Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,62
something whole that one day you will own a fraction of.
Chrissie’s sprawled out on the bed I’ve been sleeping in since I got here a few months ago. It’s the same bed I slept in when I visited here as a kid, with the same Strawberry Shortcake sheets I never had the heart to tell my father I outgrew, and lying on them Chrissie looks like a little kid herself. Her hair is tied up in a silk headscarf, which means she must have spent half a day blow-drying and flat-ironing it movie-star straight, humidity be damned. She’s wearing cut-offs and ratty sneakers and smells like a bottle of tamarind perfume I remember her borrowing from me the last time she was over here.
Chrissie’s parents are splitting and she’s spending the summer in Waterton, Delaware, with her father because that’s supposed to make her OK with it, except her father’s been cocooning himself in the hospital all summer, and Chrissie’s spent most of her time so far playing hearts with Aunt Edie and the two widows next door, and the rest of it mysteriously unaccounted for, though Tia’s filled me in on some rumors.
“Where are you going?” Chrissie asks me, nudging my suitcase with her elbow.
“We’re going to North Carolina, I guess. Aunt Edie wants you to come with me.”
“What’s in North Carolina?”
I consider the question. “A friend” would be a lie of omission; “an ex” would put Brian in the same category as Jay, who I came here to get away from. Jay, who still lives in the apartment with my name on the lease and is probably fucking another girl on my sofa right now. Jay, who earlier this week sent me an e-mail that seemed to presume I would take time off from not speaking to him, and working on my own dissertation (“She Real Cool: The Art and Activism of Gwendolyn Brooks”), in order to proofread his (“Retroactive Intentionality: [Re]Reading Radical Artists’ Self-Assessments”).
“A friend,” I say. “Brian. He’s in a band. He wants me to see his show.”
“A friend you’re meeting in your underwear?” Chrissie asks, sitting up and gesturing toward my suitcase, which for the time being contains nothing but toiletries and underwear. She arches her eyebrows at me and giggles. “What kind of show does he want you to see?”
“I haven’t thought about the clothes yet. Underwear is the easy part of packing. There’s no deciding. You can’t go wrong with underwear.”
“So the only panties you own are black lace?” she asks, smirking into the suitcase.
“Shut up,” I say. “You shouldn’t be looking through other people’s underwear. And what do you know about lace underwear, anyway?”
Chrissie blushes so red I’m sorry I asked, and then just as quickly starts singing, “I see London, I see France, Brian’s gonna see Carla’s slutty underpants . . .”
Given my history with Brian, this is too close to true. Every item of non-underwear clothing I’ve considered packing I’ve rejected because it would seem like a deliberate provocation. I don’t own much that Brian hasn’t ripped off of me at some point in the past, even when he was seeing other women, even when he was with the fiancée before the one I’m ostensibly going down there to meet. I shush Chrissie off to bed while I finish packing, but I hear her in the next room, tossing and turning, riffling through the pages of a magazine. When I finally zip my suitcase shut, I go back into the bedroom to check on her. I haven’t seen too much of Chrissie since I’ve been in town, and she thinks I’ve been avoiding her. She’s probably right: lately watching Chrissie has been like watching a taped recording of my own adolescence, which is nothing I want to revisit.
Though the lights are off in the bedroom when I go to check on her, I can tell Chrissie’s only pretending to be asleep.
“Night, Chris,” I say.
“Night,” she mumbles.
“Hey,” she calls as I start to leave. “Can Tia come with us tomorrow? It’d be fun. Like a girls’ road trip.”
I consider the many reasons why this would not be fun. Tia never liked Brian. Once he made the mistake of telling her he understood oppression because he was half Irish and one-eighth Native American. After that, Tia always called him he-who-has-metal-in-his-face, because of his eyebrow piercing. Brian never liked Tia, except for that one time in college he drunkenly asked me if I thought she’d be into a threesome, and I stopped speaking