by Lexie Ray
I didn’t care, that is, until the next morning, when I woke up on the couch, my dress up to my waist, my ass hanging out of my panties, and my head aching.
“Oh, God,” I moaned, touching my face and noticing that my hand came back with a rainbow of colors. My makeup. I hadn’t taken it off. In fact, I didn’t remember how I got home.
“You up, sorpresita?”
I couldn’t see which prima or sister was talking to me. My vision was blurred, and it was hard to keep my eyes open.
“I dunno,” I groaned. “What happened?”
“We closed the club down,” she said. “You wouldn’t go, even when they turned the lights on. We had to drag you out, and then you puked. That kid didn’t care. He kept kissing you. We got you home, girl, no worries.”
That kid? Oh—Jimmy. Oh. I covered my face in my hands.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, my voice muffled. “I had sex in the bathroom with him.”
“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, sorpresita?” she laughed.
How was I going to face him at school on Monday? Would he tell anyone? Would our secret tryst stay a secret?
“All he did was sing your praises,” she continued. I was able to open one eye and see it was my oldest sister. “It was some kind of thing with his crew.”
Damn it. I had just been some conquest to induct him into his crew. I knew it. How could I ever return to school?
“Aw, don’t look so miserable,” my sister said. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”
Did I? All of my memories from last night were encased in a strange fog. It was like they could’ve happened to someone else, or not at all.
“I guess,” I said. “My head hurts.”
My sister laughed again. “It should, sorpresita. That’s how you know you had fun. Here. Have another beer. Take it in the shower with you. Don’t come out until you drink it all. Then take a nap. Works every time.”
My stomach rolled as I heard the snap and hiss of an opened bottle, but I managed to sit up and get off the couch.
I took it to the bathroom and managed a tiny sip before I vomited in the toilet. I felt awful. Did going out to the club always end so terribly? I turned the shower on and poured the beer down the drain, stripping off my clothes and standing under the hot spray.
I’d had sex. With Jimmy from school. Things were different now, whether I wanted them to be or not.
I dragged myself to school on Monday, expecting to be made fun of. It would’ve been a relief to be overlooked or ignored, as usual.
Neither thing happened.
Many people—more than I knew—leveled looks of respect at me. I stared back at them, trying to figure out why they were acting how they were, until I saw Jimmy and a couple of members of his crew who were still in school standing by my locker.
He had a tough guy look on his face, and a faint moustache that I’d never noticed before, but he smiled when he saw me.
“What’s up, chingona?” he asked, jerking his chin at me as I walked up.
“What’s up with you?” I asked, my eyes darting around at the rest of the crew before falling back down to some place around Jimmy’s moustache. “What’s this?”
“You’re my girl now,” he said. “Right?”
Was I? We’d hooked up in a club bathroom. Did that push us together? I was too timid to ask.
“Sure,” I said shyly. “If you want.”
“Fuck yeah, I want,” he said, all bravado. He was different from the Jimmy who’d been in the club on Friday. The sex—and whatever else must have transpired during the weekend—changed him.
And just like that, I had a boyfriend. Jimmy liked parading me around school, picking me up from my classes and walking me to my locker—his crew always in tow. I was never alone anymore, and it made me feel both strange and good—like I belonged again.
We went everywhere together, Jimmy resting his hand on the small of my back, trailing his fingers down over the top of my ass every so often. It was his right, I guessed. He’d taken me in the club bathroom. I belonged to him now. Didn’t I?
I found out later that many of the female contingency had paired off with members of the same crew. Jimmy might be part of it, but he was lower level. The higher ups in the crew had already dropped out of school. I knew the crew was just a feeder into one of the more serious gangs, but it felt nice going back to the apartment with Jimmy and hanging out. I was one of the girls of the crew, it felt like. They were polite to me, and my family was proud.
It also helped that the sex with Jimmy got better and better every time it happened.
By the time I was eighteen, though, and getting ready to finish high school, things were getting out of control.
Despite all of their lectures about protection number one, three of the four that made up the female contingency had gotten knocked up. Las primas both had little babies, and my second oldest sister had a big belly. The apartment was always crowded with squalling infants or members of the crew.
The gang members that the crew fed into were coming over more often now, too, because the two guys who’d knocked up las primas had moved up. Parties raged into the night, and Jimmy was turning into someone I didn’t like.
“Why don’t you let me put a baby in your belly, chingona?” he asked me as I tried to clean up some of the beer bottles around the kitchen. Nobody had bothered getting trash bags the last time they’d gone to the bodega, so I was putting them in an empty trashcan and hauling them down six flights of stairs to the dumpster out behind the building.
“I don’t want a baby in my belly yet,” I said. “I want to graduate school. Maybe go to college.”
“College?” Jimmy scoffed. “For what?” He’d dropped out at the beginning of the school year, the crew taking up more and more of his time. He talked about moving up to the gang, but I didn’t like the idea. They were hardened men, and Jimmy was still my boyfriend. I tried to remember him as he was that first night at the club—gawky and polite and new to all of this.
“I dunno,” I said, feeling shy that I even said anything about it. “To have a good future.”
