Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (24 page)

Afterward we were not so careful. A bunch of us piled into Rafael’s van and drove screaming and swerving up and down Lees-burg Pike. We smelled strongly of paint fumes and opened all the windows in order to stick our heads out and gulp down fresh air. It was November, but there were too many of us in the van to be cold, we were packed in tight and squeezed against each other. I could vaguely feel Tyrone’s hand creeping up my thigh, but the dizzying combination of paint fumes and the wine cooler Geena had given me earlier kept me from being sure I should do something about it. Rafael swerved into Lakewood and we drove up their hills, tearing past their mammoth brick houses, circling the private beaches built around their man-made lake, where small groups of our classmates gathered for parties on weekends. Eric rode shotgun and blasted the radio while Geena and I screamed out the windows, and the cold air and the hot van and the beat—because there was always a beat—became their own universe. It was shattered by the screech of sirens in the distance, and it was over that quickly. Rafael made a sharp left and took the back roads into Eastdale, but not before Geena stuck her head out of the window a final time and screamed to the empty echo behind us, “Fuck you, too, fucking cops!” and then collapsed giggling in my lap. We had driven all through Lakewood, but when I got back to my apartment and sleepily collapsed on the living room sofa that doubled as my bed, I was not a bit jealous, not at all. They had houses, they had money, they damn near ran the school, but they still had nothing that was half as exciting as Geena.

We lost the football game. A couple of the Lakewood kids seemed sad about this: they’d genuinely wanted that sword. “Probably to cut our heads off with,” Jason said. On our part, the loss was overshadowed by the enthusiastic response to the news that Stonewall Jackson was going to have to reschedule their prom. We knew they’d get the money back, but it was a victory nonetheless. The school held an assembly to address the vandalism. The senior class adviser chided Jackson for “not only committing such a childish act but refusing to take responsibility for it even after the fact.” The Jackson football team had claimed over and over again that they’d had nothing to do with it, that we’d probably done it ourselves to get them in trouble. Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone to believe them. In the school board’s mind, we still had loyalties. Mrs. Peterson gave a long speech about embracing diversity—rather like a wolf giving a speech on embracing sheep—and said it was mystifying that anyone would even make such a charge against us. Geena and I sat straight-faced and said nothing. It had been our experience that white people were very easily mystified.

 

 

After that,
my nickname went from Antisocial to CeeCee, and Geena and I got permanent seats at the Eastdale senior lunch table. My classmates in honors weren’t sure what to make of my sudden transformation. After being harassed for most of elementary school, I’d realized that the more invisible I was, the more likely it was they’d reserve their cruelty for each other. In middle school, I’d been the girl sitting quietly in the back of the class, taking copious notes and wearing shapeless sweaters. It worked. They’d all started hating each other instead of me. For the first time in my life, I was the only person who never cried in the bathroom during lunchtime. My new high visibility violated the unspoken terms of our
détente.
I was suddenly a girl who wore stilettos and hip-huggers, who ran into class just before the bell rang, shouting good-byes all the way down to the end of the hallway. I was
still
a girl who knew more right answers than they did, which was the real source of the trouble—I’d gone from being an anomaly to being an impossibility.

Walking out of World History one afternoon, I heard Caitlyn Murphy say loudly, “How in the hell can she walk in those jeans?”

“How in the hell can she walk with that ass, more like,” Libby Carlisle joined in.

“Well,” said Anna James, “I’m glad she’s turning into a crack whore. Now I don’t have to worry about her messing up my class rank.”

I told Geena about this conversation after lunch, then thought no more of it until I went looking for her after school. Vi finally told me she was cornering Libby and Anna in the parking lot. To this day, I don’t know the exact terms of that confrontation: Geena wasn’t talking and it was a full year before Libby and Anna got up the nerve to even look at me again, let alone speak to me. Whatever the case, Geena got suspended for two days and no one fucked with me after that. I perfected the art of smiling cruelly, then ran out of school to Geena, and the football field, and the city late at night, to everything that was bright and noisy and newly beautiful.

We were not always laughing. When Geena’s mom was hospitalized with a tumor that turned out to be benign, I cut school for three days to hold Geena’s hand in the hospital waiting room. Later, when the attendance woman said the unexcused absences meant we would both automatically fail for the semester, I got a sympathetic young ER resident to write doctor’s notes for both of us. When my dad lost his job and I couldn’t stand to be in the house and hear my parents budgeting money in terse voices, Geena invented reasons why I had to sleep over at her place every night. When Geena had her abortion, I went with her and covered for her with everyone who wanted to know why she wasn’t laughing like usual. When I swallowed a bottle of Tylenol for no real reason I could think of, Geena stuck her fingers down my throat until I vomited, and through my vomit and her tears screamed until I promised never to do it again. These were the things we never talked about, but they were our things nonetheless.

In the spring
of my junior year, Mrs. Peterson sent an office aid to pull me out of class right before lunch. A chorus of
oohs
greeted the announcement that Mrs. Peterson wanted to see me. In the waiting area, I smiled weakly at Mrs. Sanchez, the receptionist, hoping she might give me a heads-up on what I was here for. She only smiled back at me. Inside her office, Mrs. Peterson grinned at me with her big chipmunk teeth. I had never been so scared to be smiled at.

