They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  His face was pale with moonlight. Standing at a distance and with both hands held out, Ricky looked so reticent and ceremonious that Rocky felt as if she were being offered a sacrifice. She held the fur vest to her open mouth to inhale, but it didn’t smell like it was dead. It didn’t smell like anything at all. She thrust it onto her shoulders and jumped at Ricky.

  He lost his balance, and together they fell. She put her hands out, and her knuckles scraped against the ground. She didn’t feel anything, certainly not any pain.

  “You animal,” she said as she felt his tongue slip against her skin, migrating south from her collarbone. “I can’t believe you actually did it.”

  “Let’s go back to the car,” he said. Gently, he bit into her skin, and she felt the capillaries bursting. She looked down. Even though it was cold by the river, her ponytail dripped with sweat, slickening the vest, as if she had licked the fur down with her tongue.

  Rocky rammed her mouth into his neck, but unlike Ricky’s bite, hers was brutal. She heard him take a deep breath, but when he said nothing else, her chest fluttered with ecstasy. When she had met him, she’d worried that he was contemptuous of her, then she worried he was too earnest. Now she realized that she didn’t really care what he was—he’d proven himself tonight. She wondered what else he was willing to do in her honor. Maybe he was madly in love with her, even. Her thoughts became delirious with wonder until she felt her thinking mind wither away entirely, tossed away like a shriveled fruit, and it was the sensation of being straddled atop Ricky’s lap, her bare knees grinding against the graveled ground, that finally brought her back to consciousness. She could stay lost in this position forever, she thought, but what if there was something else? Something even better?

  “Not the car,” she said, knowing that even if her father or brother were home and awake, neither of them would stop her from bringing this strange boy down the long corridor to her room. “Let’s go to my place.” She knew that it was only the beginning of the Enrique—or was it the Ricardo? Either way, it was the beginning of a wonderful experience.

  CHAPTER 19

  The sun was gone, and with it, so was the light. Lying facedown on the couch in the living room, Maria didn’t look up when her older brother came in. She’d been grounded for almost a month now, meaning she wasn’t allowed to stay out past sundown and she was certainly not allowed to sleep over at Rocky’s apartment. Her parents weren’t bothering her anymore about applying for a new job, especially not when they’d found her on more than one occasion with large textbooks splayed open for the SAT. But without the ability to move freely and widely around the city at night, where the most fun to be had was interspersed between lampposts, Maria knew she was being deprived. She had been stripped of her fundamental right to summer.

  “That sucks,” Rocky had said when Maria told Rocky how bored and depressed she was. Whenever Maria asked what she was doing, Rocky said she was with Matthew. It was odd for her to spend so much time with him—Rocky always complained about how she really didn’t like him that much.

  Along with her SAT prep, Maria had been reading more every day, but in the days since Andres had broken up with her, she hadn’t been able to concentrate for too long on anything. Over the past week, she had made several failed attempts to convince Andres to stay with her. Each time she asked, he only became angrier, his insults that much more deliberate and incisive. There was no getting around it—Maria was losing Andres to Chastity, a girl who Andres swore was much prettier and lovelier than she was. In the end, she really was prettier and lovelier. Maria knew because she too had met her.

  She had found the girl’s information because she knew Andres’s password. She asked Chastity to meet her at Andres’s apartment to confront him together. As they walked into the apartment complex, Maria was giddy, knowing that she was going to win Andres back. Maria was the veteran girlfriend, and her relationship with Andres was no longer frivolous and new—it was sturdy and impervious. Moreover, Maria knew that she was better than Andres, and probably better than Chastity, too, and that she was a catch for someone like him. In the same way that girls in her grade fawned over Rocky’s boyfriend Matthew for being wickedly intelligent and coming from an even richer family than most families they knew on the Upper East Side, Maria knew that she was smarter than Andres and that she’d go to a much better college than he ever would—and that meant she was worth something greater than him. If she weren’t rich per se, that was only as of yet, and even now she was richer than him, and it seemed to Maria that everything—including Bell Seminary, including dating, including venturing outside of one’s rightful league—was about upward social mobility. As the days went by, these were the reflections that stiffened Maria’s resolve and convinced her that it was nonsensical that Andres had dumped her. She knew enough to know that Andres didn’t have the authority to leave her, and if he did, he would forever and ever regret his mistake. He wouldn’t understand now, but one day he would—that the sacrifices she made for him, like enduring his constant and relentless abuse, were for nobody’s sake but his own.

  As soon as Andres saw Maria, the disgust on his face was as apparent as dirt. “Why are you here, bitch?” She flinched, the way she always did when Andres jabbed her like that, black and blues cracking open from somewhere invisible just beneath the skin. Just as the sores started to bloom, to her great shock, Chastity slapped him.

