“I feel like you’re not supporting me,” she says.
He takes a deep breath. He closes his eyes. He opens them. He looks at her for a moment, then stares back up at the ceiling. “It’s getting hard to support you,” he finally says. “It feels like the whole thing is about hating men or something. And I’m, like, a man, so I kind of take it personally.”
“I don’t hate men,” she says, her voice shaking with hurt, or anger, or both. “I just hate what some men do. I hate that they get away with it.”
“I get it,” he says, sitting up to face her. “I hate that stuff too. But you’re all talking about the bad stuff all the time, so it seems like that’s all you think there is. But there are good guys too. And most guys are probably somewhere in the middle. What about them?” He pauses. He waits for her to meet his eyes. “What about me?”
She thinks she hears his voice crack. He looks away, but not before she notices the new wetness in his eyes. She opens her mouth to speak but nothing comes out.
“I know I’m not perfect,” he says. “But I try to be a good boyfriend. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says.
His eyes bore into hers, begging. “Do you think I’m like them?” he says softly. “Do you think I’m a bad guy?”
“No,” she says immediately, because she knows it’s the answer he needs to hear. She wraps her arms around him because she knows he needs to be comforted. They hold each other for a long time, and she can feel the relief in his body just as she notices the rising tension in hers. She knows it’s true that she loves him, but she wonders if maybe there is a little part of herself, deep down, that doesn’t trust him, that believes there is some latent animal part of him, part of all men, that’s like those guys, that’s bad, and there’s nothing he, or she, or anyone, can do to fix it.
*
Krista’s and Trista’s families sit beside each other at a wedding that is like almost every other wedding they’ve attended. Same music, same suits, same floral arrangements. Same words coming out of Pastor Skinner’s mouth. Same tired old reading from Ephesians: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
Krista and Trista look at each other and roll their darkly penciled eyes.
*
A girl takes her dog out for his afternoon walk. She feels her phone buzz in her pocket with a new text message: U like? The attached photo glares at her from the screen and hijacks the good day she was having until now, replacing it with a sick feeling that spreads through her entire body.
When did she ever give that douche bag in her economics class the impression that she wanted him to send her a picture of his pink, crooked dick? How can it be so easy for him to force his body into her vision like this, without her permission?
She looks away from the dick pic and sees her dog crouched over the ground, concentrating. She bends down, holds out her phone and clicks, then presses send to reply with a picture of her dog’s fresh warm turd and the text message: U like?
*
A girl searches on the Internet: How do girls masturbate?
ROSINA.
In a miracle of scheduling, Rosina has a whole glorious Saturday off work and babysitting until the Nowhere Girls meeting tonight. Is this what it feels like to be a normal teenager? To have hours on end to sit around and do whatever you want, to do nothing, to listen to music and stare at the ceiling and dream about the life you’re going to have, someday, as soon as you make it out of this one?
Mom’s at work, of course. Tía Blanca is watching all the kids next door. Rosina already finished her homework, so now all she has to do is go downstairs to check on Abuelita once in a while. Otherwise, she’s free to turn her music on as loud as she wants (Abuelita’s hard of hearing) and let the voices of her idols carry her away to a place where she is strong and fearless, where she can imagine herself onstage with them—harmonizing vocals with Corin Tucker, playing guitar next to Kathleen Hanna.
Bang bang bang, says the door.
“Rosina, open up,” says her mother on the other side.
No, Rosina thinks, closing her eyes. Something seizes in her chest. Mami has an uncanny sense of the exact right time to crush Rosina, always right at the moment she is starting to feel free.
“Rosina!” Bang bang bang.
“It’s not locked,” Rosina mumbles. Of course it’s not locked. Mom had Uncle Ephraim remove the lock as soon as Rosina started puberty.
Mami has a way of opening the door that always seems somewhat violent to Rosina. Like she’s a ball of anger and everything she touches explodes.
“Turn that noise off!” Mami shouts over the music.
Rosina rolls over on her bed and shuts off her stereo, saying a silent good-bye to the Butchies. “What?” she says in her best bitchy teen snarl.
“Elena called in sick,” Mom says, scowling at a poster of a sweaty, tattooed, and scantily clad female musician onstage. “You have to come in to work.”
Rosina bolts upright. “No,” she says firmly. “Absolutely not.”
“Don’t give me that,” Mami says. “You’re not going to skip work just to lie around doing nothing.”
“I have plans,” Rosina says. “I have to leave soon.”
“What plans? Watching TV with that crazy girl?”
“I told you not to call her that.”
“Whatever it is can wait until another time,” Mami says, rifling through the pile of clean laundry on the floor that Rosina still hasn’t managed to fold and put away. She picks up a black shirt, smells it, then throws it at Rosina. “Here.”
Rosina throws it back. “I’m not going.”
Their eyes lock. Mami stands completely still. A rock. A mountain.
“You are going to work,” Mami says slowly. “Get dressed.”
“It’s my day off,” Rosina says.
“Your family needs you.”
Fuck my family, Rosina thinks. But it’s like Mami heard her, like she read Rosina’s mind, because her eyes narrow as if in response. Rosina can read her mother’s mind too. She hears her when she thinks, This means war.
“How did I end up with such a lazy and ungrateful daughter?” Mami says.
“Lazy?” Rosina says. “Are you insane? I work my fucking ass off for you people.”
“Watch your mouth,” Mami hisses.
Rosina stands up. “I’m in high school, Mami. In case you didn’t know, I’m supposed to be learning shit, maybe even—God forbid!—having fun once in a while. I’m not supposed to be working almost every school night. I’m not supposed to be taking care of everybody else’s fucking kids.”
“How dare you talk to me like that,” Mami says, stepping closer. “You need to treat your mother with respect. I do everything for you.”