Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,75

knees and kept going.

“Don’t know why the fuck you laughing, Garcia. The next book they read is Mexicans Ain’t Got No Souls, Either, and Them Mothafuckas Don’t Even Speak English.”

He turned back to me. “Or do I got it all wrong, Antisocial? Go ’head, drop some knowledge on me.”

I stared back and started to open my mouth, but Geena was quicker.

“Look, she’s reading ’cause you idiots ain’t worth her time. Now sit the fuck down before I beat your black ass and then call your mama so she can do it again.”

“Ooh,” said Eric, throwing up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of defeat. “I don’t want Geena to beat my ass and call my mama.”

He sat down, though, and I had a sudden sense of the next four years passing something like this.

“I know what to do about the new vandalism policy.”

Even Geena whirled her head around in shock. The whole back of the bus looked at me expectantly. I could feel my heart racing and wondered when it had started mattering what they thought of me.

“Later,” I said, nodding toward the coaches. “After the varsity game, so the varsity team can hear too.”

Geena hardly spoke to me all afternoon. If I fucked this up I was on my own, that much was clear. Geena had helped me out, but she wasn’t about to go down with me.

We met outside school after the varsity game. The varsity players had in fact waited around to see what I had to say. I took deep breaths and played with the zipper on my cheerleading jacket, feeling something like the leader of an underground crime syndicate. My jacket said ROBERT E. LEE CHEERLEADING on the back, but it was the front that I stared down at: Crystal 2000. Crystal, 2000. Crystal 2000! I liked to think of it that way, like a brand-new kind of Crystal: Crystal 2000! Cheerleading Goddess, Criminal Extraordinaire. While I was mentally branding myself, Tyrone Holmes, the senior quarterback, interrupted and prompted me to speak.

“So, umm, I was thinking, like . . .”

I could hear the varsity cheerleaders giggling at my speech and began again, flexing my newly credible Eastdale voice.

“I mean, I’m saying, though, we fuck with Stonewall, we get in trouble. First there’s the cops, and then there’s the school board, and we don’t need all that. But if they fuck with us, it’s them that gets in trouble.”

“You think they’re dumb enough to do that?”

“They don’t have to be.” I shook my head. “If we do the school but we use their colors and make it look like it was them, they get fined and we get the money.”

“You think we should fuck up our own school?” Jason asked.

“Why not?” I asked. “Anybody care about this place?”

Tyrone nodded and grinned at me. “You know, Antisocial, you might be all right.”

“Told you,” said Geena.

A week later, we met in the parking lot of Walgreens, supplies in hand. A few seniors with old, beat-up cars carted about twenty of us to the parking lot in the middle of the night, where we split up to carry out our duties. Tyrone and Eric spray-painted the main entrance blue and silver—Stonewall Jackson’s colors—while their teammates Rafael and Delos broke a few of the back windows. (“Don’t do the downstairs classrooms: the heat doesn’t work right and it will get too cold,” Geena reminded them.) Some of the JV players TP’d the fence, while most of the cheerleaders chalked the track and the main sidewalk. We were not especially creative. Fuck was the worst word most of us could think of: Fuck Robert E. Lee, Fuck you broke Gooks, Spics and Niggers, Fuck this Ghetto Ass School, Stonewall Rules, Go Generals! Geena and I had the honor of vandalizing the school statue. We dumped a bucket of blue paint over Robert E. Lee’s head and painted long, thick stripes of silver paint over the plaque at the bottom. A final Go Stonewall! spray-painted on the outside fence, while Tien stood sentry and watched for passing cars, would be enough to get us off the hook completely.

Afterward we were not so careful. A bunch of us piled into Rafael’s van and drove screaming and swerving up and down Lees-burg Pike. We smelled strongly of paint fumes and opened all the windows in order to stick our heads out and gulp down fresh air. It was November, but there were too many of us in the van to be cold, we were