Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,57
the next day, the first day of Eva’s suspension, and demanded further questioning of the boy. He eventually admitted to having grabbed Eva’s behind earlier in the day. Debra threatened the boy, the school, and the parents, and Eva’s suspension was reversed.
“Why didn’t you tell me he touched you?” William asked Eva later.
“Didn’t matter,” she’d said. “That wasn’t why I bit him.”
The arrival of her salad saved Eva from further strained conversation about the state of her life. She’d already claimed, “I like living in the studio,” and “I’m getting so much work done.” She crunched on a crouton.
“I’m glad to see you eating,” her father said.
Eva sighed. “Daddy I’ve been eating for years. We eat together sometimes.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m just saying. You look good. Healthy.”
She was certain that her mother had encouraged him to say this sort of thing. Eva wished there were a Bat-Signal for the waiter, something to invite him to disrupt them. She hated the inexplicable things between them, the secrets her mother had given away, even though they weren’t hers to keep. She remembered all those school picture days and holidays and recitals, and she liked it better when her father thought of her that way. These days she couldn’t be around him without feeling that, without thinking he was waiting for her to win something and smile pretty.
She stabbed a tomato. She’d been eating normally since junior year of college, since she’d broken up with the last boyfriend her father had actually liked, the charming premed who’d told her she had cellulite and pretended not to hear when she threw up in his bathroom. He’d asked about that boyfriend all the time she was with Cheese, and twice as often when she was with Maya, until one day she’d said without explaining, Do you want me to hate myself? after which he’d never asked again.
When she was being honest with herself, which was more often than she was honest with other people, she admitted that Cheese was the first boy who’d ever made her feel beautiful, the first man in her life she was sure was never going anywhere no matter what she did, not that it kept her from testing him. When she talked to Lenny on the phone, or replied to Kim’s sporadic e-mails, or met Irene for drinks, dinner, and conversations that felt increasingly obligatory, she gave them a host of quite rational reasons for why she and Cheese would never really get back together. He was twenty-eight years old and seemed content to be a barista forever; he claimed to love her art but resented the time she spent on it; she had been the first of what was now a line of four artsy ethnic girlfriends in a row, making her feel a bit like he was collecting them the way her old ceramics instructor collected dolls of the world. But the truth was there was something about his availability that unsettled her, that made her want to know what it would finally take for him not to be there when she showed up unannounced.
She’d done it a month ago, the night she and Maya had broken up—thought maybe this time he would finally tell her she couldn’t do this to him anymore, that they both had to move on—but he’d opened the door and let her in. The girlfriend was still living in the apartment then, but she’d been gone for the weekend, meaning Eva got to curl herself into the corner of the saggy orange sofa she and Cheese had gotten for free off of craigslist two years earlier, and drink the cheap bourbon he poured her a shot of, and tell him what had happened.
What had happened, first, was that she and Maya had redecorated, taken to painting the walls in brightly contrasting colors, and then hanging brightly printed fabrics on the wall: red against the kitchen’s deep purple, orange against the green of the bedroom. What had happened a few days after the apartment’s transformation was Eva thought of the stark, yellowing walls of her father’s cramped apartment, the faintly moldy smell of them, the way he shrugged off her gentle suggestions that there were plenty of nicer places he could afford to move; he didn’t even have to leave the neighborhood. He would offer some excuse about the hassle of getting the couch down the narrow stairwell without ruining it, as if he couldn’t afford new furniture these days, or about liking