“Chingona, you’re going to have a good future,” he said. “The crew takes care of me and I take care of you. That’s how it’s going to be.”
I thought about being on the arm of a hardened gang banger. The crew was one thing. It was a brotherhood of friends. The gang was something different. Maybe I didn’t want that for our lives. I kept that thought to myself, though.
I dumped a couple of more beer bottles in the trashcan and paused.
“What’s this?” I asked, lifting up a package of white powder. It looked like powdered sugar, but none of us girls baked.
“That’s mine,” Jimmy said. “I’m gonna cut it and break it up before selling it. You wanna try it?”
It was then that I realized I was holding enough cocaine to put us all in prison.
“This can’t be here,” I said, holding the brick out to Jimmy. “You have to take it away.”
“Don’t freak out, chingona,” he said. “I told you. I’m gonna break it up and sell it. It’ll be gone before you know it.”
“There are babies here,” I said, dropping the coke in his lap. “Get it out. Now. If somebody finds it here, you could get my primas’ babies taken away from them. Everybody jailed.”
Jimmy was standing up and in my face faster than I thought possible.
“And who’s gonna find the coke here, huh?” he asked, pushing me backward. “You gonna tell someone, little girl? Do I need to shut your mouth for you?”
He raised his hand threateningly and I cringed away, horrified at the man in front of me. Was I worried about Jimmy getting into the gang? I didn’t know why I even bothered. He was already one of them, even if it wasn’t in name yet.
“Hey!” my oldest sister yelled, the only one who’d kept protection number one in mind. “Get away from her, puto.”
Jimmy wheeled around and cracked my sister across her
mouth. She cried out and fell to the floor, holding her hands up to her face.
“Don’t call me puto, bitch,” he spat. “This is not your business.”
I wanted to tell him off, tell him to back the fuck off my sister, to take up any of his concerns with me. But I didn’t—I couldn’t—and I hated myself for it. All I could do was stand still and tremble.
“Is that what you want?” he demanded, looking back at me. “You want me to hit you like that?”
“No, Jimmy,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Because I will!” he shouted, getting in my face again. “The coke stays here until I sell it!”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, that’s fine.”
“It’s fucking fine!” he yelled, pounding the brick down and pushing his way out the door before slamming it shut.
As soon as he was gone, I rushed over to my sister. Her teeth were red with the blood pouring from her lip. I expected her to be crying—I would’ve been crying, if it were me—but she was calm, looking at me.
“You wanna spend the rest of your life with that, hermana?” she asked me as I dabbed at her cut. “Leave it.”
I rocked back on my heels and watched as my sister licked at her split lip and spat the blood on the carpet.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He wasn’t always like this.”
“You first met him when he was a boy,” she said. “He thinks he’s a man, now, and that’s the worst thing—when a boy thinks he’s a man.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Jimmy was my age. Didn’t I make him a man that night in the bathroom, just the same way he made me a woman?
“It’s only a matter of time before he beats you, as sweet as you are,” my sister said. “The moment you stand up for yourself—and there will come a time when you got to—he won’t stand for it.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“You want to go to college,” my sister said. “Make a good life for yourself. It’s what Mami and Papi wanted, too, and it’s what you should do. Get out of this life, hermana. Do what we couldn’t. Fly away.”
“I can’t just leave,” I protested. “You’re the only family I have. And I love Jimmy.”
My sister shook her head. “If you love him, why won’t you let him put a baby in you? Why don’t you want him to keep coke in the house?”
I thought about that. The coke was the easy thing—I didn’t want to get my family in trouble. It was illegal, besides, and I didn’t want it messing things up.
The baby was trickier. I wanted to finish my education. I wanted a future for myself before I considered bringing someone else into the world. And, I slowly realized, I didn’t want anything to tie me to Jimmy.
“I have to finish school before I go anywhere,” I said.
My sister shook her head. “If you’re going, you have to go now,” she said. “This shit is only going to get worse.”
“He’s never hit me before,” I protested. “I’ve never seen him hit anyone.”
“He didn’t realize he could before right now,” she said. “What’s to stop him from hitting you the next time you tell him you don’t want a baby? What’s to stop him from forcing himself on you, trying to give you that baby?”
My sister’s words gave me chills. Would Jimmy try to do that? Maybe not the Jimmy I thought I knew, the one I’d hooked up with in the club bathroom. But the Jimmy now? The one trying to jockey for a spot in the gang, not the crew?
I couldn’t put it past him.
“Where would I go?” I asked.
“I’ve heard of a place,” my sister said. “It’s like a boarding house, only you don’t have to pay to live there. You work to stay there. I’ve heard it’s not bad. You could stay there, get your GED, maybe, and work at night. It’d be hard, but worth it.”
“Why couldn’t I just keep going to school?” I asked.
My sister spit another wad of blood on the filthy carpet. “Where is the first place you think Jimmy would go looking for you if you didn’t turn up here?” she asked grimly.
“Oh.”
“Oh is right,” my sister said. “If he asks any of us, we’ll tell him Mami and Papi called you back to Puerto Rico. There’s nothing he could do with that. He’d have to move on.”
