Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,76
packed in tight and squeezed against each other. I could vaguely feel Tyrone’s hand creeping up my thigh, but the dizzying combination of paint fumes and the wine cooler Geena had given me earlier kept me from being sure I should do something about it. Rafael swerved into Lakewood and we drove up their hills, tearing past their mammoth brick houses, circling the private beaches built around their man-made lake, where small groups of our classmates gathered for parties on weekends. Eric rode shotgun and blasted the radio while Geena and I screamed out the windows, and the cold air and the hot van and the beat—because there was always a beat—became their own universe. It was shattered by the screech of sirens in the distance, and it was over that quickly. Rafael made a sharp left and took the back roads into Eastdale, but not before Geena stuck her head out of the window a final time and screamed to the empty echo behind us, “Fuck you, too, fucking cops!” and then collapsed giggling in my lap. We had driven all through Lakewood, but when I got back to my apartment and sleepily collapsed on the living room sofa that doubled as my bed, I was not a bit jealous, not at all. They had houses, they had money, they damn near ran the school, but they still had nothing that was half as exciting as Geena.
We lost the football game. A couple of the Lakewood kids seemed sad about this: they’d genuinely wanted that sword. “Probably to cut our heads off with,” Jason said. On our part, the loss was overshadowed by the enthusiastic response to the news that Stonewall Jackson was going to have to reschedule their prom. We knew they’d get the money back, but it was a victory nonetheless. The school held an assembly to address the vandalism. The senior class adviser chided Jackson for “not only committing such a childish act but refusing to take responsibility for it even after the fact.” The Jackson football team had claimed over and over again that they’d had nothing to do with it, that we’d probably done it ourselves to get them in trouble. Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone to believe them. In the school board’s mind, we still had loyalties. Mrs. Peterson gave a long speech about embracing diversity—rather like a wolf giving a speech on embracing sheep—and said it was mystifying that anyone would even make such a charge against us. Geena and I sat straight-faced and said nothing. It had been our experience that white people were very easily mystified.
After that, my nickname went from Antisocial to CeeCee, and Geena and I got permanent seats at the Eastdale senior lunch table. My classmates in honors weren’t sure what to make of my sudden transformation. After being harassed for most of elementary school, I’d realized that the more invisible I was, the more likely it was they’d reserve their cruelty for each other. In middle school, I’d been the girl sitting quietly in the back of the class, taking copious notes and wearing shapeless sweaters. It worked. They’d all started hating each other instead of me. For the first time in my life, I was the only person who never cried in the bathroom during lunchtime. My new high visibility violated the unspoken terms of our détente. I was suddenly a girl who wore stilettos and hip-huggers, who ran into class just before the bell rang, shouting good-byes all the way down to the end of the hallway. I was still a girl who knew more right answers than they did, which was the real source of the trouble—I’d gone from being an anomaly to being an impossibility.
Walking out of World History one afternoon, I heard Caitlyn Murphy say loudly, “How in the hell can she walk in those jeans?”
“How in the hell can she walk with that ass, more like,” Libby Carlisle joined in.
“Well,” said Anna James, “I’m glad she’s turning into a crack whore. Now I don’t have to worry about her messing up my class rank.”
I told Geena about this conversation after lunch, then thought no more of it until I went looking for her after school. Vi finally told me she was cornering Libby and Anna in the parking lot. To this day, I don’t know the exact terms of that confrontation: Geena wasn’t talking and it was a full year before Libby and Anna got up the nerve to