"Lucia! Lucia!! Wake up! Come and help me open the gates; I'm off to get the groceries.
I'm groggy with sleep, so I mistake the undeniably hard body sliding against mine for that of an admirer I might have brought home from the strip club. It in turn makes me wonder about the 'groceries' part. I slowly open my eyes to glance at the long mirror across the room Stella and I share and immediately stiffen in fear: I'm 12 again, and he's above me. I can't move, and I don't breathe too much. I can wait it out. When he's done, he'll go away, and he'll leave me alone. There must be a reason he touches me like this. I feel my nightie lift slowly.
"You're such a beautiful girl, do you know that?" he asks me.
I still pretend to be asleep, reminding myself over and over again that he'll leave me alone soon and that it'll just be for a little more. Just then my aunt bursts in, a long whip in her hand, and the scene changes: I'm in the bathroom with her, naked and wet with the water thrown on me to heighten the sting from the whip and screaming from the pain. It's so much. I want to explain that I did nothing and that I didn't ask for it. I scream for my mom, begging her to come and save me, when I hear her voice: "You must have enjoyed everything he did to you; that's why you didn't speak up. You liked it". My cries increase in intensity when I hear Stella, amidst the chaos, calling my name: "Lucia! Lucia!! LU-FUCKING-CIA!!-
I bolt up from bed, one hand automatically flying to my right cheek. I eye an obviously flustered and scantily dressed Stella in disbelief.
"Fucking Ouch?!! Did you just?"
"You had me bloody scared to death. You weirdo!" she exclaims.
"Did you have to hit me like I stole your man, though?" I yell right back.
Something flashes behind her eyes so fast, I'm sure I imagined it, but she smiles at me for a moment before bursting into laughter. After a few seconds of staring at her incredulously, I joined in. It's hard not to love Stella.
"Nightmares are back, huh?" she asks after our laugh marathon.
"I guess so". I answer, refusing to meet her eyes.
"And you're still not going to tell me what happened, chicas?" She asks again. I chanced a glance at her and found her looking at me with so much love and concern. I look away again. I don't deserve it. I was dirty, damaged, and broken. I didn't deserve anything or anyone nice.
Skewed logic, I'm aware. But it's helped me to always keep my guard up.
It's kept me safe.
"I'll tell you soon, Ginger," I say, calling her by her stripper name. She hated it.
True to form, she groaned, " Ugh! Call me that one more time; I dare you. I'm a natural blonde, for heaven's sake. Mario is a dunce, I tell you. Mark my words. The puta doesn't have two brain cells to rub together".
I agreed. Mario, our boss at the strip club and the fucker that fired me, is basically the walking stereotype of a pimp. A short, fat, ugly waste of space. With a (you guessed it) pot belly that looked like it went on for miles if you looked at it from the side, and let's not forget the receding hairline. He's a typical 'alpha male' with no respect for women, and that's usually evident in the purple and black bruises the girls at the club sport receive from time to time. The customers didn't care, though; the strip club was just seedy enough to both overlook and encourage things like that. Sometimes, I even think that the customers like to see the bruises. They're sick fucks like that.
"It's a new day, Carina," referring to Stella with the Spanish word for sweetheart. "I want to start it nice, happy, and optimistic; no more talks of nightmares and Mario".
I stretch towards my bedside table, pull out the top drawer, and reach in for a joint and a lighter. I light up the blunt, take a deep breath with the first hit, and feel my eyes flutter close on the exhale. I open my eyes to find Stella watching me. I gestured in her direction, silently asking if she wanted a hit, an offer she refused, but then again, she always did. I keep asking because somewhere along the line, it became our thing: I'd ask, and she'd refuse. Always.
It was my constant in a way.