Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,3
weekend. Me and Jasmine always shared everything, and after I showered I went through Jasmine’s closet like I would have gone through mine, looking for something to wear out later. Only this year was sharing things getting to be a problem, because we were starting to be built different. I put on a pair of Jasmine’s jeans, which were tight around my hips and she told me so. “Look at you, stretching out my jeans with your big old ass,” was what she actually said.
“You wish you had my ass,” I said, which was true, she did, because hers was flat like a board and people teased her about it. Jasmine was small but all the meat she had on her was settled in her tummy, which was a cute little puff now but would be a gut someday if she ever got fat. It made me happy sometimes to think that even though Jasmine’s face was better than mine, if I ever got fat I’d get fat the way my mother had, all in the hips and chest, and some people would still be all right with that, more than if I had a big giant stomach like Jasmine might one day. We weren’t bad-looking, neither one of us, but we weren’t ever going to be beautiful, either, I knew that already. We were the kind of girls who would always be very pretty if but if never seemed to happen. If Jasmine’s skin cleared up and she could keep her hair done and she did something about her teeth, which were a little crooked, and if I lost five pounds and got contact lenses and did something about the way my skin was always ashy, maybe we’d be the prettiest girls in Mount Vernon, but we weren’t, we were just us. Jasmine had beautiful dark eyes and the most perfect nose I ever saw on anybody, and I had nice lips and a pretty good shape, and that was it. We got dressed to go to the movies because there was nothing else to do, and even though Jasmine’s pants were a little tight on me and the shirt I’d borrowed was pushing my chest up in my face, I looked all right, just maybe like I was trying too hard.
When we got to the lobby of the new movie theatre, I told Jasmine I liked the way it was done up: the ceiling was gold and glittery and the carpet was still fire-truck red and not dingy burgundy like red carpet usually was. Jasmine said she thought the whole thing looked fake and tacky, and speaking of fake and tacky, look who was here. It was Cindy, in some tight jeans and a shirt that said BABY GIRL and showed off the rhinestone she had stuck to her belly button. Eddie was there, too, and Michael and a bunch of their friends, and they waved us over. When Cindy saw Jasmine she ran up and hugged her, and Jasmine hugged her back, like they hadn’t been calling each other skank-ass bitches five minutes ago. The boys all looked confused, because boys are stupid like that.
“Look what Eddie gave me,” said Cindy, all friendly. She pulled a pink teddy bear out of her purse and squeezed its belly. It sang You are my sunshine, in a vibrating robot voice. It scared me.
“That’s nice,” said Jasmine, her voice so high that she sounded almost like the teddy bear. Cindy smiled and walked off to go kiss on Eddie some more. She was swinging her hips back and forth like the pendulum our science teacher had showed us, as if anyone was really trying to look at her.
“Instigator,” I whispered to Jasmine as Cindy left. Jasmine ignored me.
“I don’t have a teddy bear, neither,” said Eddie’s friend Tre, putting an arm around Jasmine. Jasmine pushed his arm off.
“C’mon, Jasmine. I lost my teddy bear. Can I sleep with you tonight?”
All Eddie’s friends had been trying to push up on Jasmine since they found out she’d done it with him, but Jasmine wasn’t having it. She looked at Tre like he was some nasty-flavored gum on the bottom of her shoe. She’d told me next time she was waiting for the real thing, not some punk high school boy. Michael put an arm around each of our shoulders and kissed us both on the cheek, me first, then Jasmine.
“You know these are my girls,” he said to Tre. “Leave’em alone.”