Ordinary Girls

by Jaquira Díaz

  But that morning, before I was due in court, my father just said, “Good. Maybe then you’ll learn.” He was tired of having to lose sleep over me—he worked two jobs, seven days a week, and hadn’t taken a vacation ever, since we moved to Miami from Puerto Rico.

  That morning, Anthony had been running late for school, but he made sure to say goodbye to me before he walked out of our apartment.

  “Hey, remember,” he said, “if they lock you up, don’t drop the soap!” He laughed his ass off as he strapped on his backpack and headed out the door.

  As soon as he was gone, I went to the refrigerator for a plastic bottle of ketchup, and while Abuela did the dishes, I threw open the door to Anthony’s closet, and squeezed a small pool of ketchup into the inside of his favorite sneakers. Left shoe, right shoe.

  Across from 2-1, facing the courthouse’s crowded entrance, I waited for the other girl. Every time a girl walked through the door or stopped to look up her name on the bulletin boards, Tanisha asked, “Is that her?”

  One after another, teenagers and their parents filed into the room, took seats around us, waiting for their names to be called by the juvenile court bailiff. I didn’t see her. Maybe she wouldn’t even show.

  Finally, one of the bailiffs came out of 2-1, called my name. He looked over the crowd, waiting for someone to respond.

  I got up, looked around.

  Another girl and her mother got up.

  “Is that her?” Tanisha asked.

  I wanted to say yes. But right then, I wasn’t sure. It had been several weeks, and so much had happened since then, so many other fights, so much drinking, smoking. I didn’t remember what she even looked like anymore. I would remember her face only from that day in the courthouse. Acne scars, wispy bangs. The way she rolled her eyes as she walked past me, the way she’d cuffed her T-shirt sleeves. I wouldn’t remember hitting her weeks before, or how her face looked when I hit her, or if her eyes had been closed, or who else had been there, or if she’d hit me back, or if any of her friends had jumped in, or if she’d tangled her hands in my hair and pulled, or the dull ache in my scalp that would usually follow, or the rage, or the guilt I almost always felt after a fight. But I would stand before the judge, the prosecutor, the police officers, the girl, the girl’s mother, and I would believe, without a doubt, that if they said I did it, then I did, and whatever sentence the judge handed down, I deserved.

  Get yourself a bunch of hoodlum friends. Start kickin’ it with your local hood rats. And don’t even flinch when one of the gang recruiters tells you that in order to prove that you have what it takes, you have to a) get jumped in, which means you get your ass kicked by five of their top enforcers, or b) let a mob of homeboys run a train on you.

  Get used to shoplifting, vandalism, joyriding. Run away from home six, seven times. Drop out of school. Get arrested more times than you can count—spend more nights in juvie than you do at home. Do this just for the fuck of it. Enjoy this, because you’re young, and invincible, and let’s face it, you don’t believe in consequences.

  Spend your fourteenth birthday on the streets, smoking Newports and knocking back Cisco by the quart, not wanting much of anything. Don’t think of your father. Or your abuela, who’s been up all night wondering, again, where you are. If you’re okay. If you’re alive.

  That week, me and Boogie took the bus to Hialeah to visit our boy Héctor, who’d been on house-arrest for three months. When we got there, he let us take his car, though neither of us had a license and barely knew how to drive. We went to la bodega de la esquina for some Newports and Philly blunts.

  The dude who always worked the register was a friendly old guy everybody called Papi. Hey, Papi, we’d call out as we walked in, making a beeline for the coolers. How you doing, Papi? as we set Doritos and Pepsis on the counter.

  Boogie made her way to the coolers. I asked for my cigarettes and five Phillies, and he set them down on the counter.

  “You better bring ID next time,” he said.

  “They’re not for me, Papi,” I said, laughing. “They’re for my mom.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, yeah.”

  Once we were out the door, Boogie pulled a small bottle of Cisco from each pocket of her baggy-ass jeans.

  “Hang on to these,” she said, handing them to me, and got in the driver’s seat.

