra smacked the discs in his fist onto the table. Josephine jumped; the grid jumped and fell on its side, sending discs clattering and rattling across the table and onto the grass. Josephine moved to pick up the pieces, and there was silence until the whistle blew to pull all the students inside. Counselors were herding the kids back into the rec center pool. Bodies drained into the indoor pool room and so did the sounds they carried. 

“You’re really annoying sometimes, Jo,” said Sunra. He stormed off without picking up a single piece, leaving Josephine to clean up the pieces by herself, among other voices and other blues.

*

What gift does someone give for a voice over the phone? In the pool, the instructors were having them practice the jellyfish float, Josephine’s least favorite exercise. She much preferred kicking, since she could kick the hardest out of all the girls. Seemingly overnight, she sprouted her father’s broad shoulders and rectangular frame. Her skin was ashy from all the chlorine. The water made her feel like a clunky, graceless rhombus. And worse yet, as she lay back and felt the water tongue her ears and lick the edges of her eyes, she had nothing to distract herself from thinking of a gift for her fairytale father. 

“All you have to do is lean back, Jo,” her instructor urged her. “Lean back—Relax, Josephine.” She didn’t like how the instructor spat out her name, “JOH-suh-feen,” like a sneeze. It was very unlike the way her mother said it—even at her angriest, her mother took care in pronouncing her name the way she intended. The soft J, the breathy “eh,” the tight “ine,” with the careful tongue touch on the N that wrapped it all up in a nice bow. Josephine, a name that was her mother’s gift. The instructor kept telling Josephine to relax, like the water would hold her. Relax, like she and the water were shaking hands. Relax, like between herself and the water, she wasn’t the only one with something to lose. 

“Why are you so tense, Josephine?” 

Because giving gifts was new. What’s a 10-year-old supposed to get for a grown man? What did he even like? She rattled off all the things she knew about him: He was a singer and a guitarist. He had dreadlocks, or at least, he used to. He was a very large man—broad  shoulders, broad gut. Even his voice, the two times he’d called her, was surreal in how thick and heavy it was, like her mother’s landline needed a heavy-duty cord to carry it. He said things like “Hello, Jojo!” and “Goodbye,” and “I will visit soon,” and a lot of words in between. He was incredibly talkative. His words never stuck.

The Snaps boys were ignoring the instructors and taking running jumps off the high dive, presumably unconscious of how small and gangly they were. Did they really have no idea of how little weight they had to throw around? Meanwhile, she had to put all her trust in the water, floating in a swimsuit that fit her one year ago, feeling almost completely alone in fretting about fairytale fathers. Whatever gift she got for him, she wanted it to remind him of the lonely sounds of water.

Josephine spent the whole day brainstorming gift ideas. Lunchtime—he ate lunch, right? Did he eat Scooby-Doo fruit snacks? Back in the pool after lunch—did he need a water cap for his dreadlocks like she did for her braids? The Snaps boys were talking about cartoons on cable channels her mother didn’t want to pay for. Maybe they had gift cards for cable connections that she could buy. Except she didn’t have money, nor did she know if Brandon even had cable. A towel with her face on it—no, her mother’s—no, Sunra’s. Shower shoes? Body wash? An extra pair of socks to replace the ones that soaked up the locker room floor sweat? 

Kids would start to filter out at the end of the day, some being picked up early, others simply had parents who showed up exactly at the end of the day. Sunra, who hadn’t spoken to Josephine since that morning, was always one of the early kids to go—she couldn’t help but wonder how his mother had time to pick him up early. She and a handful of other kids were the stragglers, the ones the instructors told to wait on the benches in the lobby of the rec facility to clear the grass for the late afternoon yoga ladies. So, she waited by the window and watched cars circle up to the doorway. It was one of her favorite parts of the day, because—

“Jo? Hey Jo!” One of the girls from swim class tapped her on the shoulder. Jo recognized her as Jenny. She had long reddish-blonde hair that she never wore a cap for. Other girls teased her for her freckles. She got poison ivy every other day and would tell everyone about it. Josephine was convinced she did it on purpose because other than the rash, she was quite boring. Josephine smiled a bit and waved at her.

