Side Chick Nation

by Aya De León

  “They’re out of the New York Times,” Zavier said and headed back to a newsstand they had passed. “Yell if they’re about to close the gates.”

  Dulce stood in line to buy the shirt, glancing from time to time at their gate. Her mind kept drifting into a surreal mash up of sex and flooding water, crying women and dead bodies.

  “Dulce,” a voice startled her out of her daze. She looked up expecting to see Zavier, but it was Phillip Gerard.

  “Fate brings us together again,” he said. “Same airport. Any chance I can tempt you to come to Panama with me. A beautiful country. Truly.”

  “What?” Dulce asked. “I just came out of a disaster zone.”

  “Let me take your mind off all that,” he said. “I’ll be staying on the beach.”

  “Forget it,” Dulce said.

  “I think you need to back off, man,” Zavier said. He held several national papers in his hand, like a weapon.

  Gerard’s back was to him. But then the older man turned around. “I didn’t realize she already had company,” he said.

  In that moment, Zavier recognized the man he had seen in Santo Domingo.

  “What the fuck?” he asked. “I thought you said this guy was your uncle. From Cuba.”

  The man laughed. “More like her sugar daddy from Miami.”

  Dulce’s face flamed and she could feel the snacks from the plane lurch in her stomach. She thought she might be sick. Or spontaneously ignite in a blaze of shame.

  “Maybe another time, sweetheart,” Gerard said, and strode back the way he had come.

  “You—” Zavier stammered. “You acted like it was all so long ago. When you were a teenager. But we were on a date, and you left for some . . . older guy you were fucking for money?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Dulce said. But she could see she’d fucked it up. She couldn’t explain it to him like this. She couldn’t explain how, when you get turned out as a fourteen year old, you just learn to fuck on autopilot. You don’t think about it. You don’t think about who you want to be with, you just think about survival. Who can keep you off the street. Who can make sure you get food in the fridge. You follow the money. How it was different now. Now that they’d been together in this different way.

  But she had chickened out from telling him about it. Even though the viejita had told her to. She knew she should, but she gambled on him never knowing, and yet he had learned and now she didn’t look like a girl who didn’t know better, she just looked like a liar. What did Jerry used to call her. A lying bitch whore.

  She shrank from the hurt and fury in Zavier’s face.

  “Just let me explain,” she said. “We can talk about it on the flight.”

  She held her breath, hoping that somehow he would say yes. She stared at him, the papers held against his chest. The face of the US president. His furious expression and the headline about him firing back at the Mayor of San Juan. She saw the word “nasty.”

  She looked up to Zavier’s face and that’s what she saw. He looked at her as if she were nasty.

  In the brief second that she stared at him, Zavier said nothing. Then his mouth contracted into a tight circle, and he threw the newspapers with all his strength. The enraged face of the president unfurled and sailed over the mezzanine, newsprint pages fluttered down onto the waiting passengers like big, gray birds.

  Zavier turned away from her and stalked back toward the newsstand.

  Dulce spun away from his retreating back toward the JFK flight.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, they still hadn’t closed the plane doors. There was some kind of delay. Zavier could still make it.

  Her eyes stayed glued to the front of the aisle. With every new passenger who came in, she felt a jolt of hope that it would be Zavier. But she saw a parade of flight attendants and other airline staff. Finally, she had nearly given up hope and the tears began to fall. Through her blurred vision, a man entered in a blue, short-sleeved shirt. Her heart leaped and she blinked the tears away. But it was a dark-haired white man in a button-down. Not Zavier. They were closing the doors now. He wasn’t coming. Wouldn’t be joining her. They couldn’t talk about it. She’d fucked it up for good.

  Now, the jumbled memories of the bodies, and the viejita, and the sex, were no longer balanced between possibility and rage. They’d lost the feeling of falling in love to pull her back from the precipice of hopelessness. Now it was all despair and horror, regret, and shame.

