Ordinary Girls

by Jaquira Díaz

  Just weeks later, me and Shorty were back on the beach, knocking back Olde E with some dudes we’d just met. The sun on our faces, bikinis under oversized T-shirts, we walked a couple blocks to their place. And once we were there, fifteen and sixteen and in a stranger’s apartment, DJ Playero’s “Underground” on the radio, it was so clear, so easy to see. How they separated us, knew exactly what to say. Shorty in the bathroom, me in the living room, the bottle half-empty on the floor. How I never thought to ask how old he was—old enough to buy alcohol, to have his own apartment. How he ripped my bathing suit, the banging on the bathroom door, his hand over my mouth, the music so loud. How I pushed back, kicking, reaching for the ashtray, the remote, anything, until finally, the bottle, and I was Shorty and Shorty was me and we were every girl, we had not been alone, all of us in that apartment, in that bathroom, all of us breathing, alive, lightning in our limbs, banging on that door for minutes, hours, a lifetime, and for a moment I thought it was possible that I could lose her, that I could be one of those girls.

  It was the same the next summer, and the summer after that: we went right back to drinking, smoking, fighting, dancing dancing dancing, running away. We wanted to be seen, finally, to exist in the lives we’d mapped out for ourselves. We wanted more than noise—we wanted everything. We were ordinary girls, but we would’ve given anything to be monsters. We weren’t creatures or aliens or women in disguise, but girls. We were girls.

  PART Three

  Familia

  Beach City

  I.

  One August afternoon, the year we started high school, I met Cheito. I was coming back from the beach with Boogie, walking barefoot on the scorching sidewalk because someone had stolen all my shit while I was in the water, including my chancletas. Boogie still had her sandals, her towel, her lipstick half melted in her backpack. But I had nothing except my shorts and bikini top—what I’d been wearing while swimming. I was trying to look cool while tiptoeing my ass all the way home when a blue Datsun stopped across the street.

  “You need a ride?” the driver called out.

  Boogie smiled. “It’s your lucky day, girl.”

  I checked out the car, the Puerto Rican flag hanging from the car’s mirror, counted two boys. I looked down at my burning feet. “Fuck it.”

  We crossed the street, and the boy riding shotgun moved to the back. Before Boogie could slide in and take his place, the driver pointed at me, looked me in the eyes. “Sit up front with me,” he said.

  Boogie sat in the back with his friend. I sat up front, checking him out. He had a dark tan, a low fade, hazel eyes that looked almost green in the sunlight. He kept smiling at me, confident—he was fine and he knew it. I was suspicious of his every move. I didn’t smile back. “I’m going to Ninth and West Avenue,” I said.

  “No problem.” He was quiet for a minute, then said, “My name’s Cheito, by the way.”

  “Jaqui,” I said, “and that’s Boogie.” I had already decided that I wouldn’t make conversation with them, but giving them our names didn’t seem like a big deal.

  “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Make a left on Fifth Street,” I said.

  He approached the light on Fifth. I sat back and ignored his question.

  “Why you gotta be so rude, girl?” Boogie said. “She’s Puerto Rican, and I’m Cuban.”

  “I was born in Caguas,” Cheito said to me, “and my mom’s family’s from San Lorenzo. What about you? Were you born on the island?”

  “En Humacao.”

  “Oh! So you like Tito Rojas? He’s from Humacao.” He turned up the volume on his radio, which was playing Tito Rojas’s “Condéname a tu amor.”

  I smiled. “I love him. And Pedro Conga. But not a lot of people know about Pedro.”

  He looked sideways at me. “You dance salsa?”

  “Claro que si. It’s in the contract.”

  Boogie tapped my seat. “What do you mean? What contract?”

  Cheito looked back at her. “You don’t know about that. You’re Cuban.”

  I smiled at him, then turned to her. “The Boricua Contract.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Dumbass.”

  Cheito and I both laughed, and he headed north on West Avenue toward my building, the windows down, the wind slapping at my face and hair.

  When we pulled up to Southgate Towers a minute later, I opened the door, got out of the car quickly.

  “Hold up!” Cheito said. “Can I call you?”

  I shut the door, then leaned down and looked into the car. He seemed friendly enough. He’d given us a ride. He handed me a Taco Bell napkin, and I scribbled my phone number on it.

  He shook his head. “Que mala,” he said. “I can’t believe you were just gonna walk away without giving me your number.”

  I handed it to him. “How do you know it’s not fake?”

  In the backseat, Boogie was still talking to his friend.

  “I’m a call you and find out,” Cheito said.

  He called two days later and we talked for hours. We talked about Puerto Rico, about Puerto Rican food, Puerto Rican music. He told me about growing up in Hialeah and summers in Caguas and San Lorenzo. I told him about Humacao, Fajardo, Luquillo, about Miami Beach. We both raved about our abuelas, who’d raised us. We shared stories about our fathers, both mujeriegos, all the women they’d betrayed. We compared stories about our mothers, both of them hurt by the men they’d married. We played our favorite songs for each other. We listened to each other breathing on the line when we ran out of shit to talk about. At around 3:00 a.m., we started falling asleep on the line, but didn’t get off until the sun rose, then agreed to talk again the next day.

