B0061QB04W EBOK (50 page)

I opened my eyes. I was on the floor, crying. My father stood above me. Mila walked back into the kitchen, and I asked her where Mago was. It wasn’t her voice that I had heard. “Why won’t she come?” I said.

“She left,” Mila said.

I shook my head, unable to believe what Mila had said. It couldn’t be true.
How could Mago have left when she knew he was hitting me? No, no. There has to be a mistake
. “Mago!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Mago!”

But no one answered.

“¿Ya ves?” Papi said. “That’s how much she cares.” I glanced at the door, waiting for my sister to come, but she didn’t. I looked up at my father, at his fists, and at that moment I just wanted him to keep going, to keep beating me and beating me with those hands that were the same shape as my own. Beat me until I could no longer think anymore, until they made me disappear, cease to exist.
She left. She left. She left.

He went back to his room with another beer in his hand. Mila helped me to stand up.

“You should understand,” Mila said to me as I headed to my bedroom. “Your sister is pregnant. If she had come up here to defend you, who knows what he would have done to her. He could have hurt the baby.”

I left her in the kitchen and made my way to my room to lock myself in.

21

M
Y BEDROOM WAS
my prison.

No, my bedroom was my haven. From the door in, I was safe. From the door out, the demons would come with their mocking faces. I stayed in my room and suffered from hunger, picturing Mila cooking, she and Papi eating dinner, watching TV in the living room. I waited and waited, trying not to think of the way my stomach seemed to chew on itself to appease its hunger. I peed in a bucket I had taken from my father’s shed and kept in the corner of the room. I lay in bed and waited. I was afraid that if I came out of the room to eat or go to the bathroom, he’d come down on me like a vulture. Little by little he pecked away at my soul. I was afraid, sometimes, that one day there would be nothing left.

Finally, the television would get shut off. Finally, I would hear their footsteps fading into their bedroom. Finally, they would fall asleep. I tiptoed out of the room and dumped the pee in the bucket into the toilet. Then I rushed to the kitchen and grabbed whatever Mila had made for dinner. I didn’t bother heating it up. He might come out, and I didn’t want to see him. I gobbled down the food in my room and hid the dirty plate under the bed. I breathed in relief, my stomach finally pacified.

I tossed and turned in bed. I knew sleep wouldn’t come. It was yet another thing I had lost. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a good night’s sleep. I lay awake, wondering what my sister and brother were doing, what my mother was doing, what the whole world was doing while I was there, a prisoner in my own room.

I turned on the TV and kept the volume as low as possible. I stuffed the cracks in the door with my underwear so that he wouldn’t see the light from the TV. This was as close as I could come to making myself disappear from his sight.

Then I discovered my hero, there on the TV. Dr. Sam Beckett. He was a physicist who traveled in time to fix the lives of other people in a show called
Quantum Leap
. Oh, how I wished Dr. Sam Beckett could jump into my life! Come and live it for me. Make things right in a way I could not, in a way I might never be able to.

During the day I would move my furniture around. One day the bed was in the north corner of the room. The next day it would be in the south or east or west corner. I called Steve and asked him to come over. He helped me move the TV and the dresser to the other side of the room. “Why are you always moving your furniture?” he asked as he sat down on my bed.

I shrugged, not knowing how to tell him that it helped me feel as if I had just moved elsewhere. As if I lived anywhere but here.

I was jealous of him. Franklin was back in session, so he had somewhere to go, something to do. I didn’t have a job, and since Papi had not allowed me to go to UC Irvine, or to a community college, as I had asked, what was there for me to do but to move my furniture around? I sat next to Steve on my bed, and I let him pull me down with him.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. My cousin Lola and her family had moved to the unit downstairs, and if she saw him, or if the neighbors saw him and told my father, there would be hell to pay. But I held him tight as I remembered there wasn’t anything else my father could do to me anymore. Besides, Steve was all I had left.

He tugged on my pants, as he always did. I put my hand over his to keep him from pulling down my zipper, as I always did. I knew what he wanted from me. I thought about Mago. She had a life of her own now. She was going to be a mother. She was making a family of her own. What did I have except for this horny Italian boy with hazel eyes who only wanted one thing from me? And what if I lost him, too?

“Okay,” I sighed, letting go of his hand.

“Okay? You mean—? Really?” he asked.

I heard the sound of the zipper. I felt my pants being clumsily pulled down. I felt his weight on me, and for a moment I felt as if I was not as meaningless as I had thought. For a second, I felt that I still mattered.