“You have cool hair—like, really cool hair.” Josephine thought her roots were looking frizzy, and she fully expected her mother to undo the braids and take the hot iron to it when they got home.

“Thanks,” Josephine replied. 

“Can I braid it sometime?”

“No, thank you.” The only thing worse than having Jenny’s fingertips on her scalp would be the inevitable pauses and “hmmm”s when Jenny came to realize that her own hair didn’t curl and twist and clench the same way Josephine’s did. Thankfully, her father’s white Ford Crown Victoria pulled up to the curb in the line of parents’ cars, offering her a quick escape. This was her favorite part of the day, because the line of cars made her feel like a guest of honor in a presidential cavalcade. 

“Did you make new friends today?” her mother asked as she climbed in the car. 

“Yeah, a girl named Jenny. She’s nice.”

“Black girl?”
“No.”

“Mmm.” Her mother had a special way of turning words into un-words. In that “Mmm,” Josephine heard That’s too bad and I’m disappointed, but not too surprised. She could never eavesdrop on her mother’s phone calls with her friends, because they were all energetically nonverbal.

“What does Brandon like?” she asked as they pulled away from the pool.

“Don’t call him Brandon.”

“What do I call him?”

“Don’t call him Brandon.”

“What does my dad like?”

Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know, just get him something nice.”

“Are you excited to see him?”

Her mother exhaled loudly through her nose. “He should have come to see you a long time ago. He would always call and say, ‘Oh, I’m coming. I’ll see you soon.’ But he’s coming now, and…” She rapped her fingers along the steering wheel in a conclusive fashion. “And… he’s coming now.”

This was her father’s ghost—a specter of secondhand stories and evasive one-liner answers. Josephine learned apprehension of him from her mother’s tight lips. If she asked questions about him, she’d get answers—short ones that only raised more questions, and those were off limits. It wasn’t the Ford Crown Victoria or her broad shoulders or Sunra’s name that made her father feel present when he had never been. It was those terse answers and stories. They kept alive her father’s specter.

“We have to get up early tomorrow, Josephine.”
“We’re going to Brighton Beach?” Josephine bounced in the backseat with fervor. 

◆

Brighton Beach was packed on weekends, and there was no one to talk to. Where the pool had clumps of green grass and patches of dirt, the beach had clumps of garbage and swaths of sand. Seagulls descended on unprotected sandwiches like raptors, and the air held the smell of the seaweed that slithered around unsuspecting legs in the murky green water. Josephine and her mother navigated through crowds of people, danced around discarded cigarette butts, and avoided the occasional tumbling trash bag and Styrofoam container. 

It was Josephine’s favorite place on earth.

“Josephine, watch where you’re walking!” her mom called out, to no avail. She had already taken off sprinting towards the water. Her feet kicked up clumps of sand behind her into the blankets and faces of beachgoers. Her braids bounced jauntily atop her head. She felt the salty sea, the sun’s sweet soak. Her skin was a solar cell. 

“Watch your feet, Josephine! Watch your feet!”

Her world was awash with sound. The reggaetón coming from the boomboxes; the gulls chirping; the water lapping up against the sand; kids screeching. Where other people probably felt overwhelmed, Josephine felt liberated. No one sound could be singled out—there was no single gaggle of people talking a language she couldn’t understand. There were as many people speaking Creole as there were English as there were Spanish. At the pool, seven groups of kids were vying for dominance, each with their own national language. But at the beach, it was all too much to tell apart. And she didn’t think of Brandon once, until she saw the round hull of a conch shell poking out of the wet sand by the surf. 

She dug it out of the goopy sand with her fingertips and admired its soft edges and water-worn creases. It took both of her hands to hold. Weighing it in her hands reminded her of trips to the outdoor grocery markets, watching her mother feel for quality cantaloupes with her palms. And the color of the shell—some may have called it ivory, or off-white, but Josephine called it Crown Victoria-colored. It matched the exterior of her father’s car perfectly, right down to the way they both soaked in the summer sunlight.

