Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,1
the house, where we took turns changing in the downstairs bathroom. It was an old house, like most of the ones in his part of town, but Mr. Thompson kept it nice: the wallpaper was peeling a little, but the bathroom was clean. The soap in the soap dish was shaped like a seashell, and it seemed like we were the only ones who ever used it. On our way out we said good-bye to Mr. Thompson, who nodded at us and grunted, “Girls”; then, harsher, at Michael: “Boy.”
Michael rolled his eyes. Michael wasn’t bad. Mostly I thought he hung out with us because he was bored a lot. He needed somebody to chill with when the white girls he was fucking’s parents were home. We didn’t get him in trouble as much as his boys did. We hung out with him because we figured it was easier to have a boy around than not to. Strangers usually thought one of us was with him, and they didn’t know which, so they didn’t bother either of us. When you were alone, men were always wanting something from you. We even wondered about Mr. Thompson sometimes, or at least we never went swimming at his house without Michael with us.
Mr. Thompson was retired, but he used to be our elementary school principal, which is how he was the only person in Mount Vernon we knew with a swimming pool in his backyard. We—and everybody else we knew—lived on the south side, where it was mostly apartment buildings, and if you had a house, you were lucky if your backyard was big enough for a plastic kiddie pool. The bus didn’t go by Mr. Thompson’s house, and it was a twenty-minute walk from our houses even if we walked fast, but it was nicer than swimming at the city pool. We were the only ones he’d told could use his pool anytime.
“It ’s ’cause I collected more than anyone else for the fourth-grade can drive, when we got the computers,” I said. “He likes me.”
“Nah,” Jasmine said, “he don’t even remember that. It’s ’cause my mom worked at the school all those years.”
Jasmine’s mom had been one of the lunch ladies, and we’d gone out of our way to pretend not to know her, with her hairnet cutting a line into her broad forehead, her face all covered in sweat. Even when she got home she’d smell like grease for hours. Sometimes if my mother made me a bag lunch, I’d split it with Jasmine so we didn’t have to go through the lunch line and hear the other kids laugh. At school, Mr. Thompson had been nicer to Jasmine’s mother than we had. We felt bad for letting Mr. Thompson make us nervous. He was the smartest man either of us knew, and probably he was just being nice. We were not stupid, though. We’d had enough nice guys suddenly look at us the wrong way.
My first kiss was with a boy who’d said he’d walk me home and a block later was licking my mouth. The first time a guy had ever touched me—like touched me there—I was eleven and he was sixteen and a lifeguard at the city pool. We’d been playing chicken and when he put me down he held me against the cement and put his fingers in me, and I wasn’t scared or anything, just cold and surprised. When I told Jasmine later she said he did that to everyone, her too. Michael kept people like that out of our way. People had used to say that he was fucking one of us, or trying to, but it wasn’t like that. He was our friend, and he’d moved on to white girls from Bronxville anyway. It was like he didn’t even see us like girls sometimes, and that felt nice because mostly everybody else did.
Michael’s brother Ron was leaned up against his car, waiting for him at the bottom of Mr. Thompson’s hill. The car was a brown Cadillac that was older than Ron, who graduated from our high school last spring and worked at Radio Shack. People didn’t usually notice the car much because they were too busy looking at Ron and he knew it. He was golden-colored, with curly hair and doll-baby eyelashes and the kind of smile where you could count all of his teeth. Jasmine always said how fine he was, but to me he looked like the kind of person who