Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,8

pushed the button for the eighth floor, but the doors opened on five. There was nobody standing there and I kept waiting for the thing that would stop us, and then I thought, Nothing will stop this but me. So I ran, out of the elevator and down the stairs and out the front door and down to the bodega on the corner.

There was a whole pile of fruit lit up outside, like what anybody really needed in the middle of the night was a mango. Inside, it was comforting just looking at the rows and rows of bread and cereal and soup all crammed together, and I stared at them for a while. There was an old man behind the counter, and I thought it was too late for him to be working, and he was looking at me like he thought it was too late for me to be alone in his store. He looked like how I would have imagined my grandfather looking if I’d known him.

“You all right?” he said. “You need some medicine? Some ginger ale?”

I shook my head, because I was looking for Jasmine to be behind me, but she wasn’t.

“You need to call somebody?”

I pointed at the pay phone outside on the corner, and the man behind the counter shrugged. When I realized Jasmine wasn’t running after me, I walked back outside. The door jingled at me when I opened it, and I was mad at it for sounding so happy. I didn’t know who else to call at two-thirty in the morning, so I beeped Michael and pushed in the pay phone number. I was afraid at first he wouldn’t call back, but he did, ten minutes later.

“Just come get me,” I said, instead of explaining, and all he asked for was the street names.

I’d been leaning against the pay phone for twenty minutes when his brother’s car pulled up. Michael was in the passenger’s seat. He got out when he saw me, and gave me a hug.

“You all right?” he asked. “Did something happen?” I nodded, then shook my head. I was starting to feel stupid, because I knew I looked a mess, and nothing really had happened to me.

“Where’s your girl?”

“Up in one of those buildings, with some guys she met at the club.”

Michael’s face wrinkled like it was made of clay and I had squished it. “Do we need to go get her?”

I thought of Jasmine in that man’s lap, Jasmine laughing and saying Like hell we are, Jasmine letting me run out of the elevator by myself.

“No. Leave that trick where she is,” I said. Once I said the words I was sorry, but it seemed like the kind of thing you couldn’t take back. I wanted Michael to be mad at me, to say he was Jasmine’s friend, too, and he wouldn’t leave her like that, but he just shrugged at his brother and opened the car door.

“Uh-uh,” said Ron, when Michael started to get in the front seat. “Let the lady up front.”

I sat beside him while Michael scowled and got in the back.

“I guess we can’t take you home to your mom’s or you’ll be in trouble, huh?” Ron asked.

I wanted to say yes, they could take me home, that I deserved to be in trouble, that I’d let my mother slap me if it meant we’d go get Jasmine and both of us could be at home sleeping in our rooms tonight, but I didn’t.

“No,” I said. “Can I stay at your place? I’m s’posed to be at Jasmine’s.”

“No doubt,” he said, and squeezed my knee, stopping to look at me so hard that I wasn’t even sure what I’d said, but I wanted to take that back too. I remembered my mother saying no one does you a favor who doesn’t want something back sometime. Ron was driving already and I looked out the window again and listened to the radio. Even this time of night they were still playing Tupac, which they never would have been doing when he was still alive.

Inside at Michael and Ron’s house, they put me on the downstairs couch and gave me a blanket. When Ron said good night and went into his bedroom in the basement, I thought maybe I’d only imagined the look he gave me earlier. I unlaced my shoes and took down my hair and curled up in the blanket, trying not to think about Jasmine and what kind of a mess I’d