Side Chick Nation

by Aya De León

  “Sure,” Dulce said. What was his angle?

  “I didn’t get your name,” the guy said, and introduced himself.

  “Celia M. Reyes,” Dulce said.

  “Who do you write for?” he asked.

  “I’m a freelancer,” Dulce said.

  “Same here,” he said.

  They had walked behind the hotel, and in the back courtyard there was a white tent with the smell of institutional food wafting out. They got into a long line.

  “I just got back from Delia Borbón’s hotel,” he said. “Was that you coming out with your friend from the Times?”

  Dulce shook her head. “Not me,” she said.

  “I mean, I can see it,” he said. “She only wanted to talk to someone who had been in the business. And you were the hottest girl in the room. You could have been a . . . what? Stripper? Cam girl?”

  Dulce just smiled at him.

  “Dominatrix?” he asked with a huge grin. “You’re not that tall, but I can see it. Yes, mistress.”

  They were almost at the front of the line.

  Dulce didn’t speak, she just shrugged.

  “So you’re not gonna kiss and tell?” he asked. “Or maybe no kissing?”

  Dulce tilted her head and stared at him.

  “No offense,” he said.

  “None taken.”

  “She’s with me,” the guy said, showing his credentials to the woman at the small table.

  “I’ll put it on TMZ’s tab,” she said.

  The reporter turned back to Dulce. “Or maybe you just lied and said you’d been a pro so you could get the story,” he said. “See, there are advantages of being female in this business. I could never have pulled that off.”

  “Oh I don’t know,” Dulce said. “I’m sure there are some people in the market for . . .” she looked him up and down, “. . . your type.” He was short and balding.

  A woman was spooning spaghetti and meatballs from several huge pots. She served them two large plates. Mostly noodles.

  “I’m surprised you’re not in your room typing away, getting ready to file the story,” he said. “She did talk to you, didn’t she?”

  “You got the wrong girl,” Dulce said. “I was in my room reading that profile of her in The Miami Herald. Did you know that she walked off the set of the movie she was filming to come here? Apparently, her last words to the director were ‘work around me.’”

  “Quite the diva,” the TMZ guy said.

  “That’s what the director said and he threatened to fire her,” Dulce explained. “But Delia said he was racist, and that if someone had left a movie set in LA on 9/11, no one would have threatened to fire them. She still has family on the island.”

  “Come on,” he said. “You talked to her, didn’t you?”

  “It looks like it might rain again,” Dulce said. “I think I’m gonna take my food inside.”

  The TMZ guy looked up at the sky. It was maybe half-full of puffy, white clouds. “Rain?” he asked. “Are you kidding me?”

  “How much time have you spent in the Caribbean?” she asked. “My people are from here, and we know when there’s a credible threat. See you around.”

  In the lobby, Dulce slipped quietly into the stairwell, and made sure the guy wasn’t tailing her to the third floor.

  She knocked on the door. Around the corner, she heard the stairwell door open. Had she been followed after all?

  Zavier answered, and she pressed past him into the room, shutting the door quickly behind her. For a moment, they were pressed close, then she pulled up the dish of spaghetti, and held it up between them.

  “I brought contraband,” she said.

  “Good to see how the other half is living,” he said. “But no need to ante up, you got it fair and square.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Dulce asked. “You’re the only reason I’m here as a member of the press. The only reason I got this story is you.” She remembered she needed to drive home her biggest point. “And you’re the one who’s gonna get me out of here. Spaghetti is the least I can do to pay you back.”

  “Oh good,” he said. “Because it smells delicious. Is that oregano? I think the only spice I’ve had in days has been salt.”

  The two of them sat at the desk and devoured the plate in the fading light.

  “So how do you want to approach this story?” he asked.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Since you said I had sort of become part of the news, I’d like to tell my story. It really kind of all lines up. How the US is treating Puerto Rico. How Borbón got pressured to give this guy a blow job. How I—ended up in my situation.”

  “That sounds—” he was shaking his head.

  Of course this was stupid. How did she think she should be put on the same level with a movie star and an international natural disaster?

  “That’s such an amazing idea,” he said. “And a great chance to tie in to larger issues of colonization beyond just Puerto Rico. Yes! This is going to be an incredible piece.”

  “But you need to do more than just help me,” she said. “We need to write it together. Have both our names on it.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Definitely,” she said. “I want to remain anonymous, though. So I can really tell my story without giving a fuck about what anyone thinks.”

  Zavier smiled at her. “That’s always the best way to write.”

  For the next four hours, he wrote on the laptop, and she wrote on the tablet. Dulce began by transcribing the interview with Delia, and then wrote about her earliest memories of the star. Watching cable with her brother and seeing Delia Borbón in what she now realized was an R rated movie, and probably inappropriate. But who could forget Borbón standing bare-breasted, in a wide stance. One long leg on the floor and the other foot up on the bed. A sheet draped over one hip, covering her pubic area. She had both hands on the gun, and was pointing it at the lover she had realized was also the killer. The lover that only a few moments before was making her moan (yes, Dulce realized, very inappropriate for her to have seen the film at that age). But Borbón was so powerful. As she confronted him with his misdeeds, he grinned slyly.