This would be the gift.

Josephine started to walk back to her mother, entranced by the conch in her hands. It was a pretty shell, for sure, but what struck her the most was how perfect it was—smooth and unflawed in a refuse-littered plastic beach. It reminded her of the only tape of Brandon’s music that her mother kept around the house—an early demo recording of folky rara music he had recorded in a studio in Port-au-Prince. Her mother told her that he had used almost all of his savings to convince the engineer to record him and his friends, leaving none of them with any pay. But he convinced them that the recording would pay off, and it did. They started routinely hosting gigs at the Hotel Oloffson, touring with the likes of Boukman Eksperyans and turning the heads of American music lovers who fancied themselves eclectic. Josephine held the conch to her ear to imagine the drums, trumpets, and throaty vocals. 

But instead, a searing pain blossomed on the bottom of her foot. Josephine dropped into the sand immediately with a wail. The conch tumbled out of her hands and landed next to the torn Coca-Cola can that had slashed her; it bared its silver insides wide, like a row of tin teeth. Josephine clutched her bleeding foot. It felt like someone had sketched a line into her skin with a scalpel. She tentatively stood back up, sucking in deep breaths of air and squeezing her eyes tight enough that she wouldn’t cry. Collecting the conch in one hand and her foot in the other, Josephine pogo-hopped back to her mother, who immediately jumped from the bedsheet she had laid out.

“Where did you go, enh? Didn’t I tell you to watch where you were going?” Her mother hurried her onto the bedsheet and opened the handbag she had brought with her. She extracted some gauze and Neosporin. 

“I got aaaaaah,” Josephine yelped as her mother wiped the blood off her wound. The antibacterial cream stung and tingled like icy centipede legs. “I got a gift. Aah. I got a gift for my daaaaaaaahd.”

“Good. I have to put pressure on the wound, ok?” 

“Please don’t—” Her mother’s thumbs pressed down hard on the gauze that covered her open flesh. A new pain bloomed like an ink stain in her leg and Josephine cried out, wanting to skip this pain and jump right into the next day.

◆

Her father came to their apartment precisely at 7:46 A.M., the time Josephine was born. Even after the doorman downstairs buzzed him in, he had to ask for permission from Josephine’s mother to be let inside the house, like a vampire. His “Hello!” heated the whole apartment and forced all of its walls outwards, suddenly giving them an extra 200 square feet and undoubtedly knocking their neighbors’ belongings to the ground. He was so big that he had to duck his head and turn sideways just to fit through the doorway. He brought her mother a decorative mug from every country he’d played in, and inside of each he had slipped a rolled-up check for every child support payment he’d missed. Josephine was just waking up when he opened her bedroom door. She could hear his floor-length dreadlocks brushing the floor—they tickled her nose as he leaned over her, and she couldn’t help but giggle.

“Good morning, Jojo.”

“Good morning,” Josephine replied. She opened her eyes and sat upright as he gave her a kiss on the cheek. Seeing him for the first time in a while, she realized that that kiss, in and of itself, was impressive for him. He was a floating ball of concrete-colored gas the size of an adult man, with a mop of dreadlocks sprouting from the top. How he held all those mugs was anyone’s guess, much less how he managed to give her a kiss.

“I got you a present,” said Josephine. Her father crackled and rumbled in anticipation. She reached under her bed and pulled out the conch.

“Oh!” her father exclaimed, letting off a quick thunderclap as he did so. “Very nice, Jojo! I had one just like it back at home. Pass it to me. Let me show you how to play it.”

“No.”

“Eh? Why not?”
“I already know how to play it. I want to play you a song.”

The ghost of her father did a little midair shimmy—his best attempt at a head nod—and floated back a bit to give her room. Josephine smacked her lips a bit, held the pointy end of the conch to her mouth, and blew into it as hard as she could. The sound that came out the other end was: SNAPS is the name of the game; the name of the game is SNAPS. Snap Snap Snap. Pause. Snap Snap.

