Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,28

nothing to do with that. Maybe it was just him being selfish the way that most artists are, part drawn to the idea of something that would outlast him, part worried that he couldn’t control it.

“Angel,” he said again.

Usually when I found myself not knowing what to say to make things better, I kissed him instead. If it were anything else he was upset about, I’d be undoing the buttons on his shirt and kissing circles down his chest until the distressing moment was gone, our fingers in each other’s hair, across each other’s bodies. I would lie beneath him and raise my hips to meet his while he breathed into the curve of my neck and kept a hand cupped under my butt. I would bite his earlobe and think I love this boy and Fidel would watch the whole thing silently. Then it would be over and we would breathe heavily and know where we were wounded but not how to make it better.

Instead, I left, and told him I’d call him once I thought about it. I wouldn’t, though; I decided the least I could do was make him call me. I returned to the dorm to find the girls sprawled across the common-area furniture and thought maybe they would do. It was midterm reading week, but no one was actually reading. My friends were eating chips and salsa while an underfed starlet railed against the injustice of life on MTV, buzzing in low volume while Nicole talked over it.

“You know what Laura has now?” she asked.

Value, I thought, but said nothing.

“Some damn two-hundred-dollar jeans. Can you believe? I’m about to donate me an egg.”

“Please, girl. Who you gonna find wants a Nicole egg?” Candy said.

“Well, then you’re about to haul your light ass in there and donate an egg, then cut me a percent.” Nicole continued, “Twenty seems fair. Could get me some cute jeans anyway.”

“Right. Let me go in there and sign Dulce Maria Gutierrez Hernandez on the dotted line and see how fast they throw me out the office. Who knows what could be hiding in DNA with a name like that. Maybe the kid would only get a 1400 and its whole life would be over.” Candy laughed. I felt sick. Nicole kept going.

“Well, there gotta be some rich-ass black people who can’t have their own kids and think my 1500’s worth something. C’mon, Courtney, your parents got money, right? Think they want another kid? A better one?”

Courtney threw a lime Tostito at Nicole. I walked away without them noticing and tried to imagine telling them. Nicole would say to be realistic. She’d go through numbers the way Rafael had tried to, only hers would add up and show how ridiculous the situation would be. She’d tell me we didn’t come this far to screw it up now. Candy would say it was only guilt keeping me from doing what had to be done right now, and then she’d go on a tangent about the government’s attempts to restrict female sexuality, and when I was about to walk away and she realized what she was doing she’d apologize and then have nothing left to say. Courtney would just keep asking what I wanted, which wouldn’t be any more helpful than me asking my damn self.

I knocked on Laura’s door, not sure what I wanted from her. She looked startled to see it was me knocking; it had been months since we’d had a real conversation. We’d spoken only in passing, when at all: hello, cold today, isn’t it, psych midterm’s going to be a real pain in the ass.

“What do you want?” she asked, not quite rudely but headed there.

“Can I come in?” I said. “I need to talk.”

Maybe she could tell it was serious, because she opened the door all the way and moved aside so that I could enter. Her first few checks had mainly gone to her mother, to paying off her loans, but the last one she’d clearly spent redecorating. The cheap navy comforter had been replaced by something purple and woven. Egyptian cotton, I thought, without knowing where the term had come from. The photos on her walls were not of us anymore; they were of her at clubs I’d never been to with girls I didn’t recognize. Her pajamas were screaming Nick & Nora and her hair had recently been highlighted, and I had to look at the floor in order to pretend she was the same