Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,42

I said nothing, went for a long drive, and returned to find the glass swept up and a new set of glasses lined up on the kitchen counter. I thought it was a peace offering and not a good-bye.

I never paid for the newspapers after she left and most of them stopped coming, but the German paper still came weekly. It was a week behind the present and in a language I didn’t speak, but I read it religiously, reveled in its deliberate and drawn-out words. I thought that so long as you didn’t understand a thing, it was a goddamn lovely world.

Two months after that I bought the new car, and Jane the credit bureau lady, who somehow managed to give her voice the blank intonation of a dial tone, informed me that my credit report had been red-flagged for an unusual amount of activity and I ought to review it to make sure it was all mine. I didn’t; I was vaguely flattered. Plus, I had to consider the minuscule improvement in my credit score. I’d almost forgotten about it by the time the cops showed up a month later. I’d had the day off from the bookstore, and was stretched out in bed in my boxers and a T-shirt when they knocked. I answered the door just like that because even after the breakup, the only person I could think of who’d drop by in the middle of a weekday afternoon without a phone call was Gabi. The sight of two of Fairfax County’s finest was a disappointment.

“You Carlos Aguilar?” they asked.

I tried to squint at their badges, wondering whether it was a trick.

“No,” I said, after a second.

It was cleared up pretty quickly. I may have been brown, but my Spanish was pathetic, and I had a wallet full of crap with my name on it: license, employee ID, college ID, ID from the university where I’d pretended I was going to get a master’s, library card, Giant discount card, Hollywood video card, et cetera. Enough to prove that I never let go of things, and that I was not who they were looking for.

According to the cops, Carlos was in serious trouble. He was facing several counts of credit card fraud for impersonating other people, some of whom now owed thousands of dollars. Carlos had also been selling people’s Social Security numbers on the black market. Mine he was using to be a good citizen, getting the cards he paid on time, apparently renting an apartment in my name. The cops left me with a number to call in case I had any more trouble. I thought about Carlos during the next few days, feeling a certain solidarity with him. I knew most likely I’d just been careless with some kind of important paperwork, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been chosen for a reason.

Bored and curious, I spent a lunch break doing an Internet search for myself and pulled up six addresses, one of which was my parents’ house, one of which was the shithole apartment I’d had in college, and one of which was my present address. The most recent of the other addresses I thought I recognized as an apartment complex just over the Wilson Bridge, in Maryland. I considered going there, maybe to introduce myself, maybe just to watch for a while, to see if I could pick this guy out of a lineup. The possibilities of such a situation seemed limitless, but the fear of having to explain myself put a stop to most of them. I thought about giving the cops the other address I’d found, but I figured they had people who got paid for that. I’d never even bothered to file any of the things they told me to. I had an imaginary conversation with Gabi about it, in which she told me this was the physical manifestation of my existential crisis, and I told her to stop talking bullshit and then left the room.

While I was having imaginary conversations with my ex-girlfriend, Liddie was finishing up her first semester of junior year at Harvard. It was no wonder that even people who’d known me for the three years that she didn’t exist often mistook her for the older sibling. I always thought it was because of the accident, the one she swore that she remembered in perfect detail. Driving us back from the city, Dad had slammed into a car stopped in the middle of