by Lexie Ray
“Mama’s nightclub may be closed, but these girls are still open for business,” Jason said, drawing a couple of sarcastic laughs from the crowd.
My eyes flickered down to the men below us. The fluorescent lights were so bright. I wanted to shield my eyes to stare at the people who might try to own us, but I didn’t want to see their faces. I didn’t want to see any monsters down there. I didn’t want to be bought by a monster.
“What you see is what you get,” Jason said. “Two girls. A package deal. A light girl when your moods are light. A dark girl when you want to walk on the dark side.”
Cream was the light one. I was the dark one. I wondered how many other pitches like this one Jason had made down here in this basement. Probably enough to buy his pretty little condo. The projector television. Designer clothes.
“These girls know what to do between the sheets,” Jason added, “or in the shower, or on the rug, or against the wall, or in your car …”
He trailed off and paused, waiting for the wolf whistles and catcalls to die down. It was then that Cream started to apologize.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, grinding the words out from between her gritted teeth.
She couldn’t come apart now, no more than I could. Not in front of all these people. What would happen if no one bought us? Jason had said that once we’re down here, we’re down here. There was no going back.
No escape.
“Let the bidding begin,” Jason said, backing off into the dimness of the room.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Cream chanted.
I threaded my olive fingers through her marble ones and squeezed.
“It’s okay,” I said. Her eyes were wide—probably as wide as my own. Neither of us could’ve foreseen this. Neither of us. How could we?
An auctioneer started up his chant, thankfully drowning out Cream’s apologies. I could barely make out the fact that the men in the crowd were lifting paddles with numbers on them. The auctioneer pointed each one out, his voice getting louder, his words flowing quicker, the price spiraling higher and higher.
The man’s slurring, the excited murmuring of the crowd of men, Cream’s chanting, the buzz of the fluorescent lights all merged together in one horrifying sound.
It was the sound of the end. I knew it. This was it. We were survivors, all of us. At least we had been.
But there were some things that couldn’t be survived. This was one of them.
We were being sold to the highest bidder.
We were nothing more than property.
The only thing to keep me from screaming was the fact that I was too shy to make a scene.
Too shy to scream for them to let us go.
Chapter Two
Being shy definitely hadn’t come naturally to me. In fact, I was the black sheep in the family because of it.
I’d grown up in East Harlem, one of three sisters and two female cousins who crammed their lives together in a public housing apartment. We were all Puerto Rican, but the cousins were fresh from the island. My sisters knew Spanish well enough, peppering their quickly fired statements with island slang. The cousins knew English well enough, cursing fluently, adding creative and blush-inducing adjectives to their Spanish stories.
I was lucky to be able to speak at all.
Our parents had gone back down to the island as soon as my sisters had grown, leaving me in their care. I was the youngest by far, “Mami y Papi’s sorpresita,” they called me—Mom and Dad’s little surprise. I barely remembered my parents: big, red, wet kisses at a crowded airport, lipstick prints I had to wipe off with tissues on the train ride home.
My sisters barely talked about Mom and Dad—they were nineteen and twenty years old, and had more important things on their minds. I was just eight years old and too shy to ask them to tell me about Mami and Papi. Their volume was impossible to compete with, anyways, so I kept quiet as a general rule. I kept quiet, and kept my eyes open, trying to learn as much as possible through observation.
In some arenas, it worked.
I learned all about flirting and courting and kissing and sex. My sisters were unabashedly sexual, giving it up for any and all men who struck their fancy. In our claustrophobic two-bedroom apartment, I’d often be stuck on the couch, listening to the sounds coming from one bedroom, then relaxing when it finished, and tensing up again at the sounds coming from the other bedroom.
I didn’t know I was lucky to have the couch on those nights until the cousins arrived—las primas, my sisters kept going on and on about. Las primas this, las primas that.
