Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,78

Geena would be mad; I just didn’t know how mad, or how soon. After school she asked me why I had missed lunch, and I told her I’d been in Mrs. Peterson’s office for our lunch period and she’d given me a pass to eat during B lunch instead.

“What the fuck did she want?” Geena asked.

I swallowed. Geena and I were supposed to work at the Baskin-Robbins again this summer in order to save money for a week of cheerleading camp and an end-of-the-summer beach trip that we planned to take together. I told her all at once, letting the words tumble together and repeating over and over again that the program was free.

She was quiet for a minute after I finished.

“So, Mrs. Peterson is, like, your friend now?”

“Not my friend. I mean, I’m sure she’s just doing it because it looks good, and besides, I have the best grades. If she didn’t pick me, she’d have had to explain why. But whatever, you know? It’s not like she really likes me.”

“Yeah, OK.”

Geena started walking down the hallway and I followed her.

“Geena, what do you want me to do?” I called. I didn’t mean for it to come out like a question, but it did, anyway.

She kept walking. I walked home alone, and I took the long way.

I let the promise of summer comfort me while Geena avoided me. Violeta and April became Geena’s new best girlfriends. I was somewhat consoled by the fact that it took two people to replace me. Vi made a point of telling everyone that she’d gone to middle school with me and I’d been a bougie bitch then too. I started to eat lunch in the library again. If Geena thought she could make me lonely enough to change my mind about summer school, she’d vastly underestimated my capacity for loneliness. I’d perfected lonely in the third grade.

The summer passed quickly. I spent most of my time in my dorm room reading. It was quieter than my life had ever been and I didn’t mind it. Geena and her anger were a million miles away from the college campus. I thought occasionally of the parties I was missing, of varsity practice and what I’d do with all my free time when I wasn’t on the squad next fall. Geena wouldn’t be on the squad, either: without me to do her homework, she’d failed two classes and wasn’t eligible to cheer. Mostly I didn’t think of high school at all. I read Plato and Aristotle and the Constitution, and in those moments I felt tremendously insignificant.

I walked around alone often, but my roommate for the summer didn’t find my quietness strange at all. Occasionally we’d look up from reading and smile shyly. I’d always thought the whole world was just a bigger version of Lee High School—a line running down the middle of it and people on either side telling me that I didn’t really belong there. There were still people like that at the summer academy, but I also met a handful of people who seemed to understand me on my own terms. A girl with a long black ponytail offered to be my roommate if we both got into the university. I thanked her, but in my mind I thought I’d like to go much, much farther away.

By the time school started again, I had almost forgotten what I was missing. I wasn’t lonely anymore; I was just alone. That was the luxury I had then: Geena had already made me possible. Her boldness, which I’d always thought I’d been borrowing from her, had become mine in ways I didn’t realize until she was gone. I didn’t flinch around people who didn’t like me; I didn’t feel anymore like being myself was something for which I owed the world an apology. Then again, if you believed the rumors, everyone was past the point of apology: they were busy trying to find a way to impose themselves on the world. I heard that Eric had replaced the engine in his car and gotten it to go 140 down the Pike, but it sounded like empty boasting; and as much as Vi was enjoying her rise in status, I had trouble believing that she’d actually make the freshmen cheerleaders carve player’s names into their thighs with a penknife. It was senior year, and the world as I knew it was undoing itself. The more adult everyone got on paper, the dumber they got in real