by Aya De León
Also by Aya de León
The Accidental Mistress
The Boss
Uptown Thief
Side Chick NATION
AYA DE LEÓN
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Author’s Note
Teaser chapter
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
DAFINA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Aya de León
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Dafina and the Dafina logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1579-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1581-4 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4967-1581-0 (ebook)
First Kensington Electronic Edition: July 2019
Acknowledgments
This book has been a profoundly collective effort. As always, I want to thank my literary team: my agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, my editor Esi Sogah, as well as Dawn Michelle Hardy, Michelle Addo, Vida Engstrand, and all the folks at Kensington Books. I also could NEVER have written this book without the brilliant consejos of my Boricua peer counselors and leaders: María Judith Colon, Leykamarie Alma, Yara Alma-Bonilla, James “Yimi” Searle, and Nanci Luna Jiménez. My extended Boricua fam: Alicia Bauman-Morales, Yulahlia Hernández, Aurora Levins-Morales, Sandra García Rivera, the Bay Area Boricuas. Also, my immediate fam, Stuart, Dee, Coco, Anna, Larry, Paci, Deva, Neens, and Papi. As well as my women writer/activist crew: Shailja, Pam, and Nanci. My MGMG crew of moms: Nadine, Gail, Debbie, Monisha, and HyoJung. My research/sensitivity reader/consultant/editor/ translation dream team: Susan DeFreitas, César del Peral, Daisy Hernández, Marianne Collazo, Elissa Miller, Rachel Aimee, Melissa Reyes, Carolina De Robertis, John Mundell, and Vylma V. I don’t know if I could have written this book without the profoundly orienting experience of going to an incredible conference at the University of Chicago: “Puerto Rico, Hurricane María and the Crisis of Colonialism.” Thanks to the organizers: the UIC Social Justice Initiative, the Union of Puerto Rican Students, The Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and the Puerto Rican Agenda. Big thanks also to the Boricuas who came to the Bay Area to talk about their feminist work in PR: Zulma Oliveras and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro. And the many Boricuas out there going hard for la causa who answered my calls for direction, including Eli Jacobs Fantauzzi, Rosa Clemente, and Sofía Quintero. I believe this will be one of the first published novels of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, but I want to thank Naomi Klein for what I think is the first journalistic book on Hurricane María, which was a critical text for me in the writing of this book. I like to think of Side Chick Nation as The Battle for Paradise for the set who picks up sexy urban beach reads. But I hope these two books, as well as Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez’s volume Ricanstruc-tion are simply the first wave of many, many books about the current struggle for justice in post-María Puerto Rico. And of course, thanks to my Boricua Ancestors, and all the Puerto Ricans holding strong on the island, as well as those of us reaching back from the Diaspora.
Pa’lante.
Juntos.
“Eso es como cuando usted tiene un novio or una novia que tiene una esposa or un esposo. Y usted se queja de que el 25 día de navidad está con la esposa o el esposo y no está con usted. . . .No podemos pretender que nos traten como iguales si nosotros permitimos que nos traten como menos. Y lo que que ha pasado yo creo con María es que la gente ha enten-dido que no puede seguir consintiendo a una relación de sub-ordinación que permite que nos traten como menos.”
“It’s like when you have a boyfriend or girlfriend who has a wife or a husband. And you complain that on Christmas day, they’re with their spouse and not with you. . . .We can’t try to make them treat us equally while also allowing them to treat us like we’re less than. And what has happened, I think, with [Hurricane] María is that the people [of Puerto Rico] now understand that we can’t keep consenting to a relationship [with the US] of subordination that allows them to treat us like we’re less than.”
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz
Chicago, Illinois
April 21, 2018
Prologue
Water flooded the storage space as Dulce slept. It seeped through the metal slats in the pull-down door. It pooled on the concrete floor. It rose around the mattress where Dulce was sleeping. Although she was not exactly sleeping, more like in a stupor or a spell from the cocktail of rum and marijuana. It dulled her hearing, so she didn’t startle with the shrieking winds and battering rain, and thudding of broken branches against the building. It dulled the panic she would have felt—alone in a storage space where she was living illegally. In a hurricane. And nobody knew she was there.
Water seeped up, turning the mattress into a giant sponge. Soon her back was wet. The crisscross of her racerback tank top, the cotton shorts. The moisture soaked into the fabric, even above the surface of the water she lay in. Inch by inch, the line crept up her feet, her beautifully painted blue toenails, the sides of her arms and legs and torso. It saturated her hair, destroying the remains of the blowout she’d been trying to conserve. She had sweated out the roots, but the tips of her hair had stayed somewhat straight, even in the humidity. She’d kept it up in a ponytail over the last few days, so the ends didn’t erupt into tight curls from the sweat on her back and shoulders.