  Chapter 27

  She sleepwalked out of JFK and toward the ground transportation. No luggage. Nothing to declare. Nothing to claim.

  She stood there for a moment, totally disoriented. It took a moment for Dulce to realize that the women standing next to her in line for a cab were talking about her. Not about her exactly, but about Celia M. Reyes.

  “Isn’t it every woman’s nightmare,” one said. “To have the guy you gave that blow job to twenty years ago pop up in the wrong place.”

  “No wonder she only wanted to talk to another woman who’d been a hooker or a stripper or whatever,” the other woman said. “Someone who wouldn’t judge.”

  “Some of these women need to be taken down a peg, though,” the first woman said. “Not Delia, but some of these women get married and act like they were never out here in these streets. Calling other girls all kinds of sluts. Wait til you run into that guy whose dick you sucked in the bathroom at the club.”

  “And a motherfucker shoulda been grateful and kept his mouth shut, but no,” the other woman said.

  The two of them laughed.

  Dulce walked past the two women to where she could get the bus to the subway. From JFK she barely had the money to take the train. Under other circumstances, she’d flirt with the token booth agent to get through or ask a man on the way to Manhattan if she could share a ride with him. But she had on an oversized airport shirt over a dirty tank top and flip flops. Her shorts had been pissed on and washed out with rainwater, then washed again in the dark. She was sweaty and there was a light film of dirt on her legs below the loose shorts. She hadn’t showered since sex with Zavier, which was worse, because she could still feel, still smell him on her skin.

  Dulce caught the inbound train, and found a copy of the Times on one of the seats. And there it was. Her article. Her article with Zavier. It looked good. The edits didn’t compromise the message at all, like Zavier had feared. But she couldn’t feel elated. Not since copies of the same newspaper had swooped through the air in the Miami airport.

  The muffled voice of the subway train operator announced Fulton Street. She was in Manhattan now, but wasn’t sure where she was going. She couldn’t go home to that apartment she’d grown up in. Not yet.

  Today, she needed what no one in her family had given in a decade: comfort. She needed someone to gather her up in their arms and let her sob. Sob for the man she’d lost. And for the thirty-five dead bodies, and the raging mother, and the santera who buried the dead. For the family of five who died in the car. For the wife of Pedro, whose name she had never learned, whom Pedro could successfully stalk in the chaos, and maybe would find again. For the mother and baby who died right beside her in the shelter while she was sleeping, or knocked out, or whatever. And for all the ruined houses, and people who were still dying beneath the two thirds of the planet’s surface that had declared war on that island.

  She went to the only place she knew for—what had she called it? Had Jerry called it? A place for broke down whores to go. She went to the Vega clinic.

  In the lobby, she felt out of place among the hot girls with fly clothes, tight weaves and flawless makeup. She slunk into the lobby, all her own curves hidden under the giant shirt.

  On the walls around them were schedules for the clinic’s mobile health van, which served Lower Manhattan. These were interspersed with images of attractive, confident young women from the clinic’s demographics that encouraged them to:

  Use condoms . . . every time.

  Watch you
r drink.

  Recognize the signs of an abusive relationship.

  The wall above the reception desk had a framed movie poster for Live Nude Girls Unite! featuring three comic book hero styled women, half-naked, with a “Strippers Union” picket sign and fists in the air. There were also posters for the clinic’s Sexy Girl’s Guide to Staying Safe and Healthy in NYC. Dulce had kept it under her bed like a secret holy book when she was with Jerry.

  For a few years, she had strode through that lobby, and all the regulars knew her name.

  “Excuse me?” Dulce asked the receptionist. “Is Eva Feldman here?”

  The receptionist said that her former therapist was on vacation. The girl didn’t even recognize Dulce today. Not with her oversized top, kinky brown hair, baggy shorts, and unpainted lips. Even the blue and glittery polish on her toenails was chipped and trashed.

  “Want to leave a message?” the receptionist asked. “Dr. Feldman will be back next week.”