  The next day he picked me up and we went to the beach by the Fontainebleau Hilton. We swam in the ocean together, diving headfirst into the waves, racing each other underwater. He never let me win. When I got tired, he let me hang onto his shoulders.

  In the water, he picked me up, lifted me until he was looking up at me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. He was strong, I realized, much stronger than I’d thought. From the muscles in his arms, shoulders, and back, I could tell he lifted weights. He was two years older than me, and six feet tall, and didn’t seem like a boy, but he also wasn’t a man. He was funny as hell, and always asked what I wanted, and I liked every single thing about him. In the water, with my legs wrapped around his waist, I kissed him. Just a quick, soft kiss on the lips.

  We’d kiss again when he dropped me off that night. I’d take my time reaching for the door handle, and then he’d lean over, ask, “Can I kiss you good night?”

  I’d ride the elevator all the way up to our apartment on the eighth floor, the taste of his kiss on my lips, and I would know, don’t ask me how, that some day I would marry that boy.

  Cheito asked to meet my family right away, came over one afternoon and shook Abuela’s hand, introduced himself, ate her food, charmed the fuck out of her when he spoke to her in Spanish. But not just any Spanish. He spoke with un acento Boricua, and Abuela, who spoke bien jíbara, who dragged her R’s instead of rolling them, immediately loved him. Bringing home this boy, so Puerto Rican, so respectful, who brought with him the sounds of home, of la isla, who went to school and had a job and his own car that he paid for himself, who would drive me around and take me to run errands like paying the light bill and picking up Adobo Goya and salsa de tomate when we were out? That was, in Abuela’s eyes, my greatest accomplishment. She would tell me every time he came to see me, as soon as he left. “Don’t fuck this up. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”

  He did the same with Papi. Shook his hand, introduced himself, spoke to him in Spanish, talked about salsa and cars and boxing and basketball, all the things my father loved. And then Alaina, Anthony, Mami, all my aunts, all my friends. He took an interest in every single person in my life, had conversations with them, made them laugh, gave them rides, did favors for them. He was good with people, animals, kids. Ever
ybody loved him. Loved him so much they were afraid I’d lose him, push him away, run off with a gangbanger for a week, like I’d been known to do. When he didn’t come around for a couple of days because he had to work, they’d worry, ask if everything was okay. Like they were just waiting for me to fuck it up. I loved them and resented them for it.

  But the truth is, I was afraid, too. I’d never felt so loved before, never felt so happy. With him, I ate Puerto Rican food every chance I got, spent weekends on the beach, went to salsa and merengue concerts at Bayfront Park. He introduced me to his abuela, his father, his mom, his stepmom, his baby sister. His baby sister, who was a year old, adored me. We took her to the mall and pretended she was ours. I’d change her diaper, feed her, run a baby brush through her soft curls. When she started talking, she called me Tati. She’d have entire conversations with me in baby-talk that only she understood, and I’d nod and smile and ask her questions like I was expecting an adult response: When are you gonna go get a job and start paying rent? Why don’t you make the bed, or do some dishes? Don’t you think you need to help your parents around the house more?

  But to the rest of his family I was just some loose caserío girl, a loudmouth with no table manners, a delinquent in baggy clothes who was going nowhere, a tomboy with too many piercings who refused to dress the way proper Puerto Rican women dress, refused to serve him the way a proper Puerto Rican woman is supposed to serve her man, definitely not who they thought he’d end up with.

  Cheito told me again and again not to worry about them, that he loved me, loved all the ways I was loud and funny, loved my piercings and my baggy clothes, and that he wasn’t interested in whatever they thought a proper girl was supposed to act like, and he definitely didn’t need a woman to serve him or to take care of him because he could take care of himself. He just wanted to be with me, the real me. Just spend some time with them, he said, and they’ll get to know you, and then they’ll love you, too.

  He took me to eat at his abuela’s house at least once a week, and I loved going there, even if his family didn’t like me. We’d walk in, and Cheito would give his abuela a hug, a kiss on the cheek, then hug and kiss his father, hug and kiss his stepmom. His baby sister would yell my name—Tati!—and run toward me, and I’d grab her, hoist her up onto my hip. I was amazed at how they all loved each other so much and were never afraid to show it, hugging and kissing each other the way I never saw in my own family. I had never, ever, seen Anthony kiss Papi. Men in my family did not hug and kiss other men. We hadn’t sat at a table for a meal together in years. We barely talked to each other. I couldn’t remember a single time my father told me he loved me, or the last time my mother had hugged me. I only sometimes hugged Alaina, usually when we were both crying about some fucked up shit Anthony had done to one of us. And Anthony? We’d never hugged. We’d never, ever, said I love you. We communicated by throwing shit across the room at each other. The only person who hugged me or kissed me or told me she loved me was Abuela.

