Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

Fear was her father drunk.

But this didn’t feel like that. This felt like growing up.

Jeanette’s mother had tried to talk to her about sex once. She’d found a condom in Jeanette’s purse. Her mother had tried to borrow her purse without even asking, which had angered her. It was a vintage quilted Chanel, her father’s gift to her on her thirteenth birthday. Her father gifted his love, her father who never bought her mother anything. Jeanette sensed an attempt at reclamation when her mother borrowed her purse without asking.

Jeanette liked that her mother thought boys were fucking her when she found the condom at the bottom of the Chanel bag. The truth was that she had been flirting with Manny, one of the popular boys, one of the boys who would flunk out in a year, who sat next to her in chemistry and copied her answers. She was good at chemistry.

“Do you like it raw?” Manny had said to her in class one day. Jeanette had no idea what he meant, though now she knew. But she had feigned knowledge because she liked that Manny thought she was the kind of girl who’d know. She liked that Manny pinched her waist and winked when he said it.

“Yeah,” she said, popping her gum and shrugging.

“Damn, girl. Me too,” said Manny. “Guess neither of us needs this then.” He handed her the condom and cracked up in laughter.

The teacher scolded them both, and the pathetic girls, the ones nobody wanted, looked toward them with disgust. Jeanette kept the condom and placed it in every purse or backpack she used each day or night, a reminder that she was wanted. And she pictured that when it finally happened, the fucking, she’d pull it out and the guy doing the fucking would know that other people wanted her too.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend I can stop you from, you know, doing … you know…,” her mother had said, refusing to meet Jeanette’s eyes. “I just want you to know that nobody is going to want you—for serious things, things like marriage—if you are, you know, if you’ve been, well, if you’ve been used already.”

Jeanette had giggled. Nobody looked more used up than her mother. She’d never have said it to her, but Jeanette knew her mother was just jealous her father didn’t want to use her anymore. That nobody wanted to use her mother. That her mother was useless.

On the car ride to South Beach, Johnson told Jeanette his name was Johnson. Jeanette was embarrassed she hadn’t thought to ask. She didn’t give her real name. She told Johnson her name was Caro. Caro was the hottest, most popular girl at school. Caro was Manny’s girlfriend the year before, which meant Caro liked it raw.

“How old are you really, though?” Johnson said, switching the manual gear up a level and getting on the highway. “You know what? Don’t answer that. I’m barely legal myself, ha ha ha.”

Jeanette didn’t get it. She was so tired of pretending to get things. She switched the subject. “I’ve been to a club before.”

“Oh yeah?”

Johnson had the radio station tuned to Power 96. Jeanette thought he looked too old to listen to hip-hop but then realized she just thought that because her parents never listened to Power 96, only the easy listening station and Spanish talk radio, what she assumed all adults over a certain age listened to.

“Yeah. In South Beach. Got super drunk. It was so fun.”

This wasn’t a lie. Two months earlier she’d used Sasha’s sister’s ID, and even though the two of them looked only slightly similar, the bouncer at Club Tigre had glanced at her rhinestone bra top and slid open the velvet rope. She remembered dancing on a table. She remembered older guy after older guy buying her drinks. She remembered Sasha’s attachable ponytail that made Sasha’s hair longer and thicker. She remembered vomiting on the side of the road on their way home.

“Well, it’ll be fun tonight. You ever been to a foam party?”

“Yeah,” Jeanette lied.

After an uncomfortable pause she said, “So what do you do?” This was what grown people said to each other according to all movies and TV shows. They were passing the downtown skyline, which meant Miami Beach was minutes away. Select windows of high-rises lit up like those Lite-Brite toys from when she was young. She pictured reaching out and plucking each window into her palm so the whole city went dark.

Johnson eyed her before returning his eyes to the road. “Are you some kind of hooker?”

“What?”

“What’s your endgame here? I’m not giving you money. What are you trying to do to me?”

“Fine,” Jeanette said, measuring the depth of her next lie. “I’ll tell you. I’m seventeen and a half.” She thought that’s what he wanted to hear. She thought that would set him at ease.

But Johnson just frowned at her. “I don’t get it,” he said.

They drove in silence until they crossed the bridge to the beach. Immediately the human landscape changed. Women in stilettos. Men in suits. Sex and sexiness pouring from every crevice.

But the club was nothing like she’d expected. They’d passed the places with long lines and thin women checking names off clipboards. They’d passed the hotel lobbies lined with bored valets watching over expensive cars. Their club was in an alley off Ocean Drive that smelled like piss and mildew. There was no line, no velvet rope. There was one skinny guy with red eyes who didn’t bother to ask her for ID, which would have blown Jeanette’s cover. He gave them both orange wristbands.

Inside there were only a few people. More men than women. A handful who looked like high schoolers just like her. The space was one small black rectangle with a hoselike contraption blowing bubble foam that reached to Jeanette’s waist. A disco light circled in a frenzy. Get ur freak on, Missy advised. And if you want me, want me … come