She looked up at her father and could literally see the synapses firing in his brain in the form of tiny lightning bolts. She blew into it again. Snap Snap Snap. Pause. Snap Snap.

“I don’t know what that is,” said her father. “What is that?”

“Some game the kids play at my pool.”

“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither!”

And the two spent the rest of the day laughing about the random games the white kids made up, and her father rambled on about suspicions that they were made just to have another barrier against other kids taking part. 

At least, that’s how Josephine decided to remember the day. 

In reality, her father had called her mother the night after they had gotten back from Brighton Beach and told her that (“sorry”), due to (“I’m sorry”) a change in (“sorry”) his touring schedule, he (“I’m so sorry”) once again wouldn’t be able to make it home to see Josephine (“Please tell her I’m sorry”). And then the weekend was over.

◆

On Monday, it rained during lunch, so the staff crammed all the students into the pool room. They were forced to break up their normal groups and instead line the perimeters along the walls. Josephine, sitting next to Sunra, could feel the fat summer raindrops pounding against the glass against her back. The instructors didn’t let her swim because of her injury, which she expected. But her mother still had shifts to make and no one to watch her. The other kids unwrapped their lunches to eat, but Josephine had already eaten her sandwich while watching all the kids attempt the high dive. She kept herself busy by scoring each dive, like they did on TV. Everyone’s dive kind of looked the same, though, so everyone got a solid 8.0 and a gold medal. Instead of her lunch, Josephine pulled out the conch—the conch which was, and forever would be, just a shell. 

“Is that a shell?” Sunra surprised Josephine by starting the conversation, for a change.

Josephine nodded. “I got it at the beach, for—” She stopped when she remembered how livid Sunra was the last time she brought up their father. “For—”
“For Brandon.” 

“Yeah.”

Sunra shifted his weight a little awkwardly. “My momma spent all of yesterday waiting for him to show up. I never seen her so angry before. She even mentioned your momma by her name.”
“What for?”
Another awkward shuffle. “She said he always loved your momma more than her. I tried fighting back on that. I told her he definitely loves her more. That was stupid, ‘cause now she’s mad at me, too. Said I wouldn’t understand.”

“Do you think, maybe, he loves them both?” Josephine asked.
Sunra shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. They’re tied in how much he loves each of them, so they both lose.”

Josephine didn’t say anything.  She just lowered her head and tried not to think about if the same was true for her and Sunra. 

“It’s a cool shell,” Sunra said, noticing her discomfort. 

Josephine shrugged. “It’s okay.” 

“You want to play a game?”

Josephine eyed him suspiciously. “You want to play a game?”
“I’m asking you.”

“What’s the game?”

“Questions.” Sunra didn’t wait for a response. “Okay. Would you rather lose a leg or lose an arm?”

“Probably an arm,” Josephine replied. “So I can still run.”
“You need your arms to run, though,” Sunra replied. “Now you ask me a question.”

“Did Brandon call you yesterday?”

Sunra paused. “Yeah. He told me some more bullshit about my name—how Sun Ra was this musician that had the ability to see the future. Or he was really into the future, or time travel. I don’t know. But he tried telling me that he gave me the name so I would always be thinking one step ahead of everyone else. He said the future was something I should look forward to, not the present.”

“What’d you say?” asked Josephine.

Sunra shrugged. “I said it was bullshit, and then he hung up, and then my momma yelled at me. Same as always.”

“I kind of wanted to see him,” Josephine confessed. “But I don’t feel that bad that he didn’t show up. It just feels kind of normal.” She looked at the conch in her hands. In the Brighton Beach sunlight, it was vibrant and warm. On a soggy Monday afternoon, however, it looked washed out and pale. “Is that weird?”