  When we sat down to eat at Cheito’s abuela’s house, I could feel the love in the room. I hadn’t realized it was something I’d been missing until then, until we were all sitting at the round table with our plates full, everyone smiling, asking each other about their day, passing tostones across the table, saying please and thank you like an ordinary fucking family. This is what a family was supposed to be—people who actually loved each other. I felt robbed. I looked around the dining room, the way his stepmom scooped beans onto his dad’s plate, the way his abuela fed his baby sister in her highchair, Cheito smiling at me from across the table. Damn it, I loved these people, even if they hated me. And I knew it then: this was everything I wanted.

  But there was something else I knew, would always know. I was my father’s daughter. When Cheito wasn’t around, I was back to being the same old Jaqui: Fuck love. Fuck family. I’d skip fifth and sixth period, run off with friends to smoke at the park, or go hang out in Bayside, ride the party boats, get home drunk or high at three, four in the morning. Then somehow get up at 7:00 a.m. to make it to school. I was late every single day.

  We had sex for the first time after being together a few months. We were on the beach, hanging out on the deck of a lifeguard stand after dark, talking and laughing and kissing. He was sitting on the deck, his back against the lifeguard stand’s wall, and I climbed onto his lap, started unzipping his jeans. We’d talked about doing it for a while, but never any of the details. He was a virgin, and he said he wanted to wait for me to be ready, wanted me to decide when and where.

  I straddled him until he came, and I was about to get up when one of the Beach Patrol cops rolled up in a four-wheeler, shining his flashlight in our direction.

  We froze when we saw the light, our arms around each other.

  “Not the time or the place,” the cop said. He kept his flashlight trained on us.

  “We’re leaving,” Cheito told him. “We’re leaving right now.”

  The Beach Patrol pulled away when he saw us getting up. Cheito zipped up his pants, buckled them, and I slid my shorts back on.

  “Are you okay?” he asked me.

  “I’m fine,” I said. And I was. I picked up my sneakers, my socks. Then we both started laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  The next time, he got us a room at a motel in Hialeah, on Okeechobee Road, a place with a queen-sized bed and a Jacuzzi and free cable and porn on every single TV channel. He bought a bottle of Mr. Bubble from the guy at the front desk—I guess he was trying to make it up to me—but we never even used it.

  When we got into the room, I turned on the TV, watched every one of those old pornos for a few seconds, hairy ass men with beer bellies, balding and sporting mustaches thick as brooms, jerking off on women’s tits. I cringed.

  “Is this what guys like?” I asked. “Because it’s definitely not what girls like.” But I had no idea what girls liked, not really.

  He turned off the TV, kissed me, turned on the radio, kissed me again. He put on 99 Jamz, which was playing an R&B mix. He lay me down on the bed, kissing me on the lips, biting my neck, kissing then biting my thighs. I took off my bra, tossed it aside. He pulled off my underwear and put his head between my legs, and then slid on top of me, kissing me on the lips, on my neck. He wrapped the sheet around us both, then held me until I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, maybe an hour later, he was still holding me, the music still playing. I turned over, stretching my arms, then sat up. He sat up, too, pulled me toward him and buried his face in my hair.

  “Hey,” he said, kissing the top of my head.

  We fell into each other, kissing, and he got on top of me, spread my legs, and worked himself inside me slowly. He never stopped kissing me.

  We went on like this for hours, until I couldn’t take any more, then fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  It was all new, but I loved every second of it. I wanted to be with him, always. To wake up next to him every morning. For the first time in my life, I thought, it was clear that somebody loved me. And I loved him, too.

  Even though I was fifteen, I thought I was grown, like I was in complete control of my life, and even when I wasn’t, that I definitely should be. I was sick of people treating me like a child, trying to control me. So I started saving up money. I got a job waiting tables, and then, when I turned sixteen, I dropped out of school and started working at a pharmacy. A few weeks after that, I moved out of my father’s house into a hotel. A month later, Cheito and I got a tiny apartment across the street from the beach.

  We were teenagers, both of us working full time just to make rent, taking the bus to and from work. We didn’t have much—our clothes, an old TV that Cheito had had in his childhood bedroom, a folding table from Target, a bed and small dresser his father had given us. We were struggling, but we made it work. There were so many jobs: the pharmacy, valet parking, another pharmacy, a clothing store at the mall, another restaurant. Then one day, Cheito decided he wanted to sto
p living paycheck to paycheck. He wanted a career, a future full of things he could never have if he stayed in Miami Beach, working just to pay for our small place on the beach.

  He called the local Marine Corps recruiter. He came from a family of military veterans, had uncles and cousins in the Army and the Marines, and had been talking to them about this for months.

  I pleaded with him to stay. He could go to college, I insisted. I would get a second job.

  But he didn’t want me to get a second job. He wanted to make enough money to do more than just survive, he said. He wanted us to be able to travel, see the world. I wanted him to have all those things, too, but not without me.

  We could get married, he said, as soon as he got out of boot camp and finished school. Then he could take me with him wherever he went.

  What if there’s a war? I asked. What then? It felt like I was losing my entire world. He’d been the only person who believed in me, the only person who thought I was good. He was my family.

  On the day he was supposed to fly off to Parris Island for basic training, standing outside the Miami Military Entrance Processing Station, his mom, his abuela, and I, all crying, begging him to stay, his father gave him a hug, told him to go.