Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Read Online Free PDF Page A

trouble, huh?” Ron asked.
    I wanted to say yes, they could take me home, that I deserved to be in trouble, that I’d let my mother slap me if it meant we’d go get Jasmine and both of us could be at home sleeping in our rooms tonight, but I didn’t.
    “No,” I said. “Can I stay at your place? I’m s’posed to be at Jasmine’s.”
    “No doubt,” he said, and squeezed my knee, stopping to look at me so hard that I wasn’t even sure what I’d said, but I wanted to take that back too. I remembered my mother saying no one does you a favor who doesn’t want something back sometime. Ron was driving already and I looked out the window again and listened to the radio. Even this time of night they were still playing Tupac, which they never would have been doing when he was still alive.
     
     
    Inside at Michael and Ron’s house, they put me on the downstairs couch and gave me a blanket. When Ron said good night and went into his bedroom in the basement, I thought maybe I’d only imagined the look he gave me earlier. I unlaced my shoes and took down my hair and curled up in the blanket, trying not to think about Jasmine and what kind of a mess I’d left her in. I thought of her laughing, thought of the look on her face when she had closed her eyes and let that man kiss her, and for a second I hated her and then a second later I couldn’t remember anything I’d ever hated more than leaving her. I was sitting there in the dark when Ron came back and put an arm around me.
    “You know, you’re too pretty for me to leave you on the couch like that,” he said, pulling me toward him. I didn’t know that, but I did understand then that there was no such thing as safe, only safer; that this, if it didn’t happen now, would happen later but not better. I was safer than Jasmine right now, safer than I might have been. He kissed me, hard, like he was trying to get to the last drop of something, and I kissed him back, harder, like I wanted to get it all back. The noise in my head stopped and I didn’t have to think about anything but where to put all the pieces of my body next.
    He grabbed my hand and led me to the bedroom, and he kissed me again and pushed my skirt around my hips. “You’re beautiful,” he said, which must’ve been a lie by this time of night. I sat on the bed and pulled my underwear off and realized they were Jasmine’s. I thought how mad she’d be that it was me and not her doing this. I kissed him and he kept going and I didn’t stop him.
    Afterward I was embarrassed because he was embarrassed, and I knew I couldn’t stay there, but instead of going back to the couch I walked upstairs to Michael’s room and climbed into his bed. He smelled the way I remembered him. I just wanted to touch him, really, and not to wake up alone. But he thought I meant something by it, and I let him. I let him kiss me until he felt under my shirt and his fingers found my bra hook, which was still undone because I hadn’t bothered to fasten it.
    “What happened?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” I said.
    “Right,” he said. He turned away from me and faced the wall. I looked at the back of his ears and thought about a few hours earlier, about him holding my wrist, telling me to be careful with myself. I reached to pull him toward me. I remembered the feeling of his thumb and index finger right there on my pulse as I had nodded yes.

Snakes
    T he summer I turned nine I went to Tallahassee to visit my grandmother for the first and last time. It was a hot, muggy summer, the kind of weather where you think it’s going to storm any minute, but it rarely does. That much hasn’t changed in sixteen years—not the weather, not my sense of Tallahassee, then and now, as a place where your skin crawls with the sensation that something urgent is about to happen, but you never know what, or when. That first summer I flew to visit, I was skittish as soon as I exited the plane from New Jersey, escorted by a tight-skirted