Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,7

where everyone was going.

I followed Jasmine until I realized we were leaving the club. It was like my whole body blinked. The club had been hot and sticky and outside it was almost cold. The floodlights on the block were so bright that for a minute I thought the sun must have never gone down all the way; it was that light outside.

“The hell?” I said.

“We’re going to an after party,” she giggled. “In the Bronx. The valet is getting their car. I was just about to look for you.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Yes,” she said, putting her arms around me and kissing me on the forehead. One of the guys whistled.

The valet pulled the car up, and I counted the men for the first time. There were four of them and two of us and one Mazda 626.

“There’s no room,” I said. “Let’s go.” I started to pull Jasmine’s hand, but the man by the far window patted his lap, and Jasmine crawled into the car and sat there and put her arms around him.

“Room now,” Jasmine said, and because I was out of excuses I got in the car, and five minutes later we were speeding up the West Side Highway. I remembered a story that had been on the news a few weeks ago. Some girl upstate had ended up in the hospital after she went home with five men she met on the bus. They didn’t say on the news exactly what they’d done to her, only that she was lucky to be alive. “What was that child thinking, going anyplace with all those strangers?” my mother had said. I wanted to call my mother right then and say she wasn’t, Mama, she wasn’t thinking at all, one minute she was one place and the next she was another and it all happened before she could stop it.

Then I thought maybe I was overreacting. Lots of people went to other people’s houses and most of them didn’t end up dead. Jasmine’s new friends didn’t really look dangerous. They looked like they’d spent more time getting dressed than me and Jasmine had. The one Jasmine was sitting on had a sparkly diamond earring. The one next to me had on a beige linen shirt. They all smelled like cologne beneath sweat. I liked that smell. My sheets had smelled like that once after Michael took a nap in my bed, and I didn’t want to wash them until it went away. I felt better. If I was going to kill somebody, I thought, I would not get all dressed up first. I would not put on a lot of perfume. When I turned away from the window to look at the people in the car again, I saw that Jasmine was kissing the man with the earring. She was kissing him deep, and I could see half her tongue going in and out of his mouth. His hands were tracing the top of her shirt. He fingered the chain she always wore around her neck, and stopped kissing her to look at it.

“Princess,” he mumbled. “Are you a princess?”

Jasmine giggled. Her chain glittered like a dime at the bottom of a swimming pool.

“Are you a princess too?” the man next to me asked. He looked down at me, and I could see that his eyes were a pretty green, but bloodshot.

“No,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest.

“Man, look who we got here,” said the one in the passenger seat, turning around. “College girl with a attitude problem. How’d we end up with these girls again? Y’all are probably virgins, aren’t you?”

“No,” Jasmine said. “Like hell we are. We look like virgins to you?”

“Nah,” he said, and I didn’t know whether to feel pissed off or pretty.

The car stopped in front of an apartment building, and I followed them into the lobby and into the elevator, and earring guy still had his arms around Jasmine and pretty-eyes guy was still looking at me. If I’d wanted to lose my virginity to a random guy in the Bronx, I would’ve done it already, not just let Jasmine give it away. I knew if she saw my face, she would know how mad I was, but she had her head in earring guy’s neck. The clicks and dings in the elevator seemed like they were saying something in a language I didn’t speak. I thought about pulling her off of him. I thought about hitting her. They’d