Synergy by Georgia Payne Page B

him in
jail, but it was only a matter of months. This time around, Jarell
was sentenced to a year’s minimum sentence. His four year old
daughter was forbidden to visit both by her mother and Jarell
himself; he didn’t want his daughter to visit a place like that. As
far as his daughter knew, daddy was working away. Dee had told this
line to her own son too, as a way to protect him. She didn’t think
it was right that a child so young should know about jail, or the
bad in the world. As much as her brother could annoy her, she loved
him immensely, and was extremely close to him. His being in jail
was a hard pill to swallow, especially as she knew her brother was
not a violent man. If anybody should be arrested for assault, it
should be her. She had punched a customer only a few weeks ago for
touching her up at the club. Though Jarell was the one who taught
her to fight as a child, he didn’t go looking for a fight, they
seemed to come to him. Regardless, he always seemed to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time, and this time, his family would pay
the consequence while they waited a year for his
release.
    It wasn’t the first time Jarell had been in trouble with the
law, and his family wondered whether it would be the last. Even as
a child, trouble seemed to follow Jarell around. Some stuck up mom
at Dee’s school had told her mother that there was no such thing as
trouble following somebody around. ‘ Trouble don’t follow people, trouble gets
invited ,’ she’d said, as she walked her
son away from the school. As Monique watched the stuck up woman
walk away with a scowl on her face, the woman turned around once
more and added ‘ bad kids cause
trouble .’ Monique had never been good with
words, though she had always been good with her fists, so when the
woman decided to turn back around and make her snide comment,
Monique had charged toward the woman shouting ‘ Oh, you gon’ find some trouble !’ For
once, Jarell stopped a fight by holding his mother still and
telling the woman and her son to leave.   
    Dee had
had her fair share of trouble too, aside from the fights and drunk
nights of being a teenager, she also had some intervention from the
police. When she was around sixteen she was cautioned for
possession and later put in a jail cell for the night for being
drunk and disorderly. Now, at 22 she had a suspended license for
Driving under the influence. She wasn’t proud of her run-ins with
the police, but she didn’t let it phase her either. She knew as far
as some people were concerned, she was stupid for those things, but
she knew she was doing a lot better than most of her neighbourhood.
After all, she’d never really caused any harm to
anybody.
    Though a
year wasn’t the worst sentence that could have been handed down,
Dee knew she would miss her brother while he was gone, and planned
to visit if she could. Though the two of them could argue like any
brother and sister, she really did love her brother. Growing up, it
was always the two of them running things, and with her sister
being a lot younger, Dee and Jarell were always closer than Kiki
was to her brother. Kiki had a different father to her siblings,
and while Dee would never regard her sister as a half-sister even
though genetically she was, she wondered if this contributed.
Jarell was also regarded highly in their mother’s eyes. As her
first child and only son, he held a special place in her heart.
Even though he was all grown up with a family of his own, she
worried about him like he was still her little boy, and she knew
she had reason to.
    Jason
    It was D-day for Jason and Tom as they got ready to leave
home and head back to Detroit. His mother had already shed a tear
as she hugged him and his grandmother had made dishes for him to
take back to the hotel with him. She didn’t want him eating
‘ any of that nasty hotel
food .’ Though there was nothing wrong with
the hotel’s food, he was pleased she’d made him some dishes; it