Well, this is quite the moment.
Jade LB, the mystical author of Keisha Da Sket—a fictional story from 2005 about a 17-year-old girl who went on sexual escapades—is on a Zoom call with me, ready to discuss her new Merky Books adaptation for 2021. For many years I’d wondered who this person was, why she’d written Keisha Da Sket, and if she was aware of the rollercoaster of emotions that came with the cliff she left us all hanging off when she abruptly ended Keisha’s story with no definitive ending.
Originally published through Jade’s page on Piczo—a webpage-building site loved by teens in the early 2000s—Keisha Da Sket spread throughout London and the rest of the country via MSN and bluetooth. The first time I read Keisha Da Sket, I was on my school lunch break—in the smokers’ corner, on my bredrin’s mobile phone. All morning, my girls were talking about this story going round about “some sket”, and it was the topic of conversation on the walk through dog-shit-alley to my all-girls secondary school. I said nothing during the walk; I had no idea what they were on about, what they’d read, or who this girl was who’d been getting up to what sounded like a total madness. By the time I’d read it, it was old news. It had already been discussed and dissected by everybody else.
As a teen with no internet or mobile phone, getting my hands on the chapters that followed was excruciating. I was always the last to read it. By the time the last chapter of Keisha Da Sket was published, my friends were already over it—they were over waiting for the next installment to drop, and were tired of reading fan-fiction versions being passed off as original versions. It had also become clear it wasn’t written about “da sket” they thought it was, or written by who they thought was the anonymous writer. They stopped engaging with it. But being the curious teen that I was, I was absolutely livid! I still had questions. Lots and lots of questions.
On surface level, Keisha Da Sket was all about sex and violence, and you were either reading it because you were fascinated by the explicit scenes you’d never read nor experienced before, or you were reading it as someone who actually lived it. You were either a Keisha (the ‘sket’), a Ricardo (Keisha’s roadman boyfriend), a Chanice (Keisha’s doting best friend) or a Malachi (the new kid on the block). There was someone that most of us, especially young Black people, could relate to at the time. Scratch beneath the surface and Keisha Da Sket was a tale of friendship, of loyalty, of exploration, of deprivation, of the way Black Brits—both then and now—have been dealt with by society, and how they dealt with each other.
When Jade LB joins the call, I jump straight into the press she’s already had, how nostalgic the reads are, how many memories of teenage years have been brought back and how it’s strange—at least to me—that everyone sites those years as the best years of their lives when, for some, they mark the worst. They marked bitchy school days; they marked not being able to afford the same limited edition Nike x Lily White trainers everyone had; they marked not being about to sing along to Channel U classics on the way to school because you never had Sky; they marked the shame of having to wait until lunchtime to catch up on Keisha Da Sket on your friend’s phone because you didn’t have one or internet at home. It also made you terrified of ever having sex incase someone found out and called you a ‘sket’, which was far, far worse than being called a slag.
Although the gossip in me at the time desperately wanted to meet the person behind it, the 30-year-old me today completely understands why Jade’s in front of me, on Zoom, with her camera off and her icon a picture of the Keisha The Sket book cover. Here’s how that conversation went...
“I want people to really feel and see and understand what it’s like to be a Black girl and its many facets.”