“I think I’m done with Questions,” Sunra replied. Josephine felt the same. Sunra collected his lunchbox and swim bag and stepped out into the rain. Josephine sat with her arms wrapped around her legs and listened to the Snaps boys confound each other over and over, until the swim instructors called everyone in and all the boys did high jumps off the high dive and landed with ungraceful slaps into the water, coming out laughing and patting each other like even that was something they’d invented, that no one could take away.

What gift does someone give for a voice over the phone? In the pool, the instructors were having them practice the jellyfish float, Josephine’s least favorite exercise. She much preferred kicking, since she could kick the hardest out of all the girls. Seemingly overnight, she sprouted her father’s broad shoulders and rectangular frame. Her skin was ashy from all the chlorine. The water made her feel like a clunky, graceless rhombus. And worse yet, as she lay back and felt the water tongue her ears and lick the edges of her eyes, she had nothing to distract herself from thinking of a gift for her fairytale father. 

“All you have to do is lean back, Jo,” her instructor urged her. “Lean back—Relax, Josephine.” She didn’t like how the instructor spat out her name, “JOH-suh-feen,” like a sneeze. It was very unlike the way her mother said it—even at her angriest, her mother took care in pronouncing her name the way she intended. The soft J, the breathy “eh,” the tight “ine,” with the careful tongue touch on the N that wrapped it all up in a nice bow. Josephine, a name that was her mother’s gift. The instructor kept telling Josephine to relax, like the water would hold her. Relax, like she and the water were shaking hands. Relax, like between herself and the water, she wasn’t the only one with something to lose. 

“Why are you so tense, Josephine?” 

Because giving gifts was new. What’s a 10-year-old supposed to get for a grown man? What did he even like? She rattled off all the things she knew about him: He was a singer and a guitarist. He had dreadlocks, or at least, he used to. He was a very large man—broad  shoulders, broad gut. Even his voice, the two times he’d called her, was surreal in how thick and heavy it was, like her mother’s landline needed a heavy-duty cord to carry it. He said things like “Hello, Jojo!” and “Goodbye,” and “I will visit soon,” and a lot of words in between. He was incredibly talkative. His words never stuck.

The Snaps boys were ignoring the instructors and taking running jumps off the high dive, presumably unconscious of how small and gangly they were. Did they really have no idea of how little weight they had to throw around? Meanwhile, she had to put all her trust in the water, floating in a swimsuit that fit her one year ago, feeling almost completely alone in fretting about fairytale fathers. Whatever gift she got for him, she wanted it to remind him of the lonely sounds of water.

Josephine spent the whole day brainstorming gift ideas. Lunchtime—he ate lunch, right? Did he eat Scooby-Doo fruit snacks? Back in the pool after lunch—did he need a water cap for his dreadlocks like she did for her braids? The Snaps boys were talking about cartoons on cable channels her mother didn’t want to pay for. Maybe they had gift cards for cable connections that she could buy. Except she didn’t have money, nor did she know if Brandon even had cable. A towel with her face on it—no, her mother’s—no, Sunra’s. Shower shoes? Body wash? An extra pair of socks to replace the ones that soaked up the locker room floor sweat? 

Kids would start to filter out at the end of the day, some being picked up early, others simply had parents who showed up exactly at the end of the day. Sunra, who hadn’t spoken to Josephine since that morning, was always one of the early kids to go—she couldn’t help but wonder how his mother had time to pick him up early. She and a handful of other kids were the stragglers, the ones the instructors told to wait on the benches in the lobby of the rec facility to clear the grass for the late afternoon yoga ladies. So, she waited by the window and watched cars circle up to the doorway. It was one of her favorite parts of the day, because—

“Jo? Hey Jo!” One of the girls from swim class tapped her on the shoulder. Jo recognized her as Jenny. She had long reddish-blonde hair that she never wore a cap for. Other girls teased her for her freckles. She got poison ivy every other day and would tell everyone about it. Josephine was convinced she did it on purpose because other than the rash, she was quite boring. Josephine smiled a bit and waved at her.

“You have cool hair—like, really cool hair.” Josephine thought her roots were looking frizzy, and she fully expected her mother to undo the braids and take the hot iron to it when they got home.

