Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

by Danielle Evans

  “Hey,” she says, “I’m thirsty.”

  “You should’ve thought about that before you asked Alan to put rum in your drink.”

  “You should have thought about that before you brought me to a bar.”

  “Touché,” I say. “We’re leaving soon.”

  Chrissie looks curiously at Brian, then glances back at me, and I try to relax my face into blank nonchalance, as if she’s the only one immature enough to imagine this night ending differently.

  It’s barely after midnight when I finish my cigarette and Chrissie’s drink, and Chrissie pretends she wants to stay through the end of the folksinger. It’s the worst pretext ever: the folksinger is singing a song that’s about either a blow job or her psych medication, and she keeps wailing, You cannot make me swallow, and no one wants to listen to that. I’m hugging Brian good-bye and apologizing again when the phone rings. It’s Tia. I step outside because I can’t hear her over the background noise.

  “Where the fuck are you?” she says.

  “I’m in North Carolina,” I say, “with Chrissie. I told you we were going.”

  “Did you?” she says. “Well, look, get back here. Uncle Bobby died. Everyone’s at the hospital.”

  “OK,” I say, and I take a minute to go get Chrissie, not because I’m broken up, but because I feel like I’m supposed to be and I can’t walk back in there too composed.

  When I tell Chrissie, she doesn’t lose it at first. We’re standing outside the bar, and then she sits on the toadstool bench outside the place with her arms folded across her chest and the overhead light washing out her makeup. She looks like such a little kid then that I’m sorry I brought her here to begin with. For a minute she doesn’t say anything, and then the floodgates open. It’s the first time I’ve actually seen her cry in years, and it’s so much that crying isn’t even the right word for it. Brian comes out to check on us but when he sees her he walks to the corner of the parking lot.

  “He doesn’t even fucking talk to me,” Chrissie says, when she can talk again. “All summer I’ve been there, and he doesn’t even fucking talk to me. I would have sat there with him. I would have sat in that hospital with him all fucking summer long.”

  “He’s trying to be a good dad,” I say. “He’s trying to protect you. He’s trying to be a man about things.”

  “Yeah, well. He’s being an asshole,” she says.

  “They don’t really know the difference,” I say. “You’ll go home. He’ll feel better. He won’t say it, but he will.”

  “I won’t feel better,” she says, “I won’t ever feel better.”

  “You will,” I say, which may be a lie.

  The best thing about the two years I spent with Jay is that splitting the rent let me pay off my credit cards, so I’m able to put Chrissie on a last-minute red-eye flight to Baltimore. Tia promises to pick her up there when the flight lands. I don’t go back with her because of the car and because there’s nothing for me to do there yet. The next few days will be comfort and shifting obligations, but no one will miss me or need me the way Chrissie’s father needs her right now. My own will take a few days to fly back from India, and his current girlfriend, someone he met on a cruise to London, will be with him to comfort him in the meantime. Aunt Edie will have Tia. I am, for a moment, absurdly jealous of Chrissie, because there is not a single person in the world my mere presence will comfort right now, not a single place I need to be more than this one.

  Brian’s waiting in my car outside the airport. He drives without asking me which hotel, and I know if I end up at his apartment I’m not sleeping on the couch, but the thought of waking up next to him suddenly feels more terrifying than comforting, more like undoing something than fixing it.

  “Stop,” I say. “Stop the car.”

  “We’re on the highway,” he says.

  “So get off the fucking highway, then,” I say. At first I think he’s going to ignore me, but he gets off at the next exit and pulls into the parking lot of a Waffle House just past the exit ramp.

  “What’s wrong now?” he asks.

  I don’t answer him, I just get out of the car and slam the door. It’s still Saturday night in the parking lot—more drunk strangers and other people’s problems than I can handle right now—so, after watching a girl vomit into the bushes and then go back to screaming at someone on her cell phone, I bang on the window until Brian leans over and opens the passenger-side door. I sit back in the seat and fasten my seat belt while he leans his forehead against the steering wheel. If I didn’t know him better, I might think he was praying. I turn away from him and look out the windshield, into the window of the Waffle House in front of us.