I lost my virginity in my bedroom, in my father’s house.
Right under your nose
. I felt the pain between my legs, and I bit my lips to keep from crying out.
I don’t need to leave this house to be a loose woman,
I thought, as I held on to Steve with all my might.
No, I’ll do it here, in your house, and see if I care.

A few weeks later, as I was waiting for the bus to go see my mother, I saw an ad taped to the bus stop. It read “Do You Want to Be in the Movies?” I put the flyer in my purse.
Maybe I could be a movie extra and make money so that I could rent my own place. What kind of skills does one need to just walk around or sit around and blend in with the background? I’m excellent at that.

When I got to my mom’s apartment on San Pedro Street, I asked her to take me to the Alley and buy me a dress to wear to the talent agency. She bought me a canary-yellow dress with bell-shaped sleeves and big golden buttons. She said it was so bright, for sure I would stand out in a crowd and get hired.

The next day I took the bus to the agency, which was on Wilshire
Boulevard, not too far from Beverly Hills. I felt so good in my bright yellow dress that my mother had bought for me. It was one of the few things I owned purchased by her. There were other people waiting in the lobby, and they all had leather folders or manila envelopes with them. I wondered what was inside. Nobody but me was wearing glasses, so I took them off, even though everything looked blurry. They were cheap, thick-rimmed glasses that made me look like a nerd, and I didn’t want to look like a band geek today. I wanted to look glamorous. I thought of Mago. If she were still living at home, she would have done my hair up really nicely. She would have made me look like a movie star with her magic makeup brush. Then I realized that I probably wouldn’t be sitting there if Mago were still at home. She would have protected me, instead of me now trying to fend for myself.

When I was called in, the first thing the woman said was, “Do you have your portfolio?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Your pictures. We need professional photos of you.”

“I—ah—no, I don’t have any photos.”

She went on to explain that I needed to bring eight-by-ten-inch photos, in color and black and white. She also said the agency charged a fee in order to put me in their system.

I had barely managed to get the money I needed to pay for the bus fare, let alone to pay the agency to get me a job. I walked out of there feeling disappointed. I didn’t even put my glasses back on. I wanted to hide in my blindness a little longer and not face the real world that awaited me. How could I leave my father’s house if I had no job? I wondered.

While I sat at the bus stop to go back home—still jobless—a car pulled over. The two guys in the car looked like Italian mobsters, wearing black suits and ties. The one in the passenger seat called out to me.

“Hey, are you a model?”

“Me? No,” I said, feeling my cheeks get hot from embarrassment.
Me? A model? I wish …

“Well, you should be. Do you want to be a model?”

I wanted to tell them that they were the ones who needed glasses,
more than me. Surely they could see that I was not pretty enough to be a model. Nowhere near that. And couldn’t they see my body? Couldn’t they see how short I was?

But I needed a job, and when they asked me again if I wanted to be a model, I thought about my favorite telenovela
Cristal,
of how she had met her handsome rich love at the modeling place where she worked. I said, “Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, get in the car and we’ll take you to our office. We’re agents, and we can help you.”

I hesitated as I took a step toward their car. They were complete strangers. I shouldn’t trust anything they said. What if they were lying and did something to me? But I needed money. I got in the backseat.

They drove me to a building farther up Wilshire, which was similar to the six-story building where the other agency was. When they pulled over, I breathed a sigh of relief. If their office was in that fancy place, then maybe they were who they said they were.

They took me to a huge office with a large desk and two leather sofas and offered me some water. They didn’t tell me to sit, so I stood there in the middle of the office, looking at them without squinting, so that they wouldn’t notice that I needed glasses. They sat on the leather couch and one of them said, “Okay, take off your dress.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Take off your dress,” the other one said. “If you want to be a model, we have to see what you’ve got.”

“But, but …”

“Hey, what do you think models do all day? They take off their clothes and have their picture taken.”

I put my water glass down and started to unbutton my dress. Suddenly, I hated that dress. They stared at me as I began to take it off. I slid the top of my dress off my shoulders, down to my waist. Then, I couldn’t go any further.

“Come on, you can do it,” they said. Even though the men were blurry, I knew that they were staring at my exposed breasts.

What the hell are you doing?
a voice inside me said. I didn’t recognize that voice.
Get out of there, now!
the voice said again. And I knew who it was. It was the other me—the other Reyna, the one who still believed in that bright future my father had once said I could have.

“I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake,” I said. I rushed out the door as I struggled to put my dress back on.

“Hey, come back here!” the men yelled. I ran out of the building, down Wilshire Boulevard, my heart beating hard against my chest. I didn’t look back. I was afraid to look back. I pictured them running