  “Keep drinking that bum juice. You’ll get a fucking hole in your stomach.”

  Fourteen, your friends will say. They’ll roll you a blunt, lace it with scutter, and tell you stories of all the shit they’d already done by the time they were fourteen.

  Decide this is who you want to be. Decide that you can do anything, drink anything, smoke anything, and by your next birthday, you are addicted to the chaos, the violence, the excess. But mostly, you are just addicted.

  At Héctor’s, after a couple hours of drinking and smoking, Boogie and I decided to get tattoos.

  “Put it on my ankle,” I told Héctor.

  And he did, his homemade tattoo machine buzzing. It was an odd thing, with a motor and two pencils duct-taped on either side of the makeshift needle tube, and I could swear it intensified the pain, because Héctor made it, and Héctor liked to see you squirm. Boogie knocked out on the couch, her hair tied in a moño, secured with a scrunchie. I tried to keep my leg absolutely still, which was next to impossible considering all the weed we’d just burned.

  “Roll another one,” I said, “so we can take a break.”

  He stopped, laughing and shaking his head. “Bendito nena, I thought you were all tough. It don’t hurt that much.” He handed me the quart of Olde E he’d been sipping from, and I chugged some, passed it back.

  “Stay still,” he said, grabbing my foot again, putting pressure on the skin just below my ankle. I braced myself. As the needles punctured my skin, I looked from Boogie, who had tattoos on both ankles, to Héctor, who was covered in them and shaved his head to show off the dragon on his skull. I could be stronger, I told myself. I sat still, just breathing. I checked out the pictures on the walls, on the coffee table, traced the patterns on the popcorn ceiling, closed my eyes. Anything to get my mind off the pain.

  “How old were you when you got your first one?” I asked Héctor. He didn’t say anything for a while, and I wondered if he was getting annoyed at me. Although Héctor acted like a teenager, he was well into his thirties. He was one of those guys—every barrio has one. That guy who gives all the local juvenile delinquents a place to burn their stash, an endless supply of Olde E and Newports and the occasional roll or bump of scutter.

  Among the chaos of the mismatched furniture and plain old broken shit, every picture in Héctor’s apartment was of his daughter, Vanessa. She’d died of meningitis when she was two, he’d told me one day. Never even got to see her. He’d been doing time in Metrowest her entire life, since before she was born. And her mother? She didn’t even talk to him no more. He was dead to her. Héctor had two tears tattooed just beneath his right eye, one for each year of her life that he’d missed, and over his heart, her name in Olde English letters. At fourteen, I didn’t know anything about losing a child, but I did know something about love. His story made me think of Alaina, my little sister, who was living with Mami while I was out on the street or on the beach, drinking and smoking without really giving a fuck about anything. Alaina, the one person I loved most in the world, who I only got to see sometimes, on the weekends, when she came to stay with us, who I’d left behind at Mami’s after I couldn’t stand to be there anymore. She had been there, always, and now she was having to deal with Mami all by herself. I had left her all alone.

  Héctor stopped, took a deep breath. “Oh shit. How do you spell your name again?”

  I must’ve flinched, must have made a face he found hysterical, because he laughed, put a hand to his forehead, laughed some more.

  It looked like shit. And my ankle said JACKI.

  Learn to fight dirty, to bite the soft spots on the neck and inner thigh, to pull of
f earrings and hair weaves. Slather your face with Vaseline before a fight, so you don’t get scratched, so the blows slide right off without leaving a mark. Keep five or six razorblades tucked in a loose bun on top of your head—in a girlfight, they will always pull your hair. Learn that anything can be a weapon: pencils, bottles, rocks, belt buckles, a sock full of nickels, a Master combination lock. Eventually, you’ll carry other weapons, brass knuckles and pocketknives, but never a gun, because what you really love is the fight. Besides, you’re not crazy.