  “Why are you calling her a bitch?” Her little hands flailed out to her sides so that all Maria could see of them were ten tiny red nails that soared through the air. Maria had seen Chastity spritz herself with Victoria’s Secret body spray before going up to the apartment, but she hadn’t really looked at her until now. Chastity was, like Andres said, lovely, and as Chastity waved her arms through the air, the lavender scent of her flesh seeped into Maria’s nostrils, her tongue, and down into her skin. Maria bit her lip. If she could smell it from where she was standing, Andres could surely smell it, too, and in that moment, she sensed the plan was coming undone, but she swallowed the thought to the back of her throat, down with the fragrance of Chastity.

  Within minutes, the confrontation was over, and Maria stomped out to the street with Chastity. They walked to the end of the block before parting ways. Chastity promised she would never speak to Andres again and offered Maria a piece of gum that she happily accepted. When Chastity leaned in to give Maria a kiss on the cheek goodbye, again, Maria smelled flowers, and the next day, when she saw Andres’s Facebook status had changed from “single” to “in a relationship,” her stomach growled out in pain. Again, she found that she was coming up just short of another girl, and this time it wasn’t even for the usual reasons. Chastity wasn’t thin or white and she didn’t dress or talk like Bell Seminary girls at all, and this was something that baffled Maria—how there could be something beyond the things that Bell Seminary valued that might be worth having. She thought of the way Chastity had slapped Andres, and instead of rebuking her, Andres had only lowered his head, like a repentant puppy. Of course, she had no right to Andres, and of course, Andres had known that. Maria wasn’t better than him or Chastity—she wasn’t better than anyone.

  Now, as she lay on the couch, she kept thinking of him cradling Chastity in his hands, doing the terrible things to her body that he used to do to Maria’s: ripping into her flesh with his teeth in the shower, pulling her hair with the force of a riled teenage boy whose favorite game was something called slap-box. At first, Maria felt bad for the girl. But Andres had called Chastity perfect, and Maria knew he wouldn’t handle Chastity the same way he’d handled her. She closed her eyes tight and gritted her teeth. Was there something intrinsically flawed about Maria? She wasn’t good enough for white boys—and not for brown boys, either. What if the rest of her life was like this? What was going to happen to her?

  She tried her best to will these things out of her head by thinking of the exception: Charlie—Charlie had seen who she was and liked it. Charlie, who had tended carefully to
the poems that took root in her heart, who knew she deserved to go to school, to learn more of them, to become more fully herself. In Vegas, she had dared him to call her. Take my number, she ventured, and he grinned. She had left her phone in the hotel room upstairs and was a little embarrassed when she went upstairs and saw that he hadn’t even texted her so she could save his number into her phone. Now, Andres’s words seared like a hot blade through her head. Why would he call me?—facedown on the couch—I’m ugly and stupid and gross. Her brain felt like a bloodied steak, a slab of raw meat pooling in its own liquid, like the rest of the meat that clung to her thighs, to the sides of her stomach, everywhere, spilling out of the holes of her shirts and her pant legs. Even her hands were pudgy. She could feel the clothes shrinking on her as the edges of her hips expanded from wall to wall.

  When Ricky came into the room, there was hardly enough space for him to walk around her, so large and bloated she had become by that point. She had buried her head deep in the pillow. He must have been looking at her for a while, because when she snapped her head around like an exorcised child, his whole body bolted upright.

  “Shit! I thought you were asleep.”

  “Eh.” It was less of a sound than a whimper. She looked down at the floor. There was silence as she ignored her brother, this time not even intentionally.

  “What are you doing? Do you want to come to Applebee’s with me and Alex?”

  She thought of the cheesy potato skins she liked to order. She sat up.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Now. I just came in to drop off my gym bag. Are you coming or not?”

  “Let me put on my shoes.”

  She was wearing a pair of sweatpants, but even if Ricky had been more patient, she didn’t have the resolve to change into jeans. It didn’t seem like it then that she could possibly fit into them. She slipped her feet into her Converse sneakers without bending to tie the laces.

  “You ready? Let’s go.”

  Ricky’s girlfriend, Alex, was sitting in the passenger seat of Jonathan’s beat-up Honda Civic. Jonathan lent it to Ricky on the days he wasn’t using it to go to the gym or the mall, with the requirement that he return it with a full tank. When Maria opened the door and clambered in, Alex turned around in full to greet her.

  “Hey, girl!” she said, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, and when she smiled, her eyes became thin slits of skin behind the large frames. “What’s up?” Alex said. “I didn’t expect to see you!”

  “Nothing.” Maria looked out the window. Alex lingered, her face bright and tilted like a satellite dish, and then turned back to the front of the car, where the light of her smile seemed to light the road ahead. Maria liked Alex, but she didn’t feel like talking to anybody and was grateful for the trip-hop that blasted from the speakers. Ricky’s CDs always made her think of water, the ambient gargling of rhythm and drumbeats that sounded submerged under the sea. Alex and Ricky spoke to one another now, but it was so loud in the car that Maria couldn’t hear what they were saying. Looking at them made her think of Andres, and she tried her best to not to be upset, bobbing her head to the wordless music.

  At the restaurant, Alex sat directly across from Maria. They chose a table outside so that they could sit in the sun. It was a beautiful day, and Maria realized she had almost missed it by languishing on her couch at home. She looked around now, her mood brightening. Across the street, there was a movie theater, and a line had formed that stretched out the door and halfway down the block.