  If you have ever been to a pancake house in the middle of the night, then you know how resolutely depressing it is—you live in one of the few cities where it is never actually the middle of the night. In a city like this one, the first hour or so after bar time may be upbeat, because people are still trying to get something from the night: joy or sex or gradual sobriety. At around five a.m. you’ll see the first waves of people beginning the new day or ending the night with sleepless exuberance. But between those hours, the pancake house is a dead zone for possibility. Everyone is there for lack of something: good and nourishing food, sufficient coordination to drive the rest of the way home, an appropriate person to love or fuck, a reason to get up the next morning.

  I allow myself to say out loud that maybe it is simple lack, and not some unbreakable connection, that has kept Brian and me attached to each other all this time; that for a long time all I’ve been in his presence is the absence of better things. He stays quiet. Through the window, I watch a middle-aged man in a trucker hat stare at the back silhouette of a girl in ripped fishnets and a too-tight miniskirt, not exactly lecherously, but like she is a planet he has never been to, something so far out of this reality that he might as well look carefully.

  “Just fucking go,” I say to Brian. “I’ll be fine if you just go.”

  I can hear him breathing, and his arm is touching mine, but just barely.

  “This is me,” he says. “I’m not going to leave you. And anyway, it’s your goddamn car, and I’m not walking home.”

  “Fine, then. Stay,” I say.

  I look away from the Waffle House window and back toward the highway. The traffic keeps going by, candy-painted SUVs, slick sports cars, an eighteen-wheeler.

  “I should take you to your hotel,” Brian says quietly, but he doesn’t start the engine and he doesn’t get out of the car, and we sit there like that, waiting for something better to present itself.

  Robert E. Lee Is Dead

  For making honor roll you got these stupid Mylar balloons. They were silver on the back and red or blue or pink on the front, with CONGRATULATIONS written in big clashing letters. The balloons were supplied by the army recruiters who had an office across the street from our football field, and they always stuck a green and white U.S. Army sticker on the back. If you lived in Lakewood, then when you got a balloon your parents picked you up, or you drove yourself home with it in the backseat. Either way, when you got it home, you waited for your balloon to deflate slowly; and when it finally did, your mother smoothed out the wrinkles and put it on a wall, or in an album, or in a storage box somewhere, if you already had so many that another would be redundant. If you lived in Eastdale, then the stupid balloon got in your way the whole time you were walking home.

  Geena Johnson and I lived in Eastdale. I knew her name already—everybody did—but Geena was a girl like sunlight: if you were a girl like I was back then, you didn’t look at her directly. Usually there were girls following Geena’s lead, often literally, wobbling behind her in platform boots they had just barely learned to walk in, but she was alone the first day she actually spoke to me. From the top of the hill where our high school began, I had seen her walking ahead of me, briskly and by herself. When she got to the chain-link fence encircling the water dam at the bottom of the hill, Geena threw her
backpack over the top of the fence, balanced the heel of her boot against its wobbly surface, and expertly hoisted herself over, barely breaking stride. When I hopped the fence a few moments later, I took my time. Even in sneakers I was not as slick as Geena, and plus, the balloon kept hitting the side of my face and trying to pop itself on the top of the fence. I was less awkward crossing the high, rickety bridge that was probably the reason the water dam shortcut was closed off to begin with. I took some perverse pleasure in knowing that a fall at the right angle could have killed me, one slip, and no more Crystal.

