Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (25 page)

The New Year came and went; I drank sparkling apple cider with my parents and watched the ball drop on television. It was the end of January before Geena spoke to me again. She appeared at my locker after school, shifting nervously, which was strange, because I hardly ever saw Geena look nervous.

“Look,” she said, “this is bullshit. You wanna go to the mall after school?”

I neglected to point out that the bullshit was mostly her doing. I nodded, grabbed my purse out of my locker, and followed her to the beat-up old blue Tercel she’d bought with the money she’d saved that summer, the money we hadn’t used for our beach trip. It was as if the light came on and I suddenly noticed it had been dark for months.

As quickly as they’d forgotten me, the crowd took me back. Geena let me know who’d been talking the most shit about me and we made a point of ostracizing them. We made up for lost time with a few long talks and a lot of off-campus lunches. We never exactly talked about the fight, and if anyone was rude enough to bring it up, they met both of our icy stares and shut up quickly.

By the end of March, I was on edge, waiting to find out where I’d gotten into college and whether I’d have the money to go. Geena was in danger of not graduating, but didn’t seem particularly concerned about it. AP exams were over and the final grades that would be used for class ranking were out. The teachers knew they couldn’t really keep us in school. I spent a lot of time driving around with Geena in the middle of the day. Some sophomore girls claimed a section of our lunch table and we didn’t even bother putting them in their place. We could already feel our world slipping away from us.

I think it was them that finally got to Geena, them and the four fat college acceptance letters I got in April. Walking past the senior lockers one day, we saw one of the new girls making out with her senior boyfriend. Geena shook her head and rolled her eyes in my direction, like
At least we don’t have to fuck people to be popular.
I nodded back, and mouthed,
Amateurs
.

Geena came up with the prank idea after that. She showed up at my locker after school with a sour apple lollipop in her mouth.

“Hey,” she started, “we should do something. Like a senior prank.”

“Geena. White kids do senior pranks. When we try it, they’re called felonies.”

“I thought you were practically one of them, anyway.”

I shot Geena a warning look and she dropped the subject. Still, I could see her getting more and more upset by the little things. She made a point of making Sophomore Slut Girl change lunch tables one day, coming
this close
to physically removing her. She talked with increasing frequency about the fact that she wasn’t getting a diploma. She was of two minds on the matter. One moment she’d shrug and say, “What the fuck do I want a stupid piece of paper for anyway?” The next, she’d shake her head and say, “They ought to at least give me something. Much time as I spent in this dumb-ass school.”

I got used to her mood swings and went along with them. It was easier than arguing, and I didn’t object much anyway. When Libby Carlisle got named prom queen, Geena launched into a ten-minute tirade on how she was the ugliest, bitchiest, dishwater-blondest excuse for a prom queen she’d ever heard of.

“Don’t worry about Libby Carlisle,” I said. “Libby Carlisle is about to encounter the unpleasant reality that the world does not revolve around her ass, and when she finally accepts that reality she’ll need Valium and an exotic lover to get through her boring and frustrated life.”

Geena laughed. “That’s why I love you, CeeCee. You’re so full of shit.”

 

 

Geena stopped coming
to school altogether. She wasn’t going to graduate anyway, so there wasn’t much point. I went to the obligatory senior class events and showed up for the final exams that teachers administered halfheartedly. The rest of my time was spent camped out on Geena’s living room floor, watching bad talk shows and soap operas. Geena was getting animated again by the prospect of end-of-year parties. Prom was too expensive, but April was having a semiformal in her backyard the same night, and we were excited enough about it. Geena and I went dress shopping at what everyone called the Ghetto Mall, though you knew by who was talking whether or not they meant it affectionately. I liked the dress shop, its awning unpretentiously proclaiming DRESSES, its owner a chatty Vietnamese woman who was good at eyeballing women and knowing what size they needed, even if they argued with her about it. I spent an hour eyeing the intricate beadwork of the Quinceañera dresses, lined up in the window like cakes with brightly colored icing, before settling on something slinky and black. The day of the party, Geena curled my hair and put red lipstick on me, sashaying around the room in her own deep-purple strapless sheath.

“Damn, CeeCee. Remember what a geek you were when I found you?”

“I’m not a puppy.” I pouted. “You didn’t find me. And anyway, I’m still a geek. So there.”

I stuck my tongue out and fell back on her bed.