“Thanks,” Josephine replied. 

“Can I braid it sometime?”

“No, thank you.” The only thing worse than having Jenny’s fingertips on her scalp would be the inevitable pauses and “hmmm”s when Jenny came to realize that her own hair didn’t curl and twist and clench the same way Josephine’s did. Thankfully, her father’s white Ford Crown Victoria pulled up to the curb in the line of parents’ cars, offering her a quick escape. This was her favorite part of the day, because the line of cars made her feel like a guest of honor in a presidential cavalcade. 

“Did you make new friends today?” her mother asked as she climbed in the car. 

“Yeah, a girl named Jenny. She’s nice.”

“Black girl?”
“No.”

“Mmm.” Her mother had a special way of turning words into un-words. In that “Mmm,” Josephine heard That’s too bad and I’m disappointed, but not too surprised. She could never eavesdrop on her mother’s phone calls with her friends, because they were all energetically nonverbal.

“What does Brandon like?” she asked as they pulled away from the pool.

“Don’t call him Brandon.”

“What do I call him?”

“Don’t call him Brandon.”

“What does my dad like?”

Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know, just get him something nice.”

“Are you excited to see him?”

Her mother exhaled loudly through her nose. “He should have come to see you a long time ago. He would always call and say, ‘Oh, I’m coming. I’ll see you soon.’ But he’s coming now, and…” She rapped her fingers along the steering wheel in a conclusive fashion. “And… he’s coming now.”

This was her father’s ghost—a specter of secondhand stories and evasive one-liner answers. Josephine learned apprehension of him from her mother’s tight lips. If she asked questions about him, she’d get answers—short ones that only raised more questions, and those were off limits. It wasn’t the Ford Crown Victoria or her broad shoulders or Sunra’s name that made her father feel present when he had never been. It was those terse answers and stories. They kept alive her father’s specter.

“We have to get up early tomorrow, Josephine.”
“We’re going to Brighton Beach?” Josephine bounced in the backseat with fervor. 

◆

Brighton Beach was packed on weekends, and there was no one to talk to. Where the pool had clumps of green grass and patches of dirt, the beach had clumps of garbage and swaths of sand. Seagulls descended on unprotected sandwiches like raptors, and the air held the smell of the seaweed that slithered around unsuspecting legs in the murky green water. Josephine and her mother navigated through crowds of people, danced around discarded cigarette butts, and avoided the occasional tumbling trash bag and Styrofoam container. 

It was Josephine’s favorite place on earth.

“Josephine, watch where you’re walking!” her mom called out, to no avail. She had already taken off sprinting towards the water. Her feet kicked up clumps of sand behind her into the blankets and faces of beachgoers. Her braids bounced jauntily atop her head. She felt the salty sea, the sun’s sweet soak. Her skin was a solar cell. 

“Watch your feet, Josephine! Watch your feet!”

Her world was awash with sound. The reggaetón coming from the boomboxes; the gulls chirping; the water lapping up against the sand; kids screeching. Where other people probably felt overwhelmed, Josephine felt liberated. No one sound could be singled out—there was no single gaggle of people talking a language she couldn’t understand. There were as many people speaking Creole as there were English as there were Spanish. At the pool, seven groups of kids were vying for dominance, each with their own national language. But at the beach, it was all too much to tell apart. And she didn’t think of Brandon once, until she saw the round hull of a conch shell poking out of the wet sand by the surf. 

She dug it out of the goopy sand with her fingertips and admired its soft edges and water-worn creases. It took both of her hands to hold. Weighing it in her hands reminded her of trips to the outdoor grocery markets, watching her mother feel for quality cantaloupes with her palms. And the color of the shell—some may have called it ivory, or off-white, but Josephine called it Crown Victoria-colored. It matched the exterior of her father’s car perfectly, right down to the way they both soaked in the summer sunlight.

This would be the gift.

