Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,73
but she grabbed my arm, hard, making little indentations for each of her violet fingernails, and dragged me toward the door, calling over her shoulder, “Nah, mister, she ain’t pregnant, at our school they give you a balloon for giving all the teachers blow jobs. It don’t really mean shit.”
Outside, I walked faster and hoped his English wasn’t good enough that he knew what blow job meant. Geena laughed.
“You didn’t pay for that,” I said, pointing at her Slurpee.
“No,” she said. “Didn’t pay for the cigarettes, either.”
I waited for shouts or sirens but none came, so I followed her lead, matching her stride and imagining my steps clicked like hers. Our bravado peeled a little as we crossed the parking lot and avoided looking up at the men who hung out in front of the store all day, looking for work, or drinking, or both. It was after three, so the hope of day work had mostly faded and the drinking was in full swing. They grunted appreciatively at the bodies we hadn’t quite figured out what to do with yet, and we shrank into ourselves at their cat-calls, as if blushing would make our breasts and behinds less prominent. On the next block we were cool again, walked tall and touched mailboxes and fence posts and other things that weren’t ours. Geena lit a cigarette and I watched her smoke.
“Thank you,” I said to Geena, once we’d reached my building. I hoped she wouldn’t make me explain what I was thanking her for.
“Don’t be embarrassed ’cause other people are dumb,” said Geena.
Geena Johnson was my friend. Maybe not right away, but things could happen quick like that back then. Geena came by the day after the Slurpee incident. Geena taught me how to dance and how to steal. Geena dragged me to cheerleading tryouts and threw her arms around me when we both made the JV squad. Geena also told me I’d have to do her homework sometimes so she wouldn’t get put on academic probation. Old Crystal would have had something to say about this, but I was suddenly a girl with lip liner and red and blue pom-poms. I’d just nodded.
Out of respect for Geena, or maybe it was fear, nobody from Eastdale really messed with me, but nobody talked to me, either. They looked at me curiously, the way they might have looked at a one-eyed kitten or baby bird Geena had picked up one day and begun to carry everywhere. I carried books everywhere and, without really meaning to, ignored everyone but Geena. On the bus to away games I sat in the back reading while the rest of the squad acted like girls were supposed to: Geena traded raunchy insults with the football players, Violeta and April gave each other makeovers, Tien stared into space, and Jesse perched seductively on somebody’s lap until one of the coaches made her get up and saunter poutily to her own seat.
Football season was almost over by the first time I made myself noticed. Things had been louder than usual, and I stopped reading The Souls of Black Folk for long enough to hear what everyone was complaining about. We were on our way to our second-to-last game of the season—one we were probably going to lose—but all anyone could talk about was next week’s rivalry game. The county had structured the football league so that every school had a major rival and the season ended with games between rivals, which were played for a prize. Our rival school was Stonewall Jackson, a new school in the middle of the new gated community of Hillcrest, the place where people in Lakewood kept threatening to move. Its newness made the whole concept of Rivalry Week stupid. There hadn’t been time for any history of rivalry between Lee and Jackson High Schools, and there wouldn’t have been any rivalry in the present if the school board hadn’t set it up that way. Next week’s varsity game was known as the Rebel Yell. The winner got to display an old sword that was said to be a Confederate relic, though its exact circumstances were unknown and any history we were given for it usually turned out to be invented.
“I can’t believe that lady,” Jason Simmons called from a few seats ahead of us. “Like she don’t know that ’s the whole fucking point of Rivalry Week.”
“Whatever,” Eric Manns called back. “I don’t give a fuck what Mrs. Peterson says, eggs and