“Well, you’re a hundred percent better than you were,” she snapped back, curling her eyelashes in the cracked full-length mirror on her wall. “And sit the hell up before you smash the curls I just put in your head.”

 

 

I don’t know
what we were expecting the party to be like, but it was just like every other party we’d been to since freshman year, except nobody was wearing jeans. The music echoed all the way down the block and the lawn smelled like a weak mixture of beer, weed, and vomit. The smell and the heat clung to everyone there, but all we could hear was laughter. On the back porch lay a pile of abandoned heels, shawls, jackets and ties: girls had realized how uncomfortable it was to be beautiful, and the few boys who’d bothered to take the semiformal status of the party seriously had found themselves outnumbered and done a quick ruffling of their appearances.

On the front lawn, Vi was trying to teach two freshmen how to dance cumbia, the beat from Jay-Z blaring inside the house throwing off the rhythm she was counting out. Inside, people danced on beat, some pressed so close together it was hard to tell one body from another. Others skipped the dancing all together; all of the bedroom doors were locked and April was more than happy to tell us who was in each of them. She was also slightly tipsy, and melodramatically complained about the red stain spreading across her living room carpet: someone had spilled a punch bowl full of Alizé. It smelled sickly-sweet and looked like blood.

Geena and I ended up in the garage. We could only stand around and look superior for so long before we just looked stupid.

“So,” said Geena, taking a sip of her wine cooler, “you going to graduation tomorrow?”

“I have to go,” I said, taking a bigger swallow of mine than I intended. Stray drops of pink liquid trickled down the front of my dress.

“Right.” Geena nodded. “I ain’t going. They’re just gonna gimme a fake piece of paper that says I didn’t graduate and would I like information about some damn GED programs.”

I swallowed again. “I have to go,” I repeated. “I’m the valedictorian.”

Geena laughed. “Like you haven’t been waiting your whole life for this shit.”

“I’ve been killing myself my whole life for this shit. They don’t have to expect me to be all happy about it.”

“Oh, right,” said Geena, smirking. “Poor you.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You always mean it like that.”

“Look,” I said. “I don’t even wanna go tomorrow. I have to. That’s all. No one will listen anyway. Half the parents don’t care at all about any part of graduation except when their kid’s name gets called. And the half of the ones that do care are going to be so pissed it’s me speaking and not their
gifted
child that they’ll spend the whole speech bitching. The only two people listening will be my parents, which means I can’t say anything I actually want to say, which is fuck you all very much for making me miserable since the third grade, I’m out.”

“If it were me, I’d say that.”

“Yeah, well. I can’t. Anyway, Mrs. Peterson already approved my real speech. It’s about success and obstacles and respect and bullshit.”

“Well,” said Geena, “I guess Mrs. Peterson’s opinion counts more than anyone else’s.”

I started to laugh, but she wasn’t kidding.

“You really don’t want to do this, I can get you out of it,” Geena said. “We can tell every-damn-body how you really feel. You and me.”

It was enough that I didn’t say no. Geena picked her shoes up off the garage floor where she’d kicked them aside and was already on her way out the door.

“You coming?” she called, dangling her car keys.

With a halfhearted last look at Tien throwing up on April’s front lawn, I followed Geena to her car. A few minutes later we were parked in front of her cousin Ray’s house a few blocks away. He ran a kind of automotive/construction business, in that there were usually broken-down cars parked on the front lawn, and occasionally he fixed something, and occasionally someone actually paid him for it. I didn’t ask what we were doing there. The lights were off, but Geena had a house key, and for a few minutes she walked back and forth between the car and the garage, putting things in the trunk: paint, a toolbox, a six-pack she’d stolen from the garage refrigerator.

“You aiight, CeeCee?” she asked when she got back in the car.

“Yeah, I’m good.” I stared out of the window and tried to look disinterested.

“You want to go home, I’ll take you home.”

“I’m not going home,” I said.

Geena didn’t respond, and I stayed quiet. The roads were all familiar. Within minutes I was looking at my high school in the dark. Geena pulled over in the back parking lot, right beside the football field. The field had been done over for graduation. A wooden stage had been erected in the middle of it, red, white, and blue circular banners were draped across the bottoms of the stage and the bleachers. A gold banner, stretched between two posts beside the stage, read: CONGRATULATIONS, ROBERT E. LEE CLASS OF 2000. In front of the stage, rows and rows of white plastic chairs had been set up for the senior class.