But now, the water rose just above the mattress, soaking her hair, and it bloomed into springing curls all around her head.
Still she slept.
It wasn’t until the water seeped into her ears that her body moved at all, beyond the rise and fall of her chest. Her shoulder flinched with the moisture tickling her ear canal, but it didn’t wake her. First one side, then the other, as her head was slightly tilted on the mattress. No pillow. But then both ears filled and the tickle was gone. Her body stilled again in sleep. The now full canals dulled the howls of the storm.
The flooding outside was anything but gentle, yet the water could only seep in through the slats in the metal door, and the crack at the bottom above the cement floor. So the water level rose slowly. It crept up gently along her neck, her jawline, her cheekbone. The water sidled up tenderly, like a lover.
Dulce slept, like a maiden awaiting a prince, awaiting a kiss.
Yet she slept on when the water first touched
her lips. Only when it began to drip into her mouth did she truly stir. The water, pooling in the back of her throat and making it impossible to breathe properly now. The prince had come. The rescuer on his horse. The discoverer. The pimp.
She flashed back as the water choked her. She recalled his hands around her throat, the bruising press of fingers against skin and muscle and tendon and windpipe. As the floodwater of the hurricane trickled delicately into her throat, her body recalled the searing pain of constricted breath. The scrabbling panic of asphyxiation, her heart was hammering frantically, as if it needed to escape her body to survive. Then the half-blackout, feeling her body slump to the floor, wincing with the sharp press of his boot toe as he delivered a single kick to her hip.
Her hip was soaked now in the floodwater, the left hip. Her pelvis was tilted slightly, and her left side pointed down toward the sodden mattress. Her right side was slightly raised, the hipbone jutting above the waterline like a disappearing island of brown skin, as water pooled between the tops of her thighs.
Yet she could feel that the real threat was at her throat. Again.
Like that other time, her pimp had sent one of his thugs to kill her. The man had a knife at her throat, as a few dozen women and some of their kids looked on in horror. She had been standing outside the shelter on the icy Manhattan ground in only socks, numb with terror, unable to feel the freezing concrete beneath her feet. Again, the press at her throat. The knife threatening not only skin and muscle and tendon and windpipe, but now her carotid in jeopardy, as well.
More water trickled into her throat, and she coughed weakly, her gag reflex still kicking. And with the gagging, part of her brain began to register the fact that her life was in danger. Some fight or flight response activated her tongue, dragging it into action to spit some of the water out.
Her life was in danger. Her body struggled to wake, but couldn’t quite push through her half-sleeping stupor, in which the unbidden memory bloomed in her mind like a nightmare. The time she’d been fool enough to go back to her pimp. And he’d thrown her against a wall. Paint and plaster crashing into her back and shoulder like a drunk driver. When she staggered to her feet, he’d choked her. His thick fingers were more insistent than ever, despite her own hands, gripping his wrists, digging her fingernails into his skin, trying in vain to open the vise of his oppositional thumbs. Yet it was her own grip she could feel loosening as she began to lose consciousness.
That had been Dulce’s breaking point. The moment she decided to leave him for good. Or rather, she passed out fearing she might die, but deciding to live if she found she had a choice.
That same resolve woke her inside the storage unit.
She sputtered to life, coughing through a burning throat. In total darkness, completely soaked. Her body was sluggish and disoriented with the marijuana and the residuals of rum. She tried to lift her head, but her hair was unexpectedly weighed down with water.
Slowly, through the chemical fog, she rolled to her side. As if in slow motion, she dragged an arm beneath her, propping herself up on one elbow, her mouth fully above the water line.
She coughed hard and gagged, suddenly vomiting. Yet the retching made her a bit more lucid. Even in the total darkness, she was able to orient herself, to make sense of the bizarre combination of mattress and moisture, screaming winds and crashing thuds.
Storage space. Hurricane. Flooding. Fuck.
Chapter 1
Several months earlier . . .
Dulce Garcia crept toward the back door of the nightclub’s VIP room on the balls of her stiletto sandals, trying not to wake her boyfriend. He lay, splayed back on the leather couch, in a post-orgasmic half-doze. She spat into an empty beer bottle, and tiptoed to the room’s back door. She tried to push it open with her free hand, but it was too heavy. She needed two hands for this.
She stuck the knot of money down into her cleavage, and pushed with both palms flat. The large metal door creaked against rusty hinges. In the humid Miami climate, cheap metal springs like these always rusted. This back door, required by the Florida fire code as a secondary exit, was rarely used. She tried to close it quietly behind her, but the metal was too heavy, and it tipped her forward in the six-inch gold heels.