  “But you knew I was a bad boy,” he said. “This has nothing to do with us. That bitch deserved it. It was just business.”

  “How can you say that?” Borbón asked, a tear falling.

  “See?” he had said. “You know you love me. You could never shoot me.”

  “I know I’ll miss you,” Borbón had said. “Or I’ll miss who I thought you were.”

  “Think about how you were feeling five minutes ago,” he cooed. “You know exactly who I am.”

  She shook her head but didn’t take her eyes off him. “Now that I know you could take a life like that, I have no idea who you are.”

  They both heard a siren in the distance.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “You gotta stay and face up to what you did.”

  “Sorry I won’t even have time to kiss you goodbye,” he said.

  “Don’t try to walk out that door or I’ll have to shoot,” Borbón said.

  He laughed and walked casually to the door. When he turned to blow her a kiss, she looked him in the eye and said, “Adiós, motherfucker.” And shot him in the chest. His eyes were so surprised.

  Many times, Dulce had played that scene with her former pimp, Jerry. She imagined him underestimating her. Then saying those same words, “adiós, motherfucker,” and him looking so surprised when she shot him. When she was really enraged with something he said or did, when he walked away she would mouth the words and pretend to shoot him with two fingers and her thumb as a fake gun.

  She had told Eva Feldman about it, her sometime therapist. Eva had scoffed.

  “That movie is a fantasy,” she had said. “Besides, when those two meet, they’re both adults. She’s a reporter at the top of her career. When you met Jerry, you were a child. He was twenty-five years y
our senior and spent years grooming you so he could manipulate and control you. She was in a consensual adult relationship. You were in a situation of abuse, exploitation, and statutory rape.”

  She began to write about Jerry, about what life was like in her family before Jerry. About Marisol. About the times she’d seen Borbón in the movies. About how scary it was to stand up in front of a room full of reporters and draw attention to herself. She remembered how much she had liked writing. In elementary and middle school. She had never finished her sophomore year of high school, but Mr. Q had encouraged her. Now, years later, she was finally writing something really important. The words spilled out of her before she could remember that nobody cared what girls like her had to say. She was supposed to be pretty or hot or fiery, and just let guys fuck her.

  * * *

  When Dulce had finished her draft, she walked over to Zavier. His face was bathed in the glow of his laptop, and she looked over his shoulder. As she watched, he typed:

  The hypocrisy regarding Puerto Rico is evident, in every dead chicken floating in briny, brown water, in every cement foundation littered with the sodden remains of a family home, in every waterlogged car, in every majestic fallen tree, laying on its side with dirt covered roots, like a red-brown fist. Over a century of extraction, austerity, and neglect has left the island stripped of capital, protection, and increasingly, people.

  Dulce felt a lump in her throat. She was in way over her head. How could her jumbled, tell-all about her early life compare to this professional, polished writing that he seemed to crank out, effortlessly.

  She retreated into the dark of the hotel room.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “I thought we were gonna compare notes.”

  She shook her head, unable to speak. “I don’t really have much to share.”

  “Are you kidding me?” he asked. “I heard those fingers ticking on the keypad. Let me see.”

  “It’s not finished,” Dulce said.

  “A work-in-progress,” he said. “I can’t wait to read it.”

  Dulce shook her head. “I’m not ready.”

  Zavier studied her. “Okay,” he said. “I promise to stop asking if you’ll read me one passage.”

  “What’s a passage?” Dulce asked.

  “One short part of it. Like maybe fifty words.”

  Dulce chewed her lip. “Okay,” she said. “But that’s it.”

  Zavier shrugged. “That’s fine,” he said. “I just want to get a sense of your voice.”

  Dulce lowered her eyes to the tablet. She scrolled through what she had written. She didn’t realize it at the time, but after the Borbón interview, it was over a dozen pages. She wanted to impress him. But even more than that, she knew he would end up reading all of it eventually, and she wanted him to understand how it had all begun.

  “Even though me and my girl were smoking weed that day in the park, it wasn’t the weed talking. When Jerry drove up in his car, it was the way he looked at me. She was the prettier one but he singled me out like I was special. Now I know it was probably because I looked thirsty. And I was. My brother had just got locked up for selling drugs and my sister had a new baby and was not taking well to being a mother. She would leave Darito to go out with her friends and I was the next girl in line to watch him since mom was depressed as fuck. I would hang out after school as late as I could to keep from coming home, but eventually I would get hungry, and there was usually a can of something I could open for dinner at home.

  Jerry was old and kinda fat, but not too ugly. When he made his face soft, you could see the teenager he’d been. He even had a dimple. But it wasn’t his looks that got me, either. It was that he chose me. I had never been chosen before. I never even met my dad. My mom acted like her life was over after they broke up. The senior who said he loved me and took my virginity turned out to have a girlfriend and told all his friends I was a slut. But Jerry looked in my eyes. He had a car. Money. He called me princess. He wanted to take care of me. I was fourteen. I thought I was in the end of a Disney movie where I was going to live happily ever after.”