  Learn to take a beat-down. On the streets, someone will always be bigger than you, stronger than you, badder than you. Someone will sucker punch you while you’re sitting at the bus stop smoking and shooting the shit with your homegirls. Someone will crack a bottle of Olde English over your head while you’re arguing with your man in front of Taco Bell. Walking home from a party, you’ll get jumped by six girls who thought you looked at them wrong. And even though you did look at them wrong, and even though the night before you and your friends jumped some other girl at some other party, you’ll still think they were dirty, and tomorrow you’ll come back for them.

  After we’d left Héctor’s, back at the Hialeah train station, Boogie and I smoked, shared the last bottle of Olde E, and talked about our next tattoos. A gold Monte Carlo pulled up in front of us, rolled down the driver’s side rear window. I was already bracing myself—the car was packed full of people, and Hialeah girls always caught beef when we came around their neighborhood. They didn’t say shit, just stared. But to me, and to loudmouth scuttered-up Boogie, it was clearly an invitation to fight.

  I took one last drag, flicked my cigarette at the car, crossed my arms across my chest, and grilled them.

  One of the girls stuck her head out the window. “Whatcha claim, girl?” she asked. She wanted to know where we were from before they jumped us.

  I took off my hoops, slid them into my back pocket, and even though I knew what would happen, even though I’d been on the other end of a caserío beat-down enough times to know who walked away and who got carried away, I still said, “I claim these nuts, bitch.”

  I don’t remember if I dropped my bottle of Olde E, if I put it down on the sidewalk, or when that same bottle came crashing down against my skull, glass blasting like buckshot. Or Boogie fighting girls off me when she realized I was down, taking a kick to the face from the driver, who she said looked like he was pumped full of fucking steroids. Don’t remember when the Monte Carlo drove away, the driver yelling out the window that he was gonna bust a cap in both our asses, or when the ambulance arrived, and then the cops. But I do remember sitting on the curb, Boogie hollering in the background about glass in her eye, paramedics asking questions.

  What’s your name?

  “What?” I said.

  What’s your name? He was holding my wrist, taking my pulse.

  “Jaqui.” I touched the back of my head, stared at my hand, my bloody fingers. Someone put pressure on the back of my head, said, Stay still.

  Then more questions: How old are you? and Do you know your phone number? and Do you know your address? Your parents’ work number?

  What happened? somebody kept asking.

  Do you know her phone number?

  I tried to touch my head again, but someone pulled my hand away.

  “We got jumped,” I heard Boogie say, clearly, like she was in my head.

  Look at me, another uniform said, touching the fresh tattoo on my ankle. Look at me. Are you in a gang?

  I flinched, my ankle sore, hands on my head, more pain.

  Look at me. Is that a gang tattoo?

  Fourteen. You’ll drink and fight, get high and fight. Fifteen. You’ll spend days smoking haze with your homeboy, J., raiding his old girl’s stash, until she comes home, finds you sitting side by side on her living room floor, passing the Dutch and watching the Lost Boyz rapping about ghetto love on BET, the two of you naked except for your matching Jordans.

  J. will say, You wanna try some scutter? And although you always say you never fuck with that shit, you do it anyway, and then decide to walk home, paranoid as hell.

  My father never told the story of what happened when he got to the hospital that day.

  How he was at work when he got the call, so he asked one of the off-duty cops to give him a ride.

  How the cop, a friend of his, recommended that he give me up to the state.

  “Think of your other kids,” he said.

  “It’s the best thing for her,” he said.

  “She’s going to kill you,” he said.

  And although I promised myself that I would change, promised my father and Abuela, a week later I was back on the streets.

  When I turned eighteen, I would cover the tattoo with roses. Almost a decade later, a friend who’d spent five years in lockup would tell me that in prison, a rose tattoo meant you’d spent a birthday behind bars.

  After I came home from the hospital, I spent a few days on the couch, watching TV with Abuela while Anthony was in school and Papi slept after his graveyard shift as a security guard. Abuela made bacalao guisa’o with caramelized onions, served it over guineítos with a side of aguacate, and we sat together on the couch, eating and watching reruns of our favorite Mexican novela, El extraño retorno de Diana Salazar. We yelled at the screen when we found out that Irene del Conde was really Lucrecia Treviño, an evil seventeenth-century witch who conspired to have Lucía Méndez burned at the stake for witchcraft so she could steal her true love, Mario Villareal.