When we met them at the same airport we’d sent my parents off from, all four of them of similar age and squealing, jumping up and down in the middle of the crowd, I felt more alone than ever. More alone, and more observant, watching everything. Las primas looked like my sisters—big hoop earrings, red lipstick, dark eyebrows, perms curling their hair into ringlets—and my sisters acted like las primas—giggling, talking faster than seemed humanly possible, switching back and forth between English and Spanish so easily that it made my head spin.
I understood everything and nothing at the same time, knowing the words but not their meanings, puzzled by cultural differences and curious about what seemed to be universal currency as far as their stories went—boys.
The cousins rattled Spanish at me on the train ride home, pinching my cheeks, but I couldn’t respond. I could understand the language, but I didn’t know how to speak it.
“Is she dumb, or what?” one of las primas asked my sister.
My sister looked down at me and shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “She just don’t talk much, is all. Teacher never says anything.”
The teacher never said much of anything, to be honest. The rest of the kids in my class were unmanageable, wild little animals. The teacher probably didn’t even realize I was in her class. She was working hard to simply wrangle the rest of the students that she rarely had time to teach. I was sent home with worksheets that I puzzled over, sounding out the words carefully in my quiet voice, trying to shut out the screams of laughter that often punctuated the apartment.
It was so hard for me to focus on my schoolwork when more than two of the sisters or las primas were in the apartment, drinking beer from the bottle, gossiping about their latest conquests of the boys in the neighborhood, or plotting their next one. I knew that my sisters received some sort of public assistance for raising me, but it seemed like they never worked. Looking back, I knew they had to have had jobs to afford the tight jeans in all their different washes, the makeup, the rings that glittered on every finger. I always had clean clothes, my hair slicked back into braids every morning for school.
I was taken care of, but I wasn’t. My basic needs were looked after—food, bath, clothes—but nothing else. I did my worksheets at the kitchen table as the sisters and las primas revolved around me, ignoring me and going about their own pursuits.
Then, when I was fifteen, I blossomed suddenly and devastatingly. I shot up like a weed overnight, my hair was shiny and luscious, falling to my fuller breasts, and my ass was bigger and rounder than any of my family members’. The classmates who had always overlooked me at school started to pay closer attention. So did the female contingency at home.
“Where did these nalgonas come from?” a sister asked, slapping me on the very thing she’d just named. “What, did some ass fairy visit you last night? Mari! Look at sorpresita’s nalgonas!”
I blushed, hot and heavy under my olive skin as the other sister and las primas all crowded into the bathroom.
“Fuck, sorpresita,” my other sister said. “That’s a better ass than any of us.”
“No es verdad, cabrona,” one of las primas insisted. “That’s not true, bitch. Look at these nalgonas right here!”
She slipped down her boxer shorts and mooned us right then and there, slapping her own brown cheek.
The girls’ shrieks were deafening in the tiny bathroom, and
I just wanted to curl up and die of embarrassment right on the spot. One of my sisters reached forward and spanked la prima’s bare ass as many times as she could until la prima pulled her shorts back up. I was sure they were taken from one of her many conquests.
“C’mon, sorpresita,” the other prima cajoled. “Tell tu prima how you got such a pretty ass all of a sudden. You been doing exercises? What?”
Death was being stubborn, so I was forced to shake my head slowly.
“She’s always here, cabrona,” my sister said. “You see her doing squats in the corner? Lunges around the kitchen?”
“Sopresita’s always doing her homework,” the other sister said. “Is that where you store all of that knowledge, baby? En las nalgonas?”
I shook my head again, resigning myself to my fate. Death wasn’t merciful enough to take me now and the female contingency had me cornered in the bathroom.
“I know, I know,” the other prima said. “Sorpresita never talks. All those unsaid words go straight to her ass!”
“Maybe you could shut up and try it, cabrona!” her sister screamed, and all of the girls screamed with her, laughing their heads off.
“You gotta come to the club with us,” my sister said. “Oh my God, they would die. You would fucking slay them with that ass, sorpresita.”
