Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,67
local comedian. Ever since he met her, I get random text messages from him, jokes and one-liners, and I know it means he’s watching her perform.
She obviously recognizes me when she sees me, and even though her smile seems genuine, I resent this girl already—not for having him, but because I’ll have to have her now. She’s like a crayon drawing he’s handing me, and like her or not I’ll have to pin her to my refrigerator for years.
“So, what do you think?” Brian whispers when he returns with my drink.
“Nicely done,” I say.
He looks relieved. When Miranda comes over, she hugs me first, awkwardly smushing into the hand I’d extended to shake hers.
“I’m sorry,” she says, laughing a little as she pulls away. “Was that weird? I feel like we already know each other.”
“No,” I lie. I’m saved from making further small talk when Chrissie finally rejoins us, looking like she’s ready for a glamour shot. She’s let her hair down and combed some sort of glitter through it, and put on mounds of blush and eye shadow and a coffee-colored lipstick that’s a good two shades too dark for her skin tone. I can’t open my mouth to tell her to wash her face, because I’m too busy trying not to laugh at her.
“Your sister?” Miranda asks.
“Cousin,” I say.
“Clearly, good looks run in the family,” she says. Her voice flutters a little when she laughs. “And those are great shoes,” she says to Chrissie.
It’s as if she has studied a playbook on meeting your fiancé’s ex-girlfriend. Chrissie looks at me like she doesn’t know whether it’s OK to accept the compliment. I look away, because I don’t want her to think she needs my permission to like the girl, but I also don’t want to give it. Besides, Chrissie’s shoes are tacky stiletto sandals from Pay-less, and I probably should have talked her out of them this morning.
Brian ushers Miranda and me to a table up front, and then disappears to bring back drinks for her and Chrissie. By the time he gets back, a beer for her and a Shirley Temple for Chrissie, a decent crowd has started to filter in. Before the set he squeezes my hand for luck, then gives Miranda a closed-mouth kiss. Chrissie watches this like it’s a spectator sport, and seems pleased enough that I’ve brought her into my real life that she’s reconciled herself with the indignity of drinking the Shirley Temple.
“This is kind of all right,” she says when Brian finally starts playing, which, given her usual tone these days, is like she’s handing him a Grammy.
Watching Brian perform always makes me feel weirdly proprietary about him, which is stupid, because this is the thing about him that has to be public. But I was there when he was making this shit up on his guitar, and when he’d wake up at three a.m. to whisper a song into my ear, and when he was ready to give it all up and get a real job and I told him not to. When Miranda leans forward into the music and closes her eyes like Brian is singing to her directly, something in me snaps. “Isn’t he great?” she whispers to me between songs, opening her eyes again and looking so sincere that I have to look away to stop myself from telling her he isn’t really hers, that she only loves him because she’ll never know him the way I do. It makes me happy when I recognize myself in a lyric, even if the lyric is I lied, you lied, I lied, to really love something is suicide, because how I feel about Brian hasn’t been about love in a long time, it’s been about mattering the most, and as I count the songs, I’m confident I’m still winning on that scorecard.
When the set is over, Brian and the keyboardist, Alan, disappear backstage for a minute, and Miranda asks a million questions about Delaware. I let Chrissie answer most of them, which means that the answer she gets most frequently is “dumb,” followed closely by “stupid.”
“Still,” says Miranda, “summer’s great when you’re a kid, isn’t it? I get jealous of my students sometimes—they don’t know how good they have it.”
“Summer’s awesome,” says Chrissie. “My grandfather’s dying. And my dad won’t even talk to me about it, and my parents just got divorced, and my mom’s at Bible camp trying to join some weirdo cult thing because she’s lonely and