Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,79

life. Libby Carlisle celebrated her early admission to Stanford by nearly OD’ing on coke; the senior class president got drunk one night and crashed his car into the side of a church.

We were not so much tempting fate as bargaining with it. With the sincere fatalism only teenagers can manage, we assumed that what happened before the year was out would determine what our lives would be forever after, and no one seemed thrilled about their prospects. Life became an insistent preoccupation with what happened next. The military recruitment office was full of people I’d known since elementary school and never pegged as particularly violent or patriotic. They weren’t, most of them, but the general attitude was that the military beat working at McDonald’s—at least you got to go somewhere. I started noticing how very few people actually went anywhere; the parties I used to go to with Geena had always been frequented by people who had graduated years earlier but were still around, working, or at Bailey, the local community college. Seniors started to amuse themselves by noting how fat people had gotten or how many kids they had or what kind of piece of junk they were driving; they knew it was their last chance to feel superior to anybody.

The New Year came and went; I drank sparkling apple cider with my parents and watched the ball drop on television. It was the end of January before Geena spoke to me again. She appeared at my locker after school, shifting nervously, which was strange, because I hardly ever saw Geena look nervous.

“Look,” she said, “this is bullshit. You wanna go to the mall after school?”

I neglected to point out that the bullshit was mostly her doing. I nodded, grabbed my purse out of my locker, and followed her to the beat-up old blue Tercel she’d bought with the money she’d saved that summer, the money we hadn’t used for our beach trip. It was as if the light came on and I suddenly noticed it had been dark for months.

As quickly as they’d forgotten me, the crowd took me back. Geena let me know who’d been talking the most shit about me and we made a point of ostracizing them. We made up for lost time with a few long talks and a lot of off-campus lunches. We never exactly talked about the fight, and if anyone was rude enough to bring it up, they met both of our icy stares and shut up quickly.

By the end of March, I was on edge, waiting to find out where I’d gotten into college and whether I’d have the money to go. Geena was in danger of not graduating, but didn’t seem particularly concerned about it. AP exams were over and the final grades that would be used for class ranking were out. The teachers knew they couldn’t really keep us in school. I spent a lot of time driving around with Geena in the middle of the day. Some sophomore girls claimed a section of our lunch table and we didn’t even bother putting them in their place. We could already feel our world slipping away from us.

I think it was them that finally got to Geena, them and the four fat college acceptance letters I got in April. Walking past the senior lockers one day, we saw one of the new girls making out with her senior boyfriend. Geena shook her head and rolled her eyes in my direction, like At least we don’t have to fuck people to be popular. I nodded back, and mouthed, Amateurs.

Geena came up with the prank idea after that. She showed up at my locker after school with a sour apple lollipop in her mouth.

“Hey,” she started, “we should do something. Like a senior prank.”

“Geena. White kids do senior pranks. When we try it, they’re called felonies.”

“I thought you were practically one of them, anyway.”

I shot Geena a warning look and she dropped the subject. Still, I could see her getting more and more upset by the little things. She made a point of making Sophomore Slut Girl change lunch tables one day, coming this close to physically removing her. She talked with increasing frequency about the fact that she wasn’t getting a diploma. She was of two minds on the matter. One moment she’d shrug and say, “What the fuck do I want a stupid piece of paper for anyway?” The next, she’d shake her head and say, “They ought to