  On the other side of the dam, home surprised me. I always took a minute to recognize my own neighborhood. It seemed like every day a new apartment building was being built or an older store or house torn down. Things changed quickly in those years: Eastdale pushed into the suburb of Lakewood from one side, while white flight created suburbs of the suburbs on the other. This was the new New South: same rules, new languages. The people who could afford to leave Lakewood left; the ones who couldn’t put up better fences. The rest of us were left in Eastdale: old houses, garden apartments, signs in Spanish and Vietnamese. We adapted well enough; we could all curse in Spanish and we’d skip school for noodle soup as soon as we’d skip for McDonald’s. The handful of white kids who still lived in Eastdale adopted linguistic affectations with varying degrees of success and would have nothing to do with the Lakewood kids. Eastdale kids and Lakewood kids walked on opposite sides of the hallway and ate on opposite sides of the cafeteria and probably would have worn opposite-colored clothes if they could have coordinated it without communicating. The neighborhood in the immediate vicinity of our high school was called The Crossroads; don’t ever let anyone tell you that the South is big on subtlety.

  Geena and I weren’t big on subtlety, either—not then, anyway. We were fourteen; she was flashy, I was brave the way you are when you don’t know what you have to lose. When I emerged on the other side of the dam and walked the wrong way down the side of the park-way just because I could, I was not surprised to see her ahead of me, doing the same. My balloon mirrored our walk in a hazy silver film: ELENA’SCHICKENARROZCONPOLLO29.99MANICUREANDPEDICUREPAWNSHOPKIM’SMARKETCALLHOMECHEAPPHONECARDS!

  A block from my apartment building, I stopped at the 7-Eleven to waste the few minutes my shortcut across the bridge had saved. I spent five minutes debating the merits of blue raspberry versus cherry limeade Slurpee, before blending them into a disgusting purple slush. Geena was strolling around the store like she owned it and was taking inventory, and when she finally made it to the Slurpee machine, she picked grape and was quick about it. We waited in line at the same time, but not together. The man behind the counter grinned as I laid my change on the counter with one hand and tried to balance my Slurpee and balloon in the other. He pointed upward at the bobbing surface, and read: Congratulations. He smiled and looked me over.

  “You had a baby?”

  I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

  “Someone in your family had a baby?”

  I stared at him stupidly. His face looked open, like he was waiting for an answer so he knew the right expression to make. I wanted to hit him or I wanted to say something clever or I wanted to leave, with or without my stupid Slurpee. I was waiting to be a different person when Geena stepped around from behind me. I thought for a minute she was getting in my face to laugh at me, but she grabbed my arm, hard, making little indentations for each of her violet fingernails, and dragged me toward the door, calling over her shoulder, “Nah, mister, she ain’t pregnant, at our school they give you a balloon for giving all the teachers blow jobs. It don’t really mean shit.”

  Outside, I walked faster and hoped his English wasn’t good enough that he knew what blow job meant. Geena laughed.

  “You didn’t pay for that,” I said, pointing at her Slurpee.

  “No,” she said. “Didn’t pay for the cigarettes, either.”

  I waited for shouts or sirens but none came, so I followed her lead, matching her stride and imagining my steps clicked like hers. Our bravado peeled a little as we crossed the parking lot and avoided looking up at the men who hung out in front of the store all day, looking for work, or drinking, or both. It was after three, so the hope of day work had mostly faded and the drinking was in full swing. They grunted appreciatively at the bodies we hadn’t quite figured out what to do with yet, and we shrank into ourselves at their cat-calls, as if blushing would make our breasts and behinds less prominent. On the next block we were cool again, walked tall and touched mailboxes and fence posts and other things that weren’t ours. Geena lit a cigarette and I watched her smoke.

  “Thank you,” I said to Geena, once we’d reached my building. I hoped she wouldn’t make me explain what I was thanking her for.

  “Don’t be embarrassed ’cause other people are dumb,” said Geena.

  Geena Johnson was my friend. Maybe not right away, but things could happen quick like that back then. Geena came by the day after the Slurpee incident. Geena taught me how to dance and how to steal. Geena dragged me to cheerleading tryouts and threw her arms around me when we both made the JV squad. Geena also told me I’d have to do her homework sometimes so she wouldn’t get put on academic probation. Old Crystal would have had something to say about this, but I was suddenly a girl with lip liner and red and blue pom-poms. I’d just nodded.

