Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,25
Turning sideways and inhaling bits of dust off Courtney’s carpet, I understood that my dislike of the pill was irrational, but it was too late for all that.
Of course I had a boyfriend. We all did, they were like accessories; we kept them stored at colleges up and down the East Coast and pulled them out on formal occasions or in the event of extreme boredom or loneliness. Mine I kept at NYU, where he was lonely more than I was. I had spent a good number of nights downtown, curled up in his blue flannel sheets, listening to him breathe. He was good at hand-holding and being subtly witty and distracting me when I was on the verge of tears, brilliant in that completely useless way where he could tell you off the top of his head the architect of any office building downtown and the historic relationship between the toothbrush and cultural imperialism, but not what day of the week it was or what train to take to where. I didn’t want to see him yet, so I bought a pregnancy test to confirm what I already knew, and then another in case the first one had been wrong, and then I threw the two sticks with their faint plus signs into the trash can and called my mother.
People who do not call my mother “Mother” call her Isis. Her name conjures up a persona that she indulges with miniature altars and smoky incense when she is not busy being a hairdresser. She was not busy at all when I called, the vague hum of her meditation music in the background let me know that.
“Angel. I was just thinking of you.”
Every time I call my house, even those times when I am calling because my mother has forgotten to pick me up or call me back or send me something necessary, she tells me she has just been thinking of me. I ignored her and started talking, hoping maybe with some small talk she would pick up on the tremor of my voice. I was lying on the bed in my underwear when I called her, pinching the fat at my abdomen and trying to determine whether there was more of it, looking down at my breasts and wondering if they were any bigger. I looked the same to me. I wondered if maybe I was imagining this. Stupid girls got pregnant, careless girls, girls who didn’t worry about their futures, girls whose mothers had never explained to them about sex.
Laura had been a girl something like that when she’d come to college—not stupid, but naive, uninformed. She’d been sitting in the back row of the mandatory safe-sex lecture, wide-eyed, when we met her. They’d divided us into teams and made us do races to put a condom on a banana and she’d screwed it up, put the thing on backward and had it go flying off somewhere, then blushed a brilliant shade of red and hid her face in her hands. The girls on the other team laughed.
“It’s OK,” Nicole said, putting a hand on her shoulder after we lost. “There are too many hos on this campus anyway. Who comes to college knowing how to put a condom on in five seconds?”
“Don’t say ‘hos,’” said Candy. “Just ’cause somebody likes sex doesn’t make her a ho.”
They argued all the way to the dining hall while Laura and Courtney and I exchanged hellos and shy smiles.
Nicole and Candy were virgins then, too, though you wouldn’t have known it by looking at them. Even on budgets they knew how to dress like city girls, girls who knew their way around—not like Laura, whose wardrobe screamed Kmart and favored the color pink. Maybe that was why we’d liked her right away: her need for us was immediately apparent, and unlike most of the people who needed us, we knew what to do for her.
I told my mother about Nicole’s new Triple Five Soul sweatshirt and Candy’s plans to go abroad next year. Pages rustled in the background. My mother told me how Mrs. Wilson from down the street thinned all her hair out, leaving braids in too long.
“She’ll be back by Easter,” my mother said. “She won’t let anybody else do her hair for Easter Sunday.”
“Uh-huh,” I started to agree, but my mother had already interrupted herself to read out loud from the catalogue she was thumbing through. Health crystals, mood-balancing jewelry, a guide to spiritual belly dancing.