“I got it this time,” Diego said when he heard the porter’s light knock on the door. It was too late to tell those things to tell him anything. We stayed up watching TV until my parents got home drunk insulting one another. My brother taught me how to shoot a pellet gun, play poker, and hold my breath under water. I don’t know why but I wanted him to know I wasn’t, had never been, an only child. I never told him I was the one who found my brother, the one who untied him. Sometimes, he let me cut his hair with kitchen shears.
He was so skinny, we sometimes exchanged pants. “Send up the bill,” he said and stood to put on his jeans. He reached for the phone and dialed the operator.
We stared silently at the whirling ceiling fans blades. “Bull shit,” he said with a tinge of hurt. If Diego found out, though, everything would change. All this happened back when we weren’t afraid of anything. What I did was bad, he said, and I was lucked out it didn’t turn out worse.
The next day Dad called from Chile where he was visiting a cardiologist. They locked us up all night and we had a great time. Three patrol cars for a few shitty trash cans that was too funny. One night we set fire to neighborhood trash cans. When he asked what I was thinking, I was too embarrassed to tell him I was comfortable in my own skin. “You’re the most beautiful thing in the world,” Diego would say whenever we met at the motel that was too big, too depressing, and too ugly. Not like before, when Diego would come over to make up only to have it end with both of us slinging absurd accusations at one another just for the hell of it. Truth is, long or short, I never felt anything. The doctor warned about occasional cramps. I tried covering myself with a corner of the bed sheet. “Forget it,” he snapped, walking to the minibar for a beer. Even when he kissed me in the spots nobody thinks to kiss the eyelids, bottom of the wrists. “You look like a dead girl,” he had said earlier. Admit it.”ĭiego walked around the room showing off his lean, hard body. It pisses me off when women give themselves so much importance. “I’m not an only child,” I said, shutting off the radio. This tune was a cumbia about a girl raped and killed in a wooded clearing. The TV projected porn movies that had stopped making us laugh, so we sought distraction through music. At that point the damage was done and I wanted to get as far away from him as possible, as if that was even possible. It was hot and the AC didn’t work, so we made a game of melting ice cubes across our foreheads. ( Translated from Spanish by Hector Duarte Jr.)Ī day after it all went down, Diego said I had the spoiled personality of an only child.
0 kommentar(er)