  Dulce knew this must be a passage, maybe even two, but she couldn’t stop reading.

  “Before me and Jerry had sex the first time, he took me to a private doctor, who gave me the birth control shot. ‘You don’t want to get pregnant like your sister, do you?’ he asked me. ‘You got your whole life ahead of you.’

  “None of the other boys I’d been with before had even asked if I was on birth control. Sometimes I was, and sometimes I wasn’t. I guess I was lucky. And that’s what I really felt with Jerry at first. Lucky. Even before the first time he asked me to go with another guy, he acted like I had something valuable. Like it was an amazing gift I was giving to him. The lie was like a drug. I wanted that fantasy. Even when I realized I was one of a bunch of girls, I could still rely on him to take care of me. And then later, it wasn’t about love. It was about fear. And survival. And then it was just the life I was living. The girls were my friends. He was the boss. We did what we had to do to survive. Only when he beat me up too bad and I went to hospital did I end up going to the Vega clinic and everything started to turn around.

  “I understand why Delia Borbón agonizes about what parts of her story to tell. You can’t win that battle. If you tell it all, you know people will pity you or just laugh behind your back. They won’t respect you. It’s hard, because you know that you made some of your choices because you didn’t respect yourself. But how the fuck were you supposed to respect yourself when nobody showed you respect? Your dad didn’t respect your family enough to stay. Your mom didn’t respect her kids enough to let that motherfucker go and keep it moving. The young boys you knew didn’t respect you enough to want to hear anything out of your mouth except ‘yes, whatever you want.’ Your teachers mostly didn’t want anything more than an echo of what they believed. The US government didn’t respect the country your family came from enough to let your mom or your brother get a legal job. And even though you were a US citizen, you were too young to save your family. So how the fuck were you supposed to respect yourself when a pimp came rolling up, calling you princess and telling you he wanted to make your life golden? You chased that dream down into hell, and you were never free until that motherfucker was dead.

  “But even after you were free, you were still in the life. You had no high school diploma, no skills other than fucking and sucking dick, walking in heels and tuning out while men talked about stupid shit with a resting face that looked like you were paying attention.

  “So you went from a ho to a hustler, a sugar baby, a luxury companion on good days. But your finances always depended on men and sex and charming the fuck out of people. You didn’t know how to find that fourteen-year-old girl in the park and go back to what she would have been if she’d shaken her head to the pimp with the sweet lines, and listened instead to that English teacher who liked her writing, who thought she had a gift. Would she be working retail right now? At a bookstore? In college? With some bullshit baby daddy and a couple of kids?

  “And then, the exact same thing that was supposed to be your downfall, your fatal flaw, becomes the thing that separates you from the crowd. Your idol demands: ‘who here is a current or former sex worker?’ And with that question, she has anointed you, pulled you away from the crowd. And your entire life is changed, once again.”

  Dulce couldn’t look up from the tablet. She hadn’t been able to stop herself. The words just kept gushing from her mouth. But now, she wanted to rewind the whole thing. She had said too much. It sounded wrong to her. “Anointed you”? Who used “anointed” and “baby daddy” in the same paragraph. She was all over the place. This was a mistake.

  But she looked up and Zavier’s eyes were wet. He wasn’t crying exactly. But she could see the emotion in his face. Was that pity? It was the last thing she wanted from him.

  “You’re amazing,” he said. “You’re a natural. I can’t fucking believe you never finished te
nth grade.”

  He ran his fingers through his goatee. “I went to journalism school,” he said. “I have an MFA. So I’ve heard a lot of writing. But I’ve never heard first draft material as raw and strong as yours. And you are so fucking brave.” He swallowed. “You’re right. This does have the potential to change your whole life.”

  She sat there, stunned, unable to fully take in his words, when her mind was constructing another story. She expected scorn, or pity, or him trying to take advantage. But instead he thought her work was brave? Raw? Strong? She couldn’t process it.

  “Okay,” she said. “So what happens now?”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Wiped his eyes?

  “Now,” he said, “we edit.”

  They worked through the night. They had to switch from the laptop to the tablet, with Zavier running down to the lobby to charge it. He had to be slick to avoid the TMZ reporter who wanted to know about the girl he sat next to at the press conference. He had to bribe one of the hotel staff to keep an eye on the charging laptop, for fear the TMZ guy would steal the device and try to hack his way in. An exclusive on Borbón could mean thousands. Tens of thousands, depending on what she said and if they had an audiotape. Zavier wasn’t taking any chances.

  The two of them sat close together at the desk. Dulce wasn’t used to being around a guy like this, with all the romantic tension and no sex. She felt every brush of their hands, the press of his thigh against hers as they sat together, his breath on her neck as he stood up to stretch. And yet, she couldn’t interrupt the work to tumble him into the bed. Really, she imagined pulling him into the shower. Taking him up against the smooth white tile, with the single candle flickering with the movement of their entangled shadows. But that was just a fantasy. The water would be cold, and they weren’t alone. Throughout the night, exhausted roommates would come stumbling into the room with barely a hello. They’d take a leak in the bathroom and collapse into their beds. Not one of them seemed bothered by the editing conversation or the light of the screen.