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

But Jeanette didn’t act surprised. She asked Johnson for a drink and he obliged. She asked for an amaretto sour, which Sasha had told her about at the first club, but he came back with something called a Long Island iced tea.

“With Bacardi 151!” he shouted over the music into her ear. “Let’s see what you’re made of. We’re gonna have fun tonight, little girl.”

She downed the ice tea quickly to impress him. He seemed impressed. He bought her another one. Jeanette wondered how many drinks she could get away with. She was mesmerized by this newfound power. Men wanting to buy her things just like her father did. She felt like Queen Caro, ruler of all the men, floating in her foam kingdom, watching women in bikinis grinding against men with their shirts around their necks. She liked the way they danced like they also knew their power. But how could she compete? How could she show Johnson she was even more desirable?

She felt woozy from the drinks. She decided to up her game. She bent over and dipped her hands into the foam. It was like reaching into a cloud. She felt her shorts rise up over her butt cheeks. She pictured Johnson wanting her butt cheeks. She backed up into him.

But he didn’t seem surprised. He just grabbed her waist and jerked it back harder. He had a drink in his hand and he tipped it over and a stream of liquid rolled down Jeanette’s back and into her hair and then into her ears and then into her nose.

She shook her head but felt dizzy. She stood up again.

“You little freak,” Johnson yelled into her ear. He pulled a spliff and a lighter out of his back pocket and lit up. He handed it to Jeanette. She noticed two guys beside them watching her. She puckered her lips when she sucked the spliff and stared one of them in the eye.

Johnson was sweaty. Wet orbits sprouted from his armpits. His car had smelled like cigarettes and perspiration, and now he smelled like his car. He was nothing like her father. Jeanette’s father was a drunk, but Jeanette’s father was a neat drunk. She danced a circle around Johnson, gyrating her pelvis. Her father went to work in a suit and changed into his surgical scrubs at the hospital. He always smelled of Listerine and rubbing alcohol. She put her hands on her knees and made circles with her ass. He’d only touched her once when he was drunk.

Johnson grabbed a handful of her ass and slid a finger along the seam of her jeans. That made her straighten. She couldn’t explain why she felt different all of a sudden. Nothing had changed. She couldn’t explain why Johnson kind of disgusted her—in a bad way—now. She wanted to go home. She was so dizzy. Jeanette sat down on a foam-wet plastic chair and felt her shorts saturate.

She pictured what the place would look like with muted sound—all those bodies in ridiculous movement, all those men eyeing convulsing bodies, perspiring, breathing heavy. The one bartender, a woman in a black bustier, looked like she watched the scene with muted sound. She was the only one who saw how funny it all was. Jeanette wanted to kiss her, the only real person left.

Johnson motioned with his chin and grabbed her arm. He dragged her to a corner by the bathrooms. Every wall was a mirror. The tiny space looked like a kaleidoscope and Jeanette smiled thinking of herself as a piece of colored glass that morphed, shifted into different patterns. I’m a star. I’m a Magic Eye. I’m nothing at all.

Johnson took a small baggie of white powder and a key chain with three keys out of his back pocket. He dipped a key into the baggie like he was collecting a teaspoon of sugar. Then he brought the key up to his nose in one quick swoop, snorted deeply, and threw his head back. He shook his head like a wet dog.

“God damn!”

Jeanette had never seen anyone do coke. She didn’t know anyone at her high school who even spoke about coke. She had always assumed cocaine was one of the drug addict drugs, like heroin in a syringe, the kind of drug nobody in her circles would ever do. The kind that existed so her drugs—weed, an occasional ecstasy roll or some bars from someone’s mom’s prescription—didn’t count as real drugs.

“Take a bump,” Johnson said to her, dipping the key again and holding it up to Jeanette’s face.

She was afraid, and he still disgusted her. But she was even more afraid of what would happen if Johnson discovered she wasn’t the kind of girl he thought she was. What kind of humiliation would rain down on her, whether he’d dump her on her doorstep like a child and nothing would have really changed in her life that night. The only thing that could make her harder than the hard girls was if she did things even they wouldn’t do. Jeanette was getting dizzier and dizzier. She felt nauseated.

“You’ve never done this, have you?” Johnson said to her, eyes suddenly all pupil, fried eggs with black yolks.

Jeanette didn’t say anything.

“Just snort it really, really deep, like you’re trying to breathe all the way into your skull.”

Jeanette took the key and snorted as Johnson had. She thrust her head back like him, like this was an action she’d repeated so many times it’d become automatic.

The snorting felt like drowning. It felt like breathing in water accidentally when she chicken-fought in the pool with friends, a burning all up her face and then a metallic drip at the back of her throat. She had a taste in her mouth like she’d swallowed blood.

“Good little girl,” Johnson said, giving her ass a squeeze. He took the key in his hand and shoved the tip into Jeanette’s mouth. “Now run this on your gums like a