  Dulce shook her head and let herself fade into the background of the lobby. And when the receptionist buzzed the girls into the stairwell, Dulce blended into the crowd. As everyone else went into the multipurpose room, Dulce headed up the stairs, past the administrative offices and therapy rooms.

  She was nearly at the top floor when she arrived at a door that had no one going in and out. She knew that this led to Marisol Rivera’s private apartment, a studio that opened onto the roof. Or at least it had a while back. And Marisol owned it. No one was moving out of Manhattan unless they got pushed out. Dulce gambled that Marisol would still be there.

  She knew it wasn’t appropriate to drop by the former director’s home. In fact, Dulce’s former therapist had told Marisol it was even inappropriate to take clients to her apartment when the clinic’s shelter was in overflow. But Marisol had taken her in anyway, and bathed her and put her to bed. She knew she could fall apart in those arms.

  Dulce pulled her passport out of her water wallet. She used the thick, laminated edge of the booklet to slip the lock on the hallway door, and went up to the studio apartment.

  Dulce took a deep breath and knocked.

  The woman that came to the door looked a little like Marisol with curlier hair. They had similar features. But whereas Marisol’s body was an extreme hourglass, this woman had square hips and broader shoulders.

  Dulce didn’t even contemplate English. She immediately began to speak Spanish.

  “Is Marisol home?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” the woman said. “I’m her cousin. She’s staying at her boyfriend’s. You know Raul?”

  Dulce had met him in passing when he was a security guard at the clinic. “Sure,” she said. “Maybe I’ll catch her there.”

  As Dulce was preparing to leave, a baby began to cry inside the apartment.

  “Zara!” the woman yelled into the hallway.

  There was no answer.

  The woman propped the door open and walked across the hallway.

  “Zara!” she yelled up the stairs that led to the roof. “The baby’s awake. You need to come down to feed him!”

  “Ya vengo,” came a younger woman’s voice from upstairs.

  The woman turned back to Dulce. “When I see Marisol, should I give her a message?”

  “No message,” Dulce said. “Sorry to bother you.” Then she turned and headed down toward the lobby.

  On her way down the second flight of stairs, she nearly ran into a woman with a familiar face.

  “Dulce, is that you?”

  Dulce looked up to see a thirtyish African American woman and a younger white woman with a slender frame.

  “It’s Tyesha,” the black woman said. “What? You don’t recognize me in this suit?”

  The two of them hugged, but Dulce couldn’t find her words.

  Tyesha turned to the other woman. “Dulce and I traveled to Cuba together,” Tyesha explained, then turned back to make the introduction. “Dulce, this is Serena.”

  Dulce extended her arm on autopilot and shook hands with Serena. She recognized the clinic’s office manager, but she’d never met her officially. The trip to Cuba seemed like a lifetime ago. But it was only a year and change since she left New York with Marisol, Tyesha, Kim, and Jody.

  “Were you looking for Marisol?” Tyesha asked. “I’m director of the clinic now.”

  “And I came to tell you your next appointment is here,” Serena said.

  “Great to see you Dulce,” Tyesha said as she crossed to Marisol’s old office.

  “I heard a lot about that trip to Cuba,” Serena said. “But I must have gotten it wrong. I thought you stayed there.”

  Before Dulce could even think about it, the tears started to fall.

  “Oh honey,” Serena said. “Are you okay?”

  Dulce shook her head. Why hadn’t she stayed? In Cuba, she could have had a whole new life with Josefina. She had a family that had loved her and fed her and taken care of her. She had a good life there, but she just got bored. Like she got bored with Zavier and had to go fuck Gerard. Then she was too much of a punk to own up to it.

  She managed to fuck up every good thing that came into her life.

  Dulce’s knees gave out, and she collapsed onto the stairs and wailed. Serena pressed in close beside her and wrapped her arms around Dulce. Serena was much slighter than her, but her arms held Dulce with surprising strength.

  When the fiercest part of the storm had passed, Dulce wiped her face and attempted to pull herself together. “I can’t believe I’m falling apart in the arms of a virtual stranger.”