“Crystal,” she started, and I fought the urge to tell her that was not my name anymore and hadn’t been for quite some time.

“We’re very proud of the work you’ve done since coming to Robert E. Lee. Your record here has been truly impressive.”

I was afraid she was going to expel me. I thought of the worst things I’d done in recent history and prepared myself to explain to her why going to Taco Bell during lunch, hooking up with Jason in his basement, and loaning my fake ID to a freshman cheerleader were not offenses for which she could legitimately kick me out of school.

“Every year,” she continued, “we send one student to the state summer academy. I am pleased to tell you that this year you are our nominee.”

I was so shocked that my reflexive thank-you got caught in my throat. She babbled on about the state summer academy and how good it would look on my college applications. I sat back catching bits and pieces. The seminar was on government and philosophy, which meant I’d get to read more of the stuff everyone thought I was a freak for actually enjoying, but if it had been a seminar on decorating kitchens, I still would have said yes. Being nominated by the school meant that I’d get free room and board at the university where the program was held. I was thinking it was amazing that anyone would pay for me to get away from my life for a few weeks. I was thinking also that I was not stupid. I read the papers: I knew the governor had just started a state commission on the achievement gap between white and minority students. I could picture Mrs. Peterson pouring the state investigator a cup of tea and shrugging and saying, “
Crystal
has done beautifully, and has been rewarded for it. If her friends showed the same motivation . . .”

Mrs. Peterson was still talking in the present. I snapped back into the conversation when I heard Geena’s name, followed by:

“—nearly on academic probation again. I hope you take note of this. Be careful about the company you keep.”

I wondered what kind of company she kept. I opened my mouth to defend Geena, but knew that right then I couldn’t afford to make Mrs. Peterson angry. Besides, what was keeping Geena off academic probation was me doing her homework, and Mrs. Peterson didn’t need to know that. I shut my mouth and left her office.

I knew Geena would be mad; I just didn’t know how mad, or how soon. After school she asked me why I had missed lunch, and I told her I’d been in Mrs. Peterson’s office for our lunch period and she’d given me a pass to eat during B lunch instead.

“What the fuck did she want?” Geena asked.

I swallowed. Geena and I were supposed to work at the Baskin-Robbins again this summer in order to save money for a week of cheerleading camp and an end-of-the-summer beach trip that we planned to take together. I told her all at once, letting the words tumble together and repeating over and over again that the program was free.

She was quiet for a minute after I finished.

“So, Mrs. Peterson is, like, your friend now?”

“Not my friend. I mean, I’m sure she’s just doing it because it looks good, and besides, I have the best grades. If she didn’t pick me, she’d have had to explain why. But whatever, you know? It’s not like she really likes me.”

“Yeah, OK.”

Geena started walking down the hallway and I followed her.

“Geena, what do you want me to do?” I called. I didn’t mean for it to come out like a question, but it did, anyway.

She kept walking. I walked home alone, and I took the long way.

I let the promise of summer comfort me while Geena avoided me. Violeta and April became Geena’s new best girlfriends. I was somewhat consoled by the fact that it took two people to replace me. Vi made a point of telling everyone that she’d gone to middle school with me and I’d been a bougie bitch then too. I started to eat lunch in the library again. If Geena thought she could make me lonely enough to change my mind about summer school, she’d vastly underestimated my capacity for loneliness. I’d perfected lonely in the third grade.

 

 

The summer passed quickly.
I spent most of my time in my dorm room reading. It was quieter than my life had ever been and I didn’t mind it. Geena and her anger were a million miles away from the college campus. I thought occasionally of the parties I was missing, of varsity practice and what I’d do with all my free time when I wasn’t on the squad next fall. Geena wouldn’t be on the squad, either: without me to do her homework, she’d failed two classes and wasn’t eligible to cheer. Mostly I didn’t think of high school at all. I read Plato and Aristotle and the Constitution, and in those moments I felt tremendously insignificant.

I walked around alone often, but my roommate for the summer didn’t find my quietness strange at all. Occasionally we’d look up from reading and smile shyly. I’d always thought the whole world was just a bigger version of Lee High School—a line running down the middle of it and people on either side telling me that I didn’t really belong there. There were still people like that at the summer academy, but I also met a handful of people who seemed to understand me on my own terms. A girl with a long black ponytail offered to be my roommate if we both got into the university. I thanked her, but in my mind I thought I’d like to go much, much farther away.

 

 

By the time
school started again, I had almost forgotten what I was missing. I wasn’t lonely anymore; I was just alone. That was the luxury I had then: Geena had already made me possible. Her boldness, which I’d always thought I’d been borrowing from her, had become mine in ways I didn’t realize until she was gone. I didn’t flinch around people who didn’t like me; I didn’t feel anymore like being myself was something for which I owed the world an apology. Then again, if you believed the rumors, everyone was past the point of apology: they were busy trying to find a way to impose themselves on the world. I heard that Eric had replaced the engine in his car and gotten it to go 140 down the Pike, but it sounded like empty boasting; and as much as Vi was enjoying her rise in status, I had trouble believing that she’d actually make the freshmen cheerleaders carve player’s names into their thighs with a penknife. It was senior year, and the world as I knew it was undoing itself. The more adult everyone got on paper, the dumber they got in real 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.