Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,63

to him for a month.

“Tia’s working,” I say. “And anyway, she needs to be around in case anything happens with Uncle Bobby. Aunt Edie’s going to need her.”

“People are going to need us too,” Chrissie protests. “He’s my grandfather.”

“Of course they will,” I say. “We’ll come back if anything happens.”

The truth is, I’m not sure who needs me. My father paid an obligatory visit to Uncle Bobby, and then did what he does: he’s spending the summer in India looking at death statues. We are all walking around on eggshells, waiting for a death the way people wait on rain-storms when the sky promises bad weather, but so far nobody has talked to me about it, and nobody has asked me to do anything more difficult than make potato salad.

It’s afternoon by the time we get on the road the next day, and we spend hours stuck in beach traffic. Chrissie’s awake enough to resent that I’ve confined her cell phone to the glove compartment. It’s beeping because someone’s left her a message, and between the beeping and her whining, I’m thinking of opening the glove compartment myself. My cigarettes are in there, but nobody, especially Chrissie, is supposed to know I smoke when I’m stressed.

“It could be my parents,” she says. I ignore this.

“We might as well not even be driving,” Chrissie says. “And I’m hungry.”

“Well, then you should have eaten when we stopped for brunch,” I say. Chrissie has been doing this thing where whenever we eat out together, she orders whatever I order, then suddenly remembers she can’t eat it because she’s on a diet, and has two bites and three glasses of water instead. At the diner on the way out of town, she had three french fries and a mouse-sized nibble of her grilled cheese.

“I wasn’t hungry when we stopped,” she says.

“Then you can wait until we get to Richmond for dinner.”

The traffic picks up around the Bay Bridge. In the glove compartment Chrissie’s phone is still beeping something insistent.

“You should let me get it,” she says. “What if my grandfather died?”

“Then someone would have called me,” I say.

Both pleas for her phone having failed, Chrissie sulks, actively. Her sulking takes the form of rummaging through her miniature beaded purse in search of beauty product after beauty product. When she is done with the glitter lotion and the lip gloss and the eye shadow, it’s true her skin has a glow to it, but her hands are covered in sparkles, like a kid who’s just finished an art project.

“I’ll let you answer the phone when you tell me why Aunt Edie doesn’t want you to have it in the first place,” I say.

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” Chrissie says.

“Of course you do,” I say.

“So, I can talk to him?”

“Pick up the phone if you want, but you shouldn’t, he’s an asshole.”

“You’ve never even seen him.”

“Don’t have to,” I say. “He’s a fifteen-year-old boy, which means he’s an asshole by default, or he’s older than that, in which case he’s an asshole for dating you.”

“I don’t look fourteen,” says Chrissie, which answers one question but isn’t any kind of counterargument to my original point. It’s true, though, she doesn’t look fourteen, in the way no girl looks fourteen once she’s got tits and an ass like Chrissie’s and men have stopped looking at her face. She’s the wrong kind of pretty, the kind that’s soft but not fragile, the kind that inspires the impulse to touch.

The boyfriend doesn’t answer when Chrissie calls him back.

“Asshole,” she mutters.

“Look at the water,” I say, because we’re driving over the Chesapeake, and I’ve always thought it was a beautiful view, the wires of the bridge cutting into the image of the water beneath. Passing through the bridge with the sloping wires on either side always feels to me like being inside of a giant stringed instrument. Chrissie looks sideways out the window for a second, then turns back to me.

“We’re going all the way to North Carolina just to see this guy?” she asks.

“What else do you want to do?”

“I think maybe I should go to a doctor.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask. I’m already checking out the traffic headed back to Delaware, because if this kid tells me she’s pregnant I’m turning the car around and giving her back to Aunt Edie. I’ve already done my lifetime share of abortion hand-holding.

“I think my vagina’s broken,” she says.

“OK,” I say. “OK, look. I don’t know what that means, and I don’t