SELFLESS (2 page)

“It’s okay,” I said. Her eyes were wide—probably as wide as my own. Neither of us could’ve foreseen this. Neither of us. How could we?

An auctioneer started up his chant, thankfully drowning out Cream’s apologies. I could barely make out the fact that the men in the crowd were lifting paddles with numbers on them. The auctioneer pointed each one out, his voice getting louder, his words flowing quicker, the price spiraling higher and higher.

The man’s slurring, the excited murmuring of the crowd of men, Cream’s chanting, the buzz of the fluorescent lights all merged together in one horrifying sound.

It was the sound of the end. I knew it. This was it. We were survivors, all of us. At least we had been.

But there were some things that couldn’t be survived. This was one of them.

We were being sold to the highest bidder.

We were nothing more than property.

The only thing to keep me from screaming was the fact that I was too shy to make a scene.

Too shy to scream for them to let us go.

Being shy definitely hadn’t come naturally to me. In fact, I was the black sheep in the family because of it.

I’d grown up in East Harlem, one of three sisters and two female cousins who crammed their lives together in a public housing apartment. We were all Puerto Rican, but the cousins were fresh from the island. My sisters knew Spanish well enough, peppering their quickly fired statements with island slang. The cousins knew English well enough, cursing fluently, adding creative and blush-inducing adjectives to their Spanish stories.

I was lucky to be able to speak at all.

Our parents had gone back down to the island as soon as my sisters had grown, leaving me in their care. I was the youngest by far, “
Mami y Papi’s sorpresita
,” they called me—Mom and Dad’s little surprise. I barely remembered my parents: big, red, wet kisses at a crowded airport, lipstick prints I had to wipe off with tissues on the train ride home.

My sisters barely talked about Mom and Dad—they were nineteen and twenty years old, and had more important things on their minds. I was just eight years old and too shy to ask them to tell me about Mami and Papi. Their volume was impossible to compete with, anyways, so I kept quiet as a general rule. I kept quiet, and kept my eyes open, trying to learn as much as possible through observation.

In some arenas, it worked.

I learned all about flirting and courting and kissing and sex. My sisters were unabashedly sexual, giving it up for any and all men who struck their fancy. In our claustrophobic two-bedroom apartment, I’d often be stuck on the couch, listening to the sounds coming from one bedroom, then relaxing when it finished, and tensing up again at the sounds coming from the other bedroom.

I didn’t know I was lucky to have the couch on those nights until the cousins arrived—
las primas
, my sisters kept going on and on about.
Las primas
this,
las primas
that.

When we met them at the same airport we’d sent my parents off from, all four of them of similar age and squealing, jumping up and down in the middle of the crowd, I felt more alone than ever. More alone, and more observant, watching everything.
Las primas
looked like my sisters—big hoop earrings, red lipstick, dark eyebrows, perms curling their hair into ringlets—and my sisters acted like
las primas—
giggling, talking faster than seemed humanly possible, switching back and forth between English and Spanish so easily that it made my head spin.

I understood everything and nothing at the same time, knowing the words but not their meanings, puzzled by cultural differences and curious about what seemed to be universal currency as far as their stories went—boys.

The cousins rattled Spanish at me on the train ride home, pinching my cheeks, but I couldn’t respond. I could understand the language, but I didn’t know how to speak it.

“Is she dumb, or what?” one of
las primas
asked my sister.

My sister looked down at me and shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “She just don’t talk much, is all. Teacher never says anything.”

The teacher never said much of anything, to be honest. The rest of the kids in my class were unmanageable, wild little animals. The teacher probably didn’t even realize I was in her class. She was working hard to simply wrangle the rest of the students that she rarely had time to teach. I was sent home with worksheets that I puzzled over, sounding out the words carefully in my quiet voice, trying to shut out the screams of laughter that often punctuated the apartment.

It was so hard for me to focus on my schoolwork when more than two of the sisters or
las primas
were in the apartment, drinking beer from the bottle, gossiping about their latest conquests of the boys in the neighborhood, or plotting their next one. I knew that my sisters received some sort of public assistance for raising me, but it seemed like they never worked. Looking back, I knew they had to have had jobs to afford the tight jeans in all their different washes, the makeup, the rings that glittered on every finger. I always had clean clothes, my hair slicked back into braids every morning for school.

I was taken care of, but I wasn’t. My basic needs were looked after—food, bath, clothes—but nothing else. I did my worksheets at the kitchen table as the sisters and
las primas
revolved around me, ignoring me and going about their own pursuits.

Then, when I was fifteen, I blossomed suddenly and devastatingly. I shot up like a weed overnight, my hair was shiny and luscious, falling to my fuller breasts, and my ass was bigger and rounder than any of my family members’. The classmates who had always overlooked me at school started to pay closer attention. So did the female contingency at home.

“Where did these
nalgonas
come from?” a sister asked, slapping me on the very thing she’d just named. “What, did some ass fairy visit you last night? Mari! Look at
sorpresita
’s
nalgonas
!”

I blushed, hot and heavy under my olive skin as the other sister and
las primas
all crowded into the bathroom.

“Fuck,
sorpresita
,” my other sister said. “That’s a better ass than any of us.”

