Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,9

left her in. I thought of her laughing, thought of the look on her face when she had closed her eyes and let that man kiss her, and for a second I hated her and then a second later I couldn’t remember anything I’d ever hated more than leaving her. I was sitting there in the dark when Ron came back and put an arm around me.

“You know, you’re too pretty for me to leave you on the couch like that,” he said, pulling me toward him. I didn’t know that, but I did understand then that there was no such thing as safe, only safer; that this, if it didn’t happen now, would happen later but not better. I was safer than Jasmine right now, safer than I might have been. He kissed me, hard, like he was trying to get to the last drop of something, and I kissed him back, harder, like I wanted to get it all back. The noise in my head stopped and I didn’t have to think about anything but where to put all the pieces of my body next.

He grabbed my hand and led me to the bedroom, and he kissed me again and pushed my skirt around my hips. “You’re beautiful,” he said, which must’ve been a lie by this time of night. I sat on the bed and pulled my underwear off and realized they were Jasmine’s. I thought how mad she’d be that it was me and not her doing this. I kissed him and he kept going and I didn’t stop him.

Afterward I was embarrassed because he was embarrassed, and I knew I couldn’t stay there, but instead of going back to the couch I walked upstairs to Michael’s room and climbed into his bed. He smelled the way I remembered him. I just wanted to touch him, really, and not to wake up alone. But he thought I meant something by it, and I let him. I let him kiss me until he felt under my shirt and his fingers found my bra hook, which was still undone because I hadn’t bothered to fasten it.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Right,” he said. He turned away from me and faced the wall. I looked at the back of his ears and thought about a few hours earlier, about him holding my wrist, telling me to be careful with myself. I reached to pull him toward me. I remembered the feeling of his thumb and index finger right there on my pulse as I had nodded yes.

Snakes

The summer I turned nine I went to Tallahassee to visit my grandmother for the first and last time. It was a hot, muggy summer, the kind of weather where you think it’s going to storm any minute, but it rarely does. That much hasn’t changed in sixteen years—not the weather, not my sense of Tallahassee, then and now, as a place where your skin crawls with the sensation that something urgent is about to happen, but you never know what, or when. That first summer I flew to visit, I was skittish as soon as I exited the plane from New Jersey, escorted by a tight-skirted stewardess who handed me a gold plastic set of pin-on wings before we walked to the arrivals gate.

My grandmother had me picked up from the airport by a driver in a company car. The driver worked for a plastics company that still had my grandfather’s name, though he’d been dead since before I was born. The driver reminded me a little bit of my father—he had the same reddish-brown skin, the same big smile—and while we waited for my luggage to come around the baggage carousel, he gave me a stick of cinnamon bubble gum that I folded and tucked into the pocket of my shorts along with the wings, which I could feel pressing into my leg. My parents, as consolation for shipping me off to my grandmother while they spent the summer in Brazil researching indigenous environmental activism, had loaded my suitcase with books. It was something they did every time they went somewhere without me. Along with the small paperback dictionary my parents had given me last summer, I kept a couple of the new books with me to thumb through on the plane: Introduction to Rites and Rituals; Talismans: A Photographic Record, Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest.

The book on talismans I found particularly intriguing. I looked at pictures of stones