  Out of respect for Geena, or maybe it was fear, nobody from Eastdale really messed with me, but nobody talked to me, either. They looked at me curiously, the way they might have looked at a one-eyed kitten or baby bird Geena had picked up one day and begun to carry everywhere. I carried books everywhere and, without really meaning to, ignored everyone but Geena. On the bus to away games I sat in the back reading while the rest of the squad acted like girls were supposed to: Geena traded raunchy insults with the football players, Violeta and April gave each other makeovers, Tien stared into space, and Jesse perched seductively on somebody’s lap until one of the coaches made her get up and saunter poutily to her own seat.

  Football season was almost over by the first time I made myself noticed. Things had been louder than usual, and I stopped reading The Souls of Black Folk for long enough to hear what everyone was complaining about. We were on our way to our second-to-last game of the season—one we were probably going to lose—but all anyone could talk about was next week’s rivalry game. The county had structured the football league so that every school had a major rival and the season ended with games between rivals, which were played for a prize. Our rival school was Stonewall Jackson, a new school in the middle of the new gated community of Hillcrest, the place where people in Lakewood kept threatening to move. Its newness made the whole concept of Rivalry Week stupid. There hadn’t been time for any history of rivalry between Lee and Jackson High Schools, and there wouldn’t have been any rivalry in the present if the school board hadn’t set it up that way. Next week’s varsity game was known as the Rebel Yell. The winner got to display an old sword that was said to be a Confederate relic, though its exact circumstances were unknown and any history we were given for it usually turned out to be invented.

  “I can’t believe that lady,” Jason Simmons called from a few seats ahead of us. “Like she don’t know that ’s the whole fucking point of Rivalry Week.”

  “Whatever,” Eric Manns called back. “I don’t give a fuck what Mrs. Peterson says, eggs and toilet paper is some bitch-ass white-boy shit, anyway. You would not catch me up in Hillcrest trying to outrun the popo over a damn football game.”

  Jason shook his head. Mrs. Peterson, Lee’s head guidance counselor, had made an announcement about Rivalry Week during morning assembly. Traditionally, the week before the end-of-season games was marked by a chain of vandalisms, but apparently the school board was exasperated by the annual cleanup efforts. If any act of vandalism is traced to a high school in this county, Mrs. Peterson had declared, the cost of cleanup will be taken out of that school’s activity budget.

  I hadn’t be
en paying attention at the time and assumed that the chorus of boos was just a general reaction to Mrs. Peterson’s voice. The woman was thoroughly disliked; hatred of her was one of the few things upon which everyone at Robert E. Lee High School agreed. The Eastdale kids hated her because she had a habit of hanging up on people’s parents when they didn’t speak English instead of getting a translator, as was county policy, and she was known for suspending people based on their zip codes rather than their behavior. At a school assembly last year, she’d blamed the dropping standardized test scores on immigrant kids who, before arriving in Eastdale, had been “living in jungles.”

  I hated her because she’d tried to talk me out of honors classes and only signed off on my schedule because I’d threatened to go to the principal. I was an accident; I’d slipped through our school’s de facto segregation and she wasn’t happy about it. I had been dealing with people like her since the third grade, when I’d been shipped off to a “gifted” school as a reward for outsmarting standardized tests. The magnet elementary and middle schools were the Lake County School District’s last line of defense against the evaporation of its upwardly mobile white people. The Lakewood PTA had tried to get a new magnet high school built, smack in the middle of Lakewood, and, when that failed, tried to have Eastdale students rezoned to a high school five miles farther away, but the county comptroller wasn’t having it. They settled for an honors wing, which housed everyone whose standardized test scores placed them into honors classes, or everyone whose parents knew that you could pay a private psychologist to declare your child a genius even if the school’s official test thought otherwise. Essentially, the honors wing housed all of Lakewood, and me.