Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,4

need to mention me, but I felt good that he had. His friends mostly left me alone already, because they knew I wasn’t good for anything but kissing you a little bit and running away. Michael nodded good-bye as he and his friends walked toward their movie. Eddie and Cindy stayed there, kissing, like that’s what they had paid admission for anyway. I grabbed Jasmine’s hand and pulled her in the other direction.

“That’s nasty,” I said. “She looks nasty all up on him in public like that.”

“No one ever bought me a singing teddy bear,” said Jasmine as we walked to the ticket counter. “Probably no one ever will buy me a singing teddy bear.”

“I’ll buy you a singing teddy bear, you silly bitch,” I said.

“Shut up,” she said. She had been sucking on her own bottom lip so hard she’d sucked the lipstick off it, and her lips were two different colors. “Don’t you ever want to matter to somebody?”

“I matter to you,” I said. “And Michael.”

Jasmine clicked her tongue. “Michael,” she said. “Say Michael had to shoot either you or that Italian chick who’s letting him hit it right now. Who do you think he would save?”

“Why does he have to shoot somebody?” I said.

“He just does.”

“Well, he’d save me, then. She’s just a girl who’s fucking him.”

“And you’re just a girl who isn’t,” Jasmine said. “You don’t understand anything, do you? Look...” She whirled me around and pointed at Cindy Jackson, who had her arms wrapped around Eddie and his hand scrunched in her hair. “When are we going to be that kind of girl?”

“What, the stupid kind? Everyone knows he’s messing with that girl who works at the earring place at the Galleria. Probably other girls too.”

“That’s not even the point, stupid. She’s the one he kisses in public.”

“Well, that’s her own dumb fault, I don’t see why you gotta be worried about it,” I said. “I wouldn’t kiss that idiot in public if you paid me. I wouldn’t kiss his fingernail in public.”

Jasmine kept watching them kiss for a minute, and she looked real sad, like she might cry or something. “That’s your problem, Erica, you don’t understand adult relationships,” she said.

“Where are there adults?” I asked, looking around. I put my hand to my forehead like I was a sea captain looking for dry land, and turned around in circles, but everywhere it was the same old people doing the same old things.

“You’re right,” Jasmine said. “I’m tired of these little boys. Next weekend we’re going to the city. We’re gonna find some real niggas who know how to treat us.”

That was not the idea I meant for Jasmine to have.

We had our cousins’ IDs, and we’d been clubbing a few times before, in Mount Vernon, but it wasn’t the same. It was usually just a bar with a DJ, and someone always knew us; we never stayed that long or got into any real trouble. Once we were inside, people would appear out of nowhere, all Ain’t you Miss Trellis’s daughter? or Didn’t you used to be friends with my little sister? If we flirted even a little bit, someone would show up to say, Yo, those are some little girls right there,and our guy would vanish. Sometimes a guy would get mad and report us to the bouncer, who would tell us it was time to go home. You had your fun girls, he’d say, and the thing was, usually we had. The point was getting in and saying we’d been there. Clubbing in the city was something else.

In a TV sitcom, one of our mothers would have called the other and busted us, but Jasmine’s mom worked nights at a diner in Yonkers, and my mom passed out around ten, two hours after she got home from working as a secretary in White Plains, and no one was making any TV show about the two of us so that was that. Her mom thought I was at her house and my mom thought she was at my house, and meanwhile we were standing on the platform of the MTA toward Manhattan.

Jasmine wouldn’t let me wear panty hose, because I’d borrowed her shoes that opened at the toe and laced up my leg from my ankles to just below my knee, and I felt naked: Her skirt was too short on me. The only thing Jasmine let me do right was bring Michael with us, and he was standing there in his