Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (3 page)

“What’s he jealous for?” I asked.

“He’s jealous of my success, dummy. Who are you?”

I thought about what I would be if I could be anything, but I didn’t really know.

“I’m at City College, too, I guess,” I said. “What do you major in to be a teacher?”

“Teaching,” said Jasmine.

“Ain’t no major in teaching,” said Michael.

“You ever been to college?” said Jasmine “Your brother ain’t even been to college.”

“I’m not stupid,” said Michael. “I’m gonna have a degree. I was over at Mr. Thompson’s today talking about books and stuff, while you two were putting a bunch of makeup on your faces.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Teaching. I’m majoring in teaching, then.”

“What about your man?” Jasmine said.

“He’s great,” I said. “He’s in college, too, and he’s gonna be a doctor, but he also writes me love poems. And paints pictures of me. He’s a painter too.”

“He so great, why you at the club?” said Michael.

“Umm . . . he’s dead?” I said.

“Dead?” said Jasmine.

“Dead.” I nodded. “I just finished grieving. I burned all his poems and now I wish I still had them.”

“Check this chick,” said Jasmine. “Even when she makes shit up, her life is fucked up.”

Michael gave me
his jacket on the way from Ray’s to the club, and I wrapped it around me and felt warmer. He was talking about earlier, when he was over at Mr. Thompson’s.

“Did you know,” said Michael, “that the Ethiopians beat the Italian army?”

“Do I care?” Jasmine asked. “No wonder I never meet nobody, hanging out with you.”

Michael made a face at Jasmine behind her back, but we were quiet for the rest of the walk.

I didn’t know why Jasmine needed to meet people besides us anyway. Jasmine thought just because people were older, they were going to be more interesting. They didn’t look any more interesting, all lined up outside the club like we did on school picture day. At the door one of the bouncers checked Jasmine’s ID, then looked her up and down and waved her in. He barely looked at mine, just glanced at my chest and stamped my hand. But he didn’t even take Michael’s, just shook his head at him and laughed.

“Not tonight,” he said.

Michael didn’t look too surprised, but he reached for my wrist when he saw I was waiting there, like I would have left with him if he asked me.

“You be careful with yourself, all right?”

I nodded. The bouncer turned around like he might change his mind about letting me in. “Bye, Ron,” said Jasmine, and she took off.

I ran in after her. “You didn’t have to just leave him like that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whole room full of people and you’re worried about Michael. He can take care of himself.”

I knew Michael would be all right. It was me I was worried about. The dance floor was full, and the strobe light brought people in and out of focus like holograms. Up on the metal platforms girls were dancing in shorts and bikini tops. The one closest to me had her body bent in half, her hands on her ankles and her shiny-gold-short-covered butt in the air. I wondered how you got to be a girl like that. Did you care too much what other people thought, or did you stop caring?

Me and Jasmine did what we always did at a club, moved to the center of the dance floor and moved our hips to the music. By the end of the first song two men had come up behind us and started grinding. I looked up at Jasmine to make sure it wasn’t Godzilla behind me, and when she nodded and gave me a thumbs-up, I pressed into the guy harder, winding forward and backward. At school they got mad about dancing like that, but we never learned any other kind of dancing except the steps from music videos, and good luck finding a boy who could keep up with that.

After we’d been dancing for an hour and I was sweaty and my thighs were tired, we went to the bathroom to fix ourselves. Nothing could be done about your hair once it started to sweat out, and I was glad at least I had pinned most of it up so you couldn’t see the frizzy parts too well. I let Jasmine fix my makeup. I could feel her fingers on my face, fixing my eye shadow, smoothing on my lip gloss. I remembered a book we’d read in middle school and said, “It’s like I’m Helen Keller, and you’re Teacher.”

“You’re the teacher,” Jasmine said. “I’m Alexis, the fashion designer.”

“We’re not,” I said, because it seemed important all of a sudden, but Jasmine was already on her way out the door.

When we left the bathroom we stood by the bar awhile and waited for people to buy us drinks. I used to always drink Midori sours because they tasted just like Kool-Aid, but Jasmine told me I couldn’t keep drinking those because that was the easiest way to show you were underage. I tried different drinks on different guys. A lawyer from Brooklyn bought me something too strong when I told him to surprise me, and kept talking about the river view from his apartment while I tried to drink it in little tiny sips. A construction worker from Queens told me he’d been waiting all his life for me, which must’ve been a pretty long time because he was kind of old. A real college student, from Harlem, walked away from me when he kept asking me questions about City College and I couldn’t answer them right.
Go home, sweetie,
he said, but I couldn’t, so I tried other names and stories. I was Renee and Yolanda and Shameka. I was a record store clerk and a waitress and a newspaper photographer. It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.