I shook my head. I’d been anchored in this harbor for so long that it felt safe. Doing something new felt shocking and dangerous. How could I leave the only place I’d known my entire life?
“You have to go,” my sister insisted. “Now, even. Before he gets back. You’re only going to be a target when he gets back.”
“I can’t,” I said, putting my face in my hands. “I can’t. I—God help me, I love him.”
“You think you love him,” my sister said. “You think you have to. But you don’t.”
Maybe leaving would be the right thing to do. I should’ve listened to my sister. But some kind of inertia, the fact that I’d adapted to what life was going to be now, kept me right where I was.
“I do love him,” I said. “And I can’t go.”
I couldn’t go—that was the truth. This was my home. Everyone—my sisters, las primas, the little babies, damn, even the crew—was my family. I couldn’t just uproot myself, just like that, and go. Even if Jimmy had just smacked my sister on the face and threatened to do the same to me—I had to stay.
This was just what it was. Life.
The next time I saw Jimmy, he was sweet to me. He brought me a bracelet—pretty and sparkly—that I didn’t want to know how he got and was extra nice in bed, not pulling my hair or any of the other crap I didn’t like. He was a perfect gentleman, telling me how much he loved his chingona, for long enough to make me forget about the ugly day when he hit my sister.
It was long enough for me to forget just what he was capable of.
When I’d found a used syringe on the kitchen floor, the babies playing just a few feet away from it, and connected it to the track marks I’d been seeing on Jimmy’s arm, I lost it. I forgot about being shy sorpresita and went on a warpath.
“You can’t just be leaving this shit around the apartment!” I exclaimed, showing him the needle and pointing at my nieces and nephew. “There are babies! What would happen if one of them got poked or something?”
Jimmy was high and he simply shrugged at me. “They’d cry, or something,” he offered.
“Or something,” I scoffed. “You sharing those needles, Jimmy? Who knows what diseases you might have.”
I was still heavily engaged with protection number one: condoms. I’d denied Jimmy sex one night when he’d come to me drunk, refusing to put the condom on. He’d been shitty and mean, but had eventually passed out.
I didn’t want anything to do with the drugs, particularly those glittering syringes. They made me squirm. Why couldn’t Jimmy just stick with alcohol? Why couldn’t we just share a case of beer and just talk about stuff and laugh like we used to?
The drugs were thanks to the gang, I knew. Jimmy was supposed to be selling them, he said, but he was using them more often than not. If the gang didn’t already know about his indiscretions with their products, they probably would soon.
“Don’t tell me what to do, chingona,” Jimmy said, his eyes dulled by whatever he’d injected himself with.
“Somebody’s gotta,” I said, shaking my head at the sight of him. “You’re pathetic.”
I was quick enough to dodge the first punch, which he launched as he heaved himself up and off the couch. That was how messed up he was. But he was furious and persistent, snagging me by my dark hair and yanking me back to him as I tried to flee, wrapping his fingers around my throat.
“You’re not in charge, here, I am,” he said, his eyes lifeless as they stared into mine. Where was that sweet boy from the club? I couldn’t seem to find him anymore.
The edges of my world were fading. I clawed at his wrists, but Jimmy hung stubbornly on to my throat. Finally, out of all other options, I fumbled in my pocket and flicked
open the switchblade.
I had to stab him twice—in the belly—until he realized that I was hurting him and backed off. I fell to my knees when he released me, gasping for breath, the room spinning. I couldn’t tell if the screaming was coming from the babies, Jimmy, or me. Maybe all of us.
But on the floor was where my sister found me. She held my face in her hands, examining it, turning my head from side to side and running her finger down both sides of my neck. I stayed silent, watching her face darken as she found what were probably finger-sized bruises on my throat. Watching her kick Jimmy in the stab wounds I’d given him was watching a movie. I was too disconnected to tell her to stop or to feel anything at all.
She picked up my switchblade and rinsed it off in the sink before jamming it back into my pocket.
Everything was happening too fast and too slow, all at once. It was probably the lack of air to my brain, my blood flow only just speeding up. Maybe it was simply the shock of what had happened. Jimmy groaned on the floor. The babies wailed. I was silent.
My sister pulled me to my feet, hustling us to the bedroom. She shoved some clothes into a tote bag and put it on my arm.
“You’re moving like you’re in a daze,” she said. “Hurry that ass, hermana.”
“What are we doing?” I asked, looking dully at the tote bag. The knife in my pocket seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.
“You have to leave,” my sister said. “The thing that I told you was going to happen? It just did. You did a good job, remembering about that knife, or he probably would’ve killed you.”
Killed me? Jimmy? It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible, could it?
But the rasp in my voice, the ache of my throat told me different. It was more than possible. He’d nearly done the deed tonight.
“Is he going to die?” I asked.
“Do you want him to?” my sister asked, leveling a look at me that was frankly frightening.
I shook my head quickly.
“Then no,” she said, the look vanishing. “He’ll be all right. Maybe he’ll even take a little care the next time he goes wrapping his fists around a pretty girl’s throat. I hope he learns his lesson. Now, c’mon.”
“What are we doing?” I asked again, allowing myself to be dragged along by my sister, the force of nature.