The slam of metal on metal woke her boyfriend. As she crept away down the dank, concrete hallway, she heard him call to her. His voice was usually loud, but it sounded faint through the thick slab of steel: “Dulce? Where’d you go, mami?” She tiptoed down the hallway to the outer door that would lead to the back alley.
But the steel could not contain the roar of rage when he realized his money was missing. She had felt a second bulge in his pants when she unzipped his jeans. As she went down on him, she had slipped the wad of bills out of his front pocket, and palmed it after he finished.
Through the metal, she could hear the slam of the VIP room’s other door. He had assumed she’d headed back into the club. She grinned as she pulled the handle for the alley exit, expecting to cut around the corner and hail a cab for a quick getaway. Uber was out of the question. It was his credit card on the account.
But the alley door was locked. She pulled with all her strength, but it wouldn’t budge. Either locked or rusted shut. She looked around frantically, afraid she would be trapped. She couldn’t retrace her steps through the VIP room—in case he came back looking for her. She ran now, not even trying to be quiet. As she sprinted toward the other end of the hallway, there was a second door that led through a storage room. Either way, she’d need to find her way out through the club. The club where her Dominican drug dealer boyfriend would be assembling his crew of boys to find her, the side chick turned “fucking bitch” who’d stolen his take for the night.
* * *
Although Dulce hung with him in the club regularly, she only knew how to get to the different dance floors and VIP rooms. She didn’t know behind the scenes. It turned out that the storage room didn’t lead back into the club. At least not directly. Dulce hurried past dusty stage props of sparkling palm trees and faded lifesize cardboard cutouts of different celebrities to pose with for selfies. Outside the other end of the room was a different hallway with a trio of doors to locked VIP rooms. At the far end of the hall was a stairwell. She knew that this club was really two buildings cobbled together. If she went up to the sixth floor, there was a walkway that led across to the main building where she had come in.
She needed to hustle, so her boyfriend didn’t get his crew to cut her off, trapping her on this end, away from the front entrance.
Dulce ran up the stairs. The first four flights were easy, fueled by adrenaline. But by the last two flights, she began to lag. Dulce’s heart beat hard, and the bustier squeezed her ribs like a vise. Between the fourth and fifth floor, she had slowed to a walk, trying to catch her breath.
A stairwell door opened a couple floors below.
“I ain’t seen the bitch,” a loud man’s voice echoed off the concrete. “He just said we need to find her and bring her to him.”
Dulce froze.
The voice continued: “Sent me down to look for her on the first floor, the last place he seen her.”
Dulce pressed herself against the wall, her heart hammering in her chest as the sound of the man’s footesteps receded.
When she heard the downstairs door open and close, she faltered for a second. Then the terror turned to adrenaline, fueling her sprint up the final flight. On the sixth floor, she twisted the knob of one of the VIP room doors hoping for a large party she could blend into. But the room was sparsely populated. A trio of bored looking girls were sitting around drinking champagne, while two guys were doing coke at the high table. They barely looked up at her, as she walked quietly across the room, staying in the shadows. One of the girls on the couch followed Dulce with her eyes.
She walked through and slipped out the door on the far end. In the hall on the other side of the VIP lounge was a coatrack. A blonde bobbed wig hung next to a leather coat and a silver scarf.
Dulce grabbed the wig and scarf and ducked into the stairwell to put them on. She pulled her long hair into a loose braid. Fortunately, she’d blown it out for her date tonight, otherwise, she’d never have gotten the wig over the tight curls of her natural hair. As it was, the braid stuck out, too thick to tuck underneath. She wore the silver scarf like a shawl, covering her shoulders and her long braid at the nape of her neck. She crisscrossed the scarf in the front to reveal her cleavage, while concealing the distinctive turquoise-sequined bustier of her dress. It was an ombre fabric, which darkened to navy at the above-the-knee hemline.
Now, she could walk openly through the hallway, peeking out from under the bangs of the bobbed blonde wig. She spotted one of her boyfriend’s crew, heading right toward her. Her heart hammered in her throat. Hopefully, he was looking for a brunette in a lighter blue dress, not a blonde in silver and navy.
As he approached, he looked her up and down mechanically.
The door to the VIP room behind her opened, and the movement caught his eye. In the split second he was looking beyond her, she picked up her phone and used it to shield her face. She had gotten the oversized version of the smartphone, and it covered her well.
When he looked back at her, he saw nothing but blonde hair and the Dominican flag phone case, as unremarkable as her caramel skin.
As he walked past, she could smell the mint on his breath as he chewed gum with his mouth open. And under the mint smell was a slight hint of weed.
Behind her now, he was asking the folks in VIP if they’d seen a girl come through.
“Yeah,” a woman’s voice said.