Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,2

should be on television, not someone you’d actually wanna talk to. He must’ve still been mad at Pac, too, or he was just tired of hearing him on the radio, because he was bumping Nas from the tape deck. Michael hopped in the front seat and started to wave bye to us.

“Man,” Ron said, cuffing him on the back of his head. “You got two cute girls here, and you ain’t even gonna try to take ’em with you? I thought I raised you better than that.”

“I’m meeting people at the Galleria. You coming?” Michael called.

“Who’s gonna be there?” Jasmine asked.

“Me, Darius, Eddie . . . prolly some other people.”

“Nuh-uh,” Jasmine said. “You’re cool, but your boy ain’t.”

“What ’s wrong with my boy?” Michael asked, grinning.

Jasmine made a tsk sound. “He ignorant, that’s what.”

“Damn son,” said Ron as he walked back to the driver’s side. “Your whole crew can’t get no play.” He got in, slammed the car door, and did a U-turn. On his way past us he leaned out the window and called, “You get tired of messing with these fools, you come down to the mall and see me,” then rolled up the amber window and drove off.

Jasmine’s problem was that she had lost her virginity to Michael’s friend Eddie four months before. He told her he would go with her afterward but instead he went with Cindy Jackson. We saw them all over the city all summer, holding hands. It drove Jasmine crazy. Jasmine liked to pretend no one knew any of this, even though JASMINE FUCKED EDDIE AND NOW SHE’S PRESSED!! had been written in both the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms at school for months. Cindy wrote it in both places. I told Jasmine Cindy was probably real familiar with the boys’ bathroom.

“The only difference between that girl and the subway,” I said, “is that everybody in the world hasn’t ridden the subway.”

I thought Jasmine would feel better, but instead of laughing she sniffled and said, “He left me for some trashy bitch.” After that I just let her cry.

On our way to Jasmine’s house, she said, “I’m sad about Tupac, a little. It is sad. You can’t ever do anything. I bet you if I got famous, somebody would kill me too.”

“What the hell would you get famous for?” I asked.

“I’m just saying, if I did.”

“Sure,” I said. “You’d be just like Tupac.”

“I’m just saying, Erica, you never know. You don’t know what could happen. You don’t know how much time you got.”

Jasmine could be melodramatic like that, thinking because something bad happened somewhere, something bad would happen to you. I remembered when Tupac had went to jail, and Jasmine cried because she said we could get arrested too, and I said, “For what?”, but it didn’t matter, she just kept crying. Mostly to make her feel better, we had bought IT’S A SET UP SO KEEP YA HEAD UP T-shirts at the mall. My mother screamed when she saw us wearing them.

“Setup,” she said. “Y’all take that crap off. Keep believing everything these rap stars tell you. I’m telling you, the minute a man says someone set him up for anything, you run, because he’s about to set you up for something.”

There were a whole lot of men we were supposed to stay away from according to my mother: rap stars, NBA players, white men. We didn’t really know any of those kinds of people. We only knew boys like Michael who freestyled a little but mostly not well, who played ball violently like someone’s life was at stake, or else too pretty, flexing for the girls every time they made a decent shot, because even they knew they would never make the NBA, and we were all they were gonna get out of a good game. The only white men we knew were teachers and cops, and no one had to tell us to try and stay away from them, when that was all we did in the first place, but my mother was always worried about something she didn’t need to be.

When we got to Jasmine’s apartment, we went straight to her room, which felt almost like it was my room too. We lived two blocks from each other and slept at each other’s house as much as we slept at our own. My schoolbooks were still piled on the corner of her floor, my second bathing suit was hanging over her desk chair, where I’d left it to dry last