I realized after a while that I didn’t see Jasmine anymore. I listened for her, but all I could hear was other people talking, and the boom of music from the speakers above me. Then I heard her laugh on the other side of the bar and start to sing along with Foxy Brown,
Ain’t no nigga like the one I got
. She was sitting on a silver bar chair, and there were guys all around her. One of them was telling her how pretty she sang, which was a lie: she had no voice to begin with, plus she was making it sound all stupid and breathy on purpose. When she saw me looking at her, she waved.

“Yo,” she said, smiling big like she had the only other time I’d seen her drunk. “Serene.” I’d forgotten which name I was answering to and looked at her funny for a minute. I walked closer and one of the men put his arm around me.

“She can come too,” he said, and Jasmine smiled, and when she got up for real, I wondered where everyone was going.

I followed Jasmine until I realized we were leaving the club. It was like my whole body blinked. The club had been hot and sticky and outside it was almost cold. The floodlights on the block were so bright that for a minute I thought the sun must have never gone down all the way; it was that light outside.

“The hell?” I said.

“We’re going to an after party,” she giggled. “In the Bronx. The valet is getting their car. I was just about to look for you.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Yes,” she said, putting her arms around me and kissing me on the forehead. One of the guys whistled.

The valet pulled the car up, and I counted the men for the first time. There were four of them and two of us and one Mazda 626.

“There’s no room,” I said. “Let’s go.” I started to pull Jasmine’s hand, but the man by the far window patted his lap, and Jasmine crawled into the car and sat there and put her arms around him.

“Room now,” Jasmine said, and because I was out of excuses I got in the car, and five minutes later we were speeding up the West Side Highway. I remembered a story that had been on the news a few weeks ago. Some girl upstate had ended up in the hospital after she went home with five men she met on the bus. They didn’t say on the news exactly what they’d done to her, only that she was lucky to be alive. “What was that child thinking, going anyplace with all those strangers?” my mother had said. I wanted to call my mother right then and say she wasn’t, Mama, she wasn’t thinking at all, one minute she was one place and the next she was another and it all happened before she could stop it.

Then I thought maybe I was overreacting. Lots of people went to other people’s houses and most of them didn’t end up dead. Jasmine’s new friends didn’t really look dangerous. They looked like they’d spent more time getting dressed than me and Jasmine had. The one Jasmine was sitting on had a sparkly diamond earring. The one next to me had on a beige linen shirt. They all smelled like cologne beneath sweat. I liked that smell. My sheets had smelled like that once after Michael took a nap in my bed, and I didn’t want to wash them until it went away. I felt better. If I was going to kill somebody, I thought, I would not get all dressed up first. I would not put on a lot of perfume. When I turned away from the window to look at the people in the car again, I saw that Jasmine was kissing the man with the earring. She was kissing him deep, and I could see half her tongue going in and out of his mouth. His hands were tracing the top of her shirt. He fingered the chain she always wore around her neck, and stopped kissing her to look at it.

“Princess,” he mumbled. “Are you a princess?”

Jasmine giggled. Her chain glittered like a dime at the bottom of a swimming pool.

“Are you a princess too?” the man next to me asked. He looked down at me, and I could see that his eyes were a pretty green, but bloodshot.

“No,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest.

“Man, look who we got here,” said the one in the passenger seat, turning around. “College girl with a attitude problem. How’d we end up with these girls again? Y’all are probably virgins, aren’t you?”

“No,” Jasmine said. “Like hell we are. We look like virgins to you?”

“Nah,” he said, and I didn’t know whether to feel pissed off or pretty.

The car stopped in front of an apartment building, and I followed them into the lobby and into the elevator, and earring guy still had his arms around Jasmine and pretty-eyes guy was still looking at me. If I’d wanted to lose my virginity to a random guy in the Bronx, I would’ve done it already, not just let Jasmine give it away. I knew if she saw my face, she would know how mad I was, but she had her head in earring guy’s neck. The clicks and dings in the elevator seemed like they were saying something in a language I didn’t speak. I thought about pulling her off of him. I thought about hitting her. They’d 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.”