“I can’t go to the club,” I said as the female contingency congratulated one another for this terrible idea.
“What’d you say, sorpresita?” my other sister asked.
“No!” la prima shouted. “Don’t speak! We don’t want those nalgonas deflating!”
I swore that I was going to have hearing loss from all the laughter in that tight little bathroom.
“I can’t go to the club,” I said. “I’m only fifteen.”
“You’ll be sixteen next month,” my sister said dismissively, as if that made all the difference in the world.
“You’ll be fine, sorpresita,” the other sister said. “You stick with us girls. We know people. We can get you in.”
Getting in wasn’t what I was worried about. I didn’t want to be paraded around all of the guys my sisters and cousins targeted. I didn’t want to go to the club at all.
“When we gonna do this, then, cabronas?” la prima asked. “This Friday?”
“Fuck it, let’s go tonight,” the other prima said.
“It’s a school night,” I protested.
“Ay!” my sister cried, swatting me on my ass. “What a little scholar! No, we’ll wait for Friday, then. Sorpresita’s gotta get her education. Mami and Papi wanted that most of all.”
I perked up, wanting to hear more about Mami and Papi. They were shadows to me—red kisses in a crowded airport. But the female contingency cackled on, planning what I was going to be wearing and what they were going to be wearing and who’d be most interested in whom.
“Cabronas, we’re forgetting the most important thing!” my other sister exclaimed.
“Sorpresita doesn’t know what’s up! We gotta give her the talk.”
“Sí, sí, sí,” la prima said quickly. “She can’t go to the club without the talk. Not with that ass.”
My sister pushed me down on the toilet as she and la prima perched on the edge of the tub. My other sister hopped up to sit on the sink, and the other prima leaned against the towel rack. My heart sank. They had me in their claws now. I was going to get a real education, now—even though I’d been learning about them ever since I’d learned to observe.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with sex, hermana,” my sister said. “Sister, we’re all products of it.”
The rest of the girls made noises of assent. I pressed my lips together, trying to just get through this. There was no escape for me.
“It’s a beautiful thing, really,” la prima said dreamily. “If it’s with the right guy.”
“Or the wrong guy with the right dick,” the other prima put in. They all cackled.
“The most important thing is that you protect yourself,” my sister said. “Protect yourself in all senses.”
“Don’t let anyone into your chocha unless they’re wearing a condom,” my other sister said, drawing a giant “X” over her own crotch with her finger. “Too many things can happen.”
“You don’t want a little baby in tu panza, do you?” la prima asked, patting my flat belly.
“And you don’t want a disease,” my sister said. “Always use a condom. That’s rule number one. Protection number one.”
“Even if you’re taking it in that ass of yours,” the other prima said.
“Don’t give that ass away,” my other sister protested. “Only to the man you love.”
“All of them are gonna tell her they love her, trying to get in that ass,” la prima said. “Sorpresita, don’t let them in. That’s a one-way street, your ass.”
“I dunno,” my sister said. “I kinda like it.”
I had to cover my ears at the resulting screams, dodging as the other sister hopped down from the sink to slap at our sister.
“Sinvergüenza!” the other sister hollered, laughing so hard that tears were rolling down her cheeks, blackened from her heavy mascara. “You shameless thing! What are you thinking, telling sorpresita that?”
“What?” my sister said, fending off the slaps with blows of her own. “She’s gonna make her own decisions about things. At least she can’t get knocked up if she takes it in the ass.”
“Es verdad, cabrona,”la prima said solemnly. “She can’t get a baby through her ass.”
I couldn’t do this anymore, I decided, standing up abruptly.
“Thanks for the advice,” I said, making a move for the door.
“Sit your ass down,” my other sister said. “We’re not done here. Condoms. They gotta be used no matter what hole you prefer. Diseases can still happen in the ass, sorpresita, and that is not a pretty thing.”
