Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,48

of them, two adults and a baby. We watched them sleep for a while, and I tried to see something magical about it, but I didn’t. I looked at the other early-morning zoo weirdos and tried to imagine what we looked like to them. There was a wan-looking art student with long blond hair, sketching the sleeping elephants on a giant pad. There was a man in uniform with a little girl on his shoulders. There was a teenager who looked like he was either homeless or that was how he wanted to look; eventually his cell phone rang and I figured it was the latter. There was a middle-aged woman in a nice coat that was too thin for the November weather. She reminded me of Gabi, though she was older and less pretty. Something about the calculated vulnerability of her shivering when she didn’t have to.

None of the strangers seemed interested in me. The teenager checked out Liddie briefly but then went back to walking around in circles. One of the elephants got up eventually and wandered off where we couldn’t see her. The other two kept sleeping.

“You’re right,” I said to Liddie. “They’re fascinating.”

“They are,” Liddie insisted. “What do you think the sleeping one’s dreaming about?”

“Peanuts,” I said.

“Don’t be a dumb-ass,” said Liddie. “I bet he’s dreaming about his mother, who was killed by ivory poachers in front of him, and he’s wishing he’d been big enough to trample the men and save her.”

“I bet Mom and Dad are sorry they read you Babar when you were a kid,” I said.

“That wasn’t Mom and Dad, that was you,” she said. “I don’t know why you were reading me that colonialist bullshit anyway.”

“Is that what this is about?” I joked. “That I raised you badly?”

“No,” she said. “I think as long as you get raised, it can’t count as badly.”

I disagreed, but didn’t say so.

We spent a few more hours at the zoo, just wandering around, looking at the stray people and occasional families. Around one we ate lunch at a downtown McDonald’s. It was sad how crowded it was. There were paper turkey cutouts stuck to the windows. I ate two Big Macs while Liddie picked at her french fries and neglected to say anything about any of the ways McDonald’s exploited people, which is how I knew she was getting antsy. Our mother called around two. I could hear the television in the background, the too-cheery voice of morning TV anchors. It was the Macy’s parade, I realized; my mother must have taped it and was watching it again. It made me a little bit sad and a little bit angry.

“How are you two doing?” she asked, in her voice straining to sound happy.

“Great,” I said, “just great. We’re cooking things now, in the common-room kitchen. The chicken smells wonderful.”

This seemed to me the biggest lie of all, since we were still in McDonald’s and everything smelled like grease and plastic.

“How are Liddie’s studies coming?” Mom asked.

“Fantastic,” I said. “Today she taught me about elephants.”

“You haven’t tried to talk her out of that nonsense?”

“I have never talked her out of anything. That’s why she talks to me.”

Liddie rolled her eyes at this and grabbed my cell phone.

“Mo-om,” she said. “It’s a holiday. We’re festive. Can’t we just stay festive?”

I could hear through the phone my mother trying to sound conciliatory, but I could see on Liddie’s face that she could hear the taped parade in the background too. Her tone got softer and sadder when she said good-bye.

After she hung up, I got a milk shake and Liddie ordered some pitiful-looking granola without the yogurt. When we’d wasted all the time we could, we got back in the car and headed for Maryland, to the address I’d confirmed and written down before we left Cam-bridge. We were quiet, and ashamed of ourselves on many counts.

We found where we were going quickly. It really was right over the bridge. It was a garden apartment complex, everything low to the ground and in the same shade of dull red brick. There were already Christmas lights strung across some of the balconies, and there was music coming from several different parked cars: Nas on one side, something with the same bass in a different language on the other. I parked right in front of the building and turned off the engine. Liddie and I sat in the car like criminals preparing for a heist. I couldn’t tell from the