  “Honey, we’re not strangers,” Serena said. “We’re from the same tribe of women. I don’t just work at the clinic. I was a client . . . back in the day.”

  Dulce nodded and more tears came, but quietly. She relaxed back into Serena’s arms and just let herself unclench for the first time since she’d run into Gerard in the Miami airport.

  * * *

  When she finally wiped her eyes and stood up, Serena stood, too. Serena patted her shoulder awkwardly in the narrow hallway.

  “Marisol isn’t up there, but I can give her your number, if you like,” Serena said, guiding her down to the reception desk.

  “That would be great,” Dulce said. “I came straight here from the airport.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Serena said. “If you just came from Cuba, then you probably don’t know what’s been going on here.”

  Dulce opened her mouth to explain that she hadn’t been in Cuba, but Serena was going on excitedly. “One of our own just blew up in the New York Times.” She pulled up a paper from the desk. “Have you seen this? ‘Celia M. Reyes.’ She got the exclusive with Delia Borbón.”

  “It’s me,” Dulce said. “I wrote that.” And she began to cry again.

  Chapter 28

  “So let me get this straight,” Marisol was saying an hour later. “You literally just got off the plane from PR?”

  Dulce had told Marisol the whole story.

  “Do you need somewhere to stay?” Marisol asked. “Our shelter is full to the fire code with folks from Puerto Rico, but I’m sure I could figure something out.”

  “No,” Dulce shook her head. “I can stay with my family. I just needed someplace to land before I had to deal with them.”

  “Do you need any money?” Marisol asked.

  Dulce emptied out her water wallet, and in the bottom were several twenties. As she put everything back, a pair of business cards fell out of her passport. Zavier’s and Gerard’s.

  Marisol reached for Gerard’s card.

  Marisol froze. Then she looked up sharply. “You know this guy?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Dulce said. “He was my sugar daddy for a few weeks. But he wouldn’t do shit for me when I got stuck. Lemme rip that up.”

  “But do you know what kind of business he does?” Marisol asked.

  Dulce shrugged. “He said something about real estate.”

  “More like disaster capitalist,” Marisol said.
“He’s one of the rich guys who’s trying to buy up Puerto Rico right now.”

  “What?” Dulce asked.

  “He has this bullshit charity,” Marisol continued. “He promises to give food and water to struggling people in Puerto Rico, but it’s really just for the people whose houses they’re buying up for pennies on the dollar. Promising cash to desperate people, and even promising food and water. They’re so damn crooked they won’t even foot the bill for the crumbs they’re offering to folks whose houses they’re practically stealing.”

  “That’s so fucked up,” Dulce said.

  “Yeah,” Marisol said. “Those ‘please give to Puerto Rico’ signs are all over the hood in NYC. And it’s the fucking vultures asking for money while they rip us off.”

  “I could call a journalist from the New York Times,” Dulce said. “I know he was talking about all the vultures trying to cash in. He’d probably run with the story.”

  Marisol walked around to the desk. “Use my—Tyesha’s phone. Dial nine to get out.”

  Dulce took a deep breath and called Zavier’s cell.

  It rang three times before he answered.

  Just hearing his voice, she could feel a lump in her throat. “Um . . . it’s Dulce.”

  “I thought not getting on that plane was enough of a statement,” he said. “But if I’ve gotta say it, then here goes: don’t call me, Dulce.”

  “But this isn’t—I mean, I have a news tip for you,” she said.

  “I don’t want it,” he said. “I don’t want anything from you.” He hung up.

  Marisol raised her eyebrows. “Oh he was that journalist.” She came around the desk and put her arm around Dulce. “Are you ok?”

  Dulce nodded. She was all cried out from before, but she felt a dull burning in her chest now.

  “I just wanted to be able to do something for you,” Dulce said. “You know, hook you up with a big reporter. You done so much for me.”

  “You don’t owe me for that,” Marisol said. “It’s what we do.”