  Abuela shook her fist at the TV every time she saw Irene del Conde. “Maldita! And poor Mario has no idea!”

  We laughed and laughed, and for a while it seemed Abuela had forgotten that I was the disappointing granddaughter, the one who was always causing trouble.

  As the day turned to night, after the evening news, we watched Dos mujeres, un camino, and wondered how Erik Estrada had an acting job when he was such a terrible actor. We laughed at the TV every time he spoke, and secretly, I hated him, because he cheated on both his wife and on Bibi Gaytán, who I was madly in love with.

  For almost a whole week, I stayed home with Abuela, pretending my head still hurt so she’d sit with me, so she’d whip us up some pancakes with extra butter, or some tembleque with extra canela. Just me and Abuela, neither of us talking about what had happened at the train station.

  And then, one day, as we balanced bowls of dulce de lechosa on our laps, while Diana Salazar was having a dream of her past life as Doña Leonor de Santiago, Abuela stopped avoiding it.

  She turned down the volume on the TV. “What’s wrong, Jaqui?” she asked me.

  I turned to her. “What do you mean?”

  “This is not the life I want for you,” she said.

  This is not the life I want for you. That was my father’s line. He would say those words to me again and again. At fifteen, when I get picked up by the cops after a fight at an Eckerd Pharmacy parking lot. At sixteen, when I pack my bags, leave his house, and drop out of high school. When I’m sitting in a courtroom after stabbing Anthony, facing attempted murder charges, waiting to hear if I’ll be tried as an adult. When he takes me to my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting after three agonizing, delirious nights in detox, holding my hand, the two of us sitting up front, the night’s speaker telling his story about a father and son, never taking his eyes off of me, and all I can think about is how easy it will be to get more scutter, more meth, how easy it will be to die, and afterward, the speaker will find me hiding in the shadows and say, I was just like you, once upon a time, and talk about how living is a choice we make. Choose life, he will say, and my father, trying to make up for all those years of absence, trying to be a better man than he’d been his whole life, will shake his hand, will wrap his arms around me, will say, This is not the life I want for you, and how my whole body will shake when he holds me, and he won’t know it yet, but I will spend my whole adult life trying to make him proud of me, trying to be everything I think he wants a d
aughter to be, trying to be the daughter I think he deserves, and I won’t know it yet, but he will break my heart again and again, and part of me will think there is justice in that. Some girls grow up to be the kind of women who fall for men like their fathers. Some girls grow up to be just like them.

  “What are you talking about?” I said to Abuela. “You’re overreacting.”

  She looked at me a long time, her gray hair wrapped in four perfect moñitos, her lips pursed, with a sadness in her eyes I would not understand until years later, when I am a woman and she is gone.

  Sixteen. Find a girl you think deserves it, an ordinary girl you were friends with just last month, a girl who spent hundreds of hours on the phone with you, confessing her fears, her dreams.

  Look at her, see her clearly, see yourself in her eyes before you do it. Punch her in the face again and again, until you’re out of breath. Push her back against a parked car. Kick her in the stomach. When she falls forward, kick her in the face and break her nose. She will cling to your leg, holding it, bleeding all over your jeans, all over your sneakers, not understanding how you could do this to her. You, who once held her hair back as she threw up behind the handball courts after the two of you got drunk on Southern Comfort. You, who wrote poems in the margins of her notebooks, left them there for her to find. She will ask, Why why why. She’ll still be wearing her backpack.

  You’ll be in the Burger King parking lot, and at least twenty other kids will be there, cheering you on. She will try to get away from you, but you won’t let her go. You are like a rabid animal, the crowd fueling your rage. You are Macho Camacho in the ring, dancing all over José Luis Ramírez. You are Joe fucking Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and this is the fight of the century.