He chewed like the cows on the farms lining the one major road into Rawlings. I started to answer, but with his mouth full he blurted out, Because you left once, right? You’re already a sellout, right? So what makes you think you can just come back like nothing? With no consequences?
My mouth went dry, and I could taste and smell my own sour breath despite the bits of food. I remembered I had on no makeup—no eyeliner, nothing on my lips. My hair was frizzy, freaked out by the sudden onslaught of Miami humidity, the ponytail on my shoulder fluffing up like a squirrel’s tail. There was no way I looked pretty enough to flirt with. He reached for another avocado chunk from my plate. He pressed down harder—much harder—than he needed to snare it.
—I’m not a sellout, I said.
—So what, are you doing like a report for school on this?
He held his fork up and lassoed the air with it. A couple of the other guys turned and flicked their eyes over my body, waiting for me to say something.
Victor said, You like a little baby reporter? You reporting on us here, Smart Girl?
He bit his bottom lip—a chipped and turned-in front tooth flashed out like a warning—and lifted his chin. Stray grays sat shrouded among the reds I’d noticed before. He was older than I thought, maybe much older. The skin circling the base of his earrings, I saw now, was blue-black, the holes ragged and peeling. I fixed my bag on my shoulder, grabbed the strap with my free hand.
—I have to go look for my mom, I said.
—You do that. Say hi to Omar for me.
—I won’t, I spit over my shoulder, trying to move away fast.
—Good, because I don’t fucking know him or his stuck-up ex-bitch.
I pretended I didn’t hear him or the snorts from the few guys who’d started paying attention to our conversation. I shoved my way into the crowd and moved in the direction of the kitchen, leaving my half-empty plate of food on a picture-lined table behind the couch. I pulled the rubber band from my hair and ran my fingers through it, arranged it on my shoulders, smoothed my thumb over each eyebrow. I lowered my head and pinched each of my cheeks as hard as I could stand it, trying to force some color into them. When I passed the bathroom, I ducked inside and slammed the door, the sound lost under the tumult of voices. I sat on the toilet and cried without wanting to, without letting myself look in the mirror at any point. I didn’t want to know what a sellout looked like.
*
That guy Victor took off not long after I emerged from the bathroom. He waved at me before leaving like nothing had happened and said, Good talking to you, as he held two fingers and his thumb like a gun in my direction. He kissed my mom goodbye, hugged the owner of the house on his way out. I worked up the courage to ask my mom, How do you know that guy, and she said, His abuela spends the days down here. I think he went to your high school, but a while ago.
She watched me as I stared at the front door after he left. He’s not for you, she said.
The crowd inside the house continued to thin as the night deepened, which was sort of a relief, but sort of not: with fewer people there, you could tell I wasn’t talking to anyone, just standing around with my bag on the floor next to me or between my legs as I pretended to be part of conversations about the Easter march and how well negotiations were going, about the mayor’s leadership and whether or not the attorney general was a lesbian, me just eating grains of rice one by one in an effort to look too occupied with food to chime in. My mom floated around the house talking to people, making them laugh, bringing them cups of water or soda or café, like she was part of another family’s Noche Buena, a family she liked more and wanted to be in, one that understood her better.
Around midnight, she came up to me and said that anyone still there would be staying the night (most were women, most were dressed in black). I thought of them as the core; I recognized some of them from TV or from news stills, where they’d stood in Ariel’s living room and prayed through phone calls, prayed before and after press conferences, put their hands on lawyers and blessed them.
—We’re going to bed now to be up early, she said. But a few of us will stay awake to pray all the way through.
—What are you gonna do?
She shrugged. Pray, she said. Try to keep people focused. But you should sleep, that way you can take the couch. If you wait, someone’ll take it. You don’t want to be under there.
She pointed at the long wooden table with the food.