[Riverhead; 2010]
by Nora Sharp
It’s strange how the first piece in a book of short stories so often ends up being the best. Maybe it’s just the excitement of starting off a new book — you’ve been looking forward to it, you have a feeling it’s going to be a good one, and are so ready to receive that first line that you suddenly get deliberate about it. You study the publication info, check out where these stories appeared first. You spend a respectful minute or two on the epigraphs before admitting their significance is still hidden.
Then you turn the page, and see, “Me and Jasmine and Michael were hanging out at Mr. Thompson’s pool.” Soon many of the details pored over moments before are forgotten, because you’re thinking about high school, and summertime, and that particular teenage feeling of wanting things you didn’t know you were better off without until you got them. “It was the day after Tupac got shot,” the narrator informs a few lines down, before delivering the first line of dialogue: “‘Sunscreen,’ Jasmine said, ‘is some white people shit.’”
The matchless story that follows is called “Virgins,” and it’s about teenagers—some technically virgins, some not—who find a way to get what they want, only to feel uglier on the other side of experience. Many of the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self hinge on the difference between dreams and reality, between the people or experiences we think will save us and the total damnation we feel upon pursuing them. But where the melodrama of some later stories can feel overblown, “Virgins” never loses its accuracy. This might be because adolescent dramas have consequences that hurt but are, ultimately, manageable—feeling like shit because your best guy friend decided he didn’t want to have sex with you—or it might be because Evans is just so good at writing exactly what teenagers say and do.
The whole book is worth it for “Virgins,” which is not to say that this story’s siblings don’t count. Many have that same fantastic quality of spot-on-ness that “Virgins” has. Most are painful, and some will make you smile.
Evans has already received enough press to ensure her first novel will be hotly anticipated. Even if its protagonists don’t turn out to be jailbait and hungry, I can promise her one more committed reader.
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