Geena got the six-pack out of the trunk and we sat in the car for a while, drinking and talking. I didn’t even like beer, but it gave me something to do besides look at Geena, who seemed sadder than I’d ever seen her, or the football field, all done up and ready for me to be a person I had never wanted to be.

“Remember freshman year?” Geena asked.

“Yeah.”

“It was like we ran things.”

“We didn’t, though. It just felt that way because we were kids.”

She made circles on the dashboard with her pointer finger. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m not going that far. It’s a three-hour train ride,” I answered, deliberately avoiding the reality that our lives were to be measured in a different kind of distance.

“So, you really don’t want to do this tomorrow?” Geena asked.

“No,” I said quickly.

“Bet you they won’t have a ceremony if the stage is all fucked up,” said Geena.

We got out of the car and I followed Geena to the stage, carrying the things she’d gotten from Ray’s. When we got to the field, Geena put down what she was carrying and walked the rest of the way to the stage. She climbed the stairs and walked around for a minute, pausing for a moment behind the podium. She spoke as if speaking into a microphone, but there was no mic, and from the other end of the field, I couldn’t hear a word she said. When she was done, she hopped off the stage, forgoing the stairs, and handed me a can of spray paint.

“You serious about this?” she asked.

By way of answering, I uncapped the can and pointed it at her for a second, grinning. Then I walked to the far end of the football field, by the opposing team’s goalposts. I wanted to say the one thing that would make everybody see themselves for what they really were, but I had no special insight into the human condition. I had only one thing to say, the thing I’d been swallowing every day since I had first been confronted with the entitled faces of my “gifted” Lakewood classmates, since I’d first heard the taunts of the Eastdale neighborhood kids, who would have ignored me my whole life if it hadn’t been for Geena, who would have never understood that I was angry on their behalf as much as on mine. YOU ARE NOT AS SPECIAL AS YOU THINK YOU ARE, I sprayed in huge letters on the grass. I shook the paint can when I’d finished, but it was empty.

“Geena,” I called, “I’m not done. Bring me another paint can.”

But she didn’t answer me, and when I turned around, she wasn’t doing anything herself, just leaning against the stage, smoking a Newport and looking at me with some mix of concern and confusion. She walked over to where I was standing.

“Come on,” she said, dropping her cigarette and taking my hand. “Let’s go. I shouldn’t have talked you into this.”

“No,” I said, “I’m not finished. And you didn’t talk me into it.”

I wanted to sign my name—my real one. I wanted, for the first time in my life, the world to see my real self, my whole one. I walked over to where Geena had left the paint cans and went back to my work of art. FUCK YOU, I wrote. LOVE, CRYSTAL.

“Crystal,” Geena yelled when I was halfway done, “are you drunk or are you stupid? You can’t put your real goddamn name! Put mine!”

But I wasn’t drunk or stupid, just tipsy and angry, and it wasn’t about Geena anymore, or even about tomorrow. I saw Geena coming over with a small brush and paint can in her hand, watched her dump it over the
C
in my name. I expected it to be swallowed up in fresh paint, but it remained clear, like Geena had just splashed it with water, and something sharp hit my nostrils.

“Shit!” Geena shrieked. “That was paint thinner. Fucking Ray.”

For a second we started to laugh together at Ray’s ineptitude, but then I saw the faintest shimmer of orange a few feet from where she’d spilled it, remembered the cigarette she’d dropped earlier. I grabbed her hand and we raced breathlessly down to the other end of the field. I was still thinking it wasn’t a big deal, that we could grab the water hose attached to the back of the school and put it out before it got any bigger, but by the time we turned around, the fire had scorched the whole spot where the letter C had been, and was starting to spread from there. It was almost summer, and the grass on the football field was dry and brown. I had heard once that our football field was a Civil War graveyard; watching the fire slither outward from one blade of glass to the next, I believed it. The fire was still small in area and low to the ground, but if nothing stopped it, it would reach the wooden stage, and then perhaps the wooden bleachers, and eventually the trees behind them, then finally the houses behind it. I looked at the fifty-yard line, where the grass no longer said CRYSTAL, and above it, where it still said YOU ARE NOT AS SPECIAL AS YOU THINK YOU ARE but wouldn’t for long. I ran for the pay phone in the school’s front parking lot, Geena behind me. I had just picked up the phone when Geena reached past me and pressed down the receiver, her nails glittering purple against the metal.