Josephine started to walk back to her mother, entranced by the conch in her hands. It was a pretty shell, for sure, but what struck her the most was how perfect it was—smooth and unflawed in a refuse-littered plastic beach. It reminded her of the only tape of Brandon’s music that her mother kept around the house—an early demo recording of folky rara music he had recorded in a studio in Port-au-Prince. Her mother told her that he had used almost all of his savings to convince the engineer to record him and his friends, leaving none of them with any pay. But he convinced them that the recording would pay off, and it did. They started routinely hosting gigs at the Hotel Oloffson, touring with the likes of Boukman Eksperyans and turning the heads of American music lovers who fancied themselves eclectic. Josephine held the conch to her ear to imagine the drums, trumpets, and throaty vocals. 

But instead, a searing pain blossomed on the bottom of her foot. Josephine dropped into the sand immediately with a wail. The conch tumbled out of her hands and landed next to the torn Coca-Cola can that had slashed her; it bared its silver insides wide, like a row of tin teeth. Josephine clutched her bleeding foot. It felt like someone had sketched a line into her skin with a scalpel. She tentatively stood back up, sucking in deep breaths of air and squeezing her eyes tight enough that she wouldn’t cry. Collecting the conch in one hand and her foot in the other, Josephine pogo-hopped back to her mother, who immediately jumped from the bedsheet she had laid out.

“Where did you go, enh? Didn’t I tell you to watch where you were going?” Her mother hurried her onto the bedsheet and opened the handbag she had brought with her. She extracted some gauze and Neosporin. 

“I got aaaaaah,” Josephine yelped as her mother wiped the blood off her wound. The antibacterial cream stung and tingled like icy centipede legs. “I got a gift. Aah. I got a gift for my daaaaaaaahd.”

“Good. I have to put pressure on the wound, ok?” 

“Please don’t—” Her mother’s thumbs pressed down hard on the gauze that covered her open flesh. A new pain bloomed like an ink stain in her leg and Josephine cried out, wanting to skip this pain and jump right into the next day.

◆

Her father came to their apartment precisely at 7:46 A.M., the time Josephine was born. Even after the doorman downstairs buzzed him in, he had to ask for permission from Josephine’s mother to be let inside the house, like a vampire. His “Hello!” heated the whole apartment and forced all of its walls outwards, suddenly giving them an extra 200 square feet and undoubtedly knocking their neighbors’ belongings to the ground. He was so big that he had to duck his head and turn sideways just to fit through the doorway. He brought her mother a decorative mug from every country he’d played in, and inside of each he had slipped a rolled-up check for every child support payment he’d missed. Josephine was just waking up when he opened her bedroom door. She could hear his floor-length dreadlocks brushing the floor—they tickled her nose as he leaned over her, and she couldn’t help but giggle.

“Good morning, Jojo.”

“Good morning,” Josephine replied. She opened her eyes and sat upright as he gave her a kiss on the cheek. Seeing him for the first time in a while, she realized that that kiss, in and of itself, was impressive for him. He was a floating ball of concrete-colored gas the size of an adult man, with a mop of dreadlocks sprouting from the top. How he held all those mugs was anyone’s guess, much less how he managed to give her a kiss.

“I got you a present,” said Josephine. Her father crackled and rumbled in anticipation. She reached under her bed and pulled out the conch.

“Oh!” her father exclaimed, letting off a quick thunderclap as he did so. “Very nice, Jojo! I had one just like it back at home. Pass it to me. Let me show you how to play it.”

“No.”

“Eh? Why not?”
“I already know how to play it. I want to play you a song.”

The ghost of her father did a little midair shimmy—his best attempt at a head nod—and floated back a bit to give her room. Josephine smacked her lips a bit, held the pointy end of the conch to her mouth, and blew into it as hard as she could. The sound that came out the other end was: SNAPS is the name of the game; the name of the game is SNAPS. Snap Snap Snap. Pause. Snap Snap.

She looked up at her father and could literally see the synapses firing in his brain in the form of tiny lightning bolts. She blew into it again. Snap Snap Snap. Pause. Snap Snap.