“Condoms, protection number one,” la prima said, pushing me back onto the toilet.
“Protection number two,” the other prima said, “is your choice. Pepper spray. Mace. A knife. Whatever fits in your purse, sorpresita, or between those titties.”
“I gotta pair of brass knuckles,” my sister said proudly. “Slip those on, hermana, and it’s lights out. It don’t matter how big that guy is.”
“Most of them are gonna be bigger than you, sorpresita,” my other sister said. “That’s just reality. If he gets violent, or if he wants to do something that you don’t wanna, you gotta let him know.”
“I want you to have this,” la prima said. “You’re a woman, now. You should’ve had one a long time ago. You take it everywhere you go.”
She reached into the pocket of her too-tight jeans and drew something out, holding it toward me. When I tentatively put my hand out, she flicked her wrist and a shiny blade popped out. I flinched backward and everyone laughed.
“That’s exactly what the boys are gonna do if you pull this on them,” la prima said, nodding with much satisfaction. “That’s exactly what’ll happen. You take this switchblade everywhere.”
“I can’t have this in school,” I protested. “I have to go through the metal detector to get in the building.”
“Shit gets in that school all the time,” my sister scoffed. “You’ll be fine.”
“Now, remember everything we told you,” my other sister said. “And if you ever have a problem with a guy, you tell us.”
“We’ll end him,” la prima said, as casually as if she’d said that they were going to the bodega.
Thus ended my first formal session of sex education. Their words and cackles had been seared into my brain. I wouldn’t have been able to forget their words even if I tried.
Friday came too soon, as much as I wished for it never to come. The female contingency attacked me as soon as I walked in the door after school. La prima ripped my backpack off of me and my sisters pushed me into the shower.
I was primped, powdered, and made up, putting on the same heavy makeup that all of t
hem wore.
“We should get her a perm before tonight,” the other prima said, fingering my locks.
“No, her hair is pretty as is, cabrona,” my sister said. “We’ll straighten it, leave it down. Makes her look older.”
“We’re not gonna have any trouble getting her in,” la prima said. “She’ll blend right in with us.”
As soon as they were done with my makeup, I saw that it was true. I looked at least of legal age to enter a club, even though I was just fifteen. The female contingency had transformed me into a doppelganger—darkened eyebrows, heavy eyeliner and shadow, and red lips. My sister loaned me a pair of outrageously big hoop earrings and the other prima zipped me up in her own dress.
“Fuck me,” she said, turning me around and around. “The dress is yours, sorpresita. With that ass of yours, you rock it better than I ever could.”
“We’re ready for the club, cabronas,” my sister hollered, looking in on me.
“Is the club ready for us?” la prima crowed, and their delighted hoots implied that the club was never ready for them. They were a force of nature, those four, and they were ready to induct me into their sisterhood. Me. Sorpresita. I’d been the outsider my whole life, so I had to admit that being a part of things was kind of exciting—even if I knew it was wrong.
The club was a shady affair a couple of blocks from our apartment, situated on a busy corner in the heart of East Harlem. Everyone who was anyone in el barrio went there. It was a place to see and be seen, and my sisters and primas went multiple times every week. It was their favorite place to pick up boys.
The bouncer didn’t give me a second glance as we entered the club en masse. I was one of the girls, clearly.
We sidled into a booth and a server brought us beer. I quickly understood that my sisters and las primas were regulars here and everyone knew what to expect from them, including what they’d like to be drinking.
As my family chattered about who was there and what they were going to do to them, I took the opportunity to look around. The club was smaller than I thought it would be, with all the tall tales I heard at home about what took place there. There were a number of elevated dance floors around the place. People milled around on them, nobody dancing quite yet even though a mirror ball through little points of light all around the space. There wasn’t really a DJ, just someone with a laptop running a playlist of songs. The bartenders were already in the weeds, dashing back and forth to serve up buckets of beer and putting bottle services together.