  “That must be for that new alien movie,” Maria said. “It came out yesterday, right?” She was asking her glass of water, her mouth sucking on the plastic straw, her eyes barreled into the bottom of her cup. Ricky and Alex looked at each other before Alex responded first.

  “Yeah, it did! Do you want to see it?”

  “I don’t know. Looks dumb.”

  “Alex is dying to see it,” Ricky said.

  “Really?” Maria felt sorry. Usually, Maria stood by her convictions, but there was something about Alex—Maria simply didn’t want Alex to dislike her.

  “Yeah,” Ricky answered. “Anything that has to do with the stars, Alex loves.”

  “What do aliens have to do with astrology?” Alex said. “But yes, I love the stars. ’Cause how could you not?” She looked at Maria, her eyes wide open. Past the glasses, Maria could see their color, dappled in warm auburn with flits of yellow running through them like the veins of an autumn leaf. They were actually large—the lenses had distorted their size—and Maria wondered why she would hide such pretty eyes behind a pair of frames. Maria saw herself reflected in them and straightened herself in her chair.

  “What’s your sign?” Alex asked. Maria wondered if Alex could see that she was looking at herself in her glasses.

  “Here we go again,” Ricky said.

  “Pisces,” Maria answered.

  “No way!”

  “What?”

  Alex stared at her as if she were floating in air and not slumped in a red plastic seat on the sidewalk, the bottom of her sweatpants legs ripped from being dragged along the ground.

  “You’re a Pisces! That’s amazing! That means you’re a water sign. Just like me. No wonder I like you so much.” She shot Ricky an accusatory glance. “Ricky, you never told me.”

  “How would I know?” Ricky asked without looking up from the menu.

  “How would you not?” She looked back at Maria. “I’m a Cancer.”

  “What does it mean? What does a ‘water sign’ mean?”

  “Well, there’s four. Water, earth, fire, and wind. The water signs are known for their emotion—we ride people out like waves. So we’re great at reading people. We vibe with people. You must make friends easily, right?”

  “I guess so,” Maria said. “I have a lot of different friends.” She paused. “Different kinds of friends.”

  “Wow,” Alex said. “I knew it. It’s just that I knew there was something about you and now I know why. Real recognizes real, you know what I mean?”

  Through tightened lips, Maria failed at repressing her smile.

  “I’m a Cancer—we’re naturally compassionate, we’re known for being empathic, which means we can see things from every perspective. We can see into people’s hearts. Pisces can, too, but they can be a little difficult sometimes. It’s not a bad thing.”

  “Difficult?”

  “Yeah! Pisces are dreamers, they have so much energy to channel. They’re sensitive and always looking for meaning. They’re only difficult because they’re such idealists! But the good part is that all that dreaming always pays off. The Pisces always ends up getting what they want.”

  “Really?” Maria glanced at Ricky, who hadn’t looked up from the menu. Maria wanted Alex to go on, but she didn’t want to seem obvious. She knew her brother had nothing nice to say about horoscopes. He was just like Maria that way, skeptical of everything. Even more skeptical—a jerk, Maria thought, a little surprised and even ashamed at how quickly and gratuitously the insult came to mind. She understood that cheesy potatoes were a peace offering, but she still hadn’t forgiven him yet—not entirely, anyway—for what he had called her that summer.

  “Yes,” Alex said. “A Pisces can make their dreams come true.”

  Maria remembered her first day at Bell Seminary. They told her they were pleased to give the scholarship money to such a talented student. They were excited—no, they had said they were thrilled—to welcome the Rosario family’s gifted daughter to the Bell Seminary School for Young Women. Maria had willed her future life into being.

  “I don’t know anything about signs,” Maria said, again addressing her glass of water.

  “Man.” Alex shook her head from side to side and looked up at the clouds as if they had parted and some cosmic truth had been revealed. “You can tell so much about a person from their sign. Now that you tell me, it makes so much sense. And that’s not even going into your ris
ing sign, which makes things even more clearer.” Ricky finally looked up at her. He was squinting at her with his head tilted to the side, the palm of his hand cradling his chin. Maria could see that he was about to correct her, because she was fighting the same impulse, too.

  “Like Ricky, for example,” Alex continued. “He’s an air element, an Aquarius. Shy and somewhat stubborn. Unsentimental. Always wanting to be alone. Cold sometimes, too, just like winter air.”

  Maria giggled and glanced at her brother, who remained imperiously silent. If he was trying to appear offended, his face betrayed him. She could see he was trying to bite down on a smile.

  “But underneath that chilly facade, Aquarius is full of this unpredictable energy. They’re full of contradictions and get flustered weighing them all. They’re genuinely exciting and endlessly interesting people, but you wouldn’t guess that at first glance.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” Maria asked. But she wasn’t so much looking at Alex as she was her older brother, whose hand was now covering a barely perceptible smile.

  “She studies it,” he said, moving his hand from his mouth and meeting Maria’s gaze. “She draws charts and everything. She can do yours if you want.”