“
No es verdad, cabrona
,” one of
las primas
insisted. “That’s not true, bitch. Look at these
nalgonas
right here!”

She slipped down her boxer shorts and mooned us right then and there, slapping her own brown cheek.

The girls’ shrieks were deafening in the tiny bathroom, and I just wanted to curl up and die of embarrassment right on the spot. One of my sisters reached forward and spanked
la prima
’s bare ass as many times as she could until
la prima
pulled her shorts back up. I was sure they were taken from one of her many conquests.

“C’mon,
sorpresita,
” the other
prima
cajoled. “Tell
tu prima
how you got such a pretty ass all of a sudden. You been doing exercises? What?”

Death was being stubborn, so I was forced to shake my head slowly.

“She’s always here,
cabrona
,” my sister said. “You see her doing squats in the corner? Lunges around the kitchen?”

“
Sopresita
’s always doing her homework,” the other sister said. “Is that where you store all of that knowledge, baby?
En las nalgonas
?”

I shook my head again, resigning myself to my fate. Death wasn’t merciful enough to take me now and the female contingency had me cornered in the bathroom.

“I know, I know,” the other
prima
said. “
Sorpresita
never talks. All those unsaid words go straight to her ass!”

“Maybe you could shut up and try it,
cabrona
!” her sister screamed, and all of the girls screamed with her, laughing their heads off.

“You gotta come to the club with us,” my sister said. “Oh my God, they would die. You would fucking slay them with that ass,
sorpresita.”

“I can’t go to the club,” I said as the female contingency congratulated one another for this terrible idea.

“What’d you say,
sorpresita
?” my other sister asked.

“No!”
la prima
shouted. “Don’t speak! We don’t want those
nalgonas
deflating!”

I swore that I was going to have hearing loss from all the laughter in that tight little bathroom.

“I can’t go to the club,” I said. “I’m only fifteen.”

“You’ll be sixteen next month,” my sister said dismissively, as if that made all the difference in the world.

“You’ll be fine,
sorpresita,
” the other sister said. “You stick with us girls. We know people. We can get you in.”

Getting in wasn’t what I was worried about. I didn’t want to be paraded around all of the guys my sisters and cousins targeted. I didn’t want to go to the club at all.

“When we gonna do this, then,
cabronas
?”
la prima
asked. “This Friday?”

“Fuck it, let’s go tonight,” the other
prima
said.

“It’s a school night,” I protested.

“
Ay!”
my sister cried, swatting me on my ass. “What a little scholar! No, we’ll wait for Friday, then.
Sorpresita
’s gotta get her education. Mami and Papi wanted that most of all.”

I perked up, wanting to hear more about Mami and Papi. They were shadows to me—red kisses in a crowded airport. But the female contingency cackled on, planning what I was going to be wearing and what they were going to be wearing and who’d be most interested in whom.

“
Cabronas
, we’re forgetting the most important thing!” my other sister exclaimed.

“
Sorpresita
doesn’t know what’s up! We gotta give her the talk.”

“
Sí, sí, sí,
”
la prima
said quickly. “She can’t go to the club without the talk. Not with that ass.”

My sister pushed me down on the toilet as she and
la prima
perched on the edge of the tub. My other sister hopped up to sit on the sink, and the other
prima
leaned against the towel rack. My heart sank. They had me in their claws now. I was going to get a real education, now—even though I’d been learning about them ever since I’d learned to observe.

“There ain’t nothing wrong with sex,
hermana
,” my sister said. “Sister, we’re all products of it.”

The rest of the girls made noises of assent. I pressed my lips together, trying to just get through this. There was no escape for me.

“It’s a beautiful thing, really,”
la prima
said dreamily. “If it’s with the right guy.”

“Or the wrong guy with the right dick,” the other
prima
put in. They all cackled.

“The most important thing is that you protect yourself,” my sister said. “Protect yourself in all senses.”

“Don’t let anyone into your
chocha
unless they’re wearing a condom,” my other sister said, drawing a giant “X” over her own crotch with her finger. “Too many things can happen.”

“You don’t want a little baby in
tu panza
, do you?”
la prima
asked, patting my flat belly.

“And you don’t want a disease,” my sister said. “Always use a condom. That’s rule number one. Protection number one.”

“Even if you’re taking it in that ass of yours,” the other
prima
said.

“Don’t give that ass away,” my other sister protested. “Only to the man you love.”

“All of them are gonna tell her they love her, trying to get in that ass,”
la prima
said. “
Sorpresita
, don’t let them in. That’s a one-way street, your ass.”

“I dunno,” my sister said. “I kinda like it.”

I had to cover my ears at the resulting screams, dodging as the other sister hopped down from the sink to slap at our sister.

“
Sinvergüenza
!” the other sister hollered, laughing so hard that tears were rolling down her cheeks, blackened from her heavy mascara. “You shameless thing! What are you thinking, telling
sorpresita
that?”

“What?” my sister said, fending off the slaps with blows of her own. “She’s gonna make her own decisions about things. At least she can’t get knocked up if she takes it in the ass.”

“
Es verdad, cabrona,”
la prima
said solemnly. “She can’t get a baby through her ass.”