“I don’t know what that is,” said her father. “What is that?”

“Some game the kids play at my pool.”

“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither!”

And the two spent the rest of the day laughing about the random games the white kids made up, and her father rambled on about suspicions that they were made just to have another barrier against other kids taking part. 

At least, that’s how Josephine decided to remember the day. 

In reality, her father had called her mother the night after they had gotten back from Brighton Beach and told her that (“sorry”), due to (“I’m sorry”) a change in (“sorry”) his touring schedule, he (“I’m so sorry”) once again wouldn’t be able to make it home to see Josephine (“Please tell her I’m sorry”). And then the weekend was over.

◆

On Monday, it rained during lunch, so the staff crammed all the students into the pool room. They were forced to break up their normal groups and instead line the perimeters along the walls. Josephine, sitting next to Sunra, could feel the fat summer raindrops pounding against the glass against her back. The instructors didn’t let her swim because of her injury, which she expected. But her mother still had shifts to make and no one to watch her. The other kids unwrapped their lunches to eat, but Josephine had already eaten her sandwich while watching all the kids attempt the high dive. She kept herself busy by scoring each dive, like they did on TV. Everyone’s dive kind of looked the same, though, so everyone got a solid 8.0 and a gold medal. Instead of her lunch, Josephine pulled out the conch—the conch which was, and forever would be, just a shell. 

“Is that a shell?” Sunra surprised Josephine by starting the conversation, for a change.

Josephine nodded. “I got it at the beach, for—” She stopped when she remembered how livid Sunra was the last time she brought up their father. “For—”
“For Brandon.” 

“Yeah.”

Sunra shifted his weight a little awkwardly. “My momma spent all of yesterday waiting for him to show up. I never seen her so angry before. She even mentioned your momma by her name.”
“What for?”
Another awkward shuffle. “She said he always loved your momma more than her. I tried fighting back on that. I told her he definitely loves her more. That was stupid, ‘cause now she’s mad at me, too. Said I wouldn’t understand.”

“Do you think, maybe, he loves them both?” Josephine asked.
Sunra shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. They’re tied in how much he loves each of them, so they both lose.”

Josephine didn’t say anything.  She just lowered her head and tried not to think about if the same was true for her and Sunra. 

“It’s a cool shell,” Sunra said, noticing her discomfort. 

Josephine shrugged. “It’s okay.” 

“You want to play a game?”

Josephine eyed him suspiciously. “You want to play a game?”
“I’m asking you.”

“What’s the game?”

“Questions.” Sunra didn’t wait for a response. “Okay. Would you rather lose a leg or lose an arm?”

“Probably an arm,” Josephine replied. “So I can still run.”
“You need your arms to run, though,” Sunra replied. “Now you ask me a question.”

“Did Brandon call you yesterday?”

Sunra paused. “Yeah. He told me some more bullshit about my name—how Sun Ra was this musician that had the ability to see the future. Or he was really into the future, or time travel. I don’t know. But he tried telling me that he gave me the name so I would always be thinking one step ahead of everyone else. He said the future was something I should look forward to, not the present.”

“What’d you say?” asked Josephine.

Sunra shrugged. “I said it was bullshit, and then he hung up, and then my momma yelled at me. Same as always.”

“I kind of wanted to see him,” Josephine confessed. “But I don’t feel that bad that he didn’t show up. It just feels kind of normal.” She looked at the conch in her hands. In the Brighton Beach sunlight, it was vibrant and warm. On a soggy Monday afternoon, however, it looked washed out and pale. “Is that weird?”

“I think I’m done with Questions,” Sunra replied. Josephine felt the same. Sunra collected his lunchbox and swim bag and stepped out into the rain. Josephine sat with her arms wrapped around her legs and listened to the Snaps boys confound each other over and over, until the swim instructors called everyone in and all the boys did high jumps off the high dive and landed with ungraceful slaps into the water, coming out laughing and patting each other like even that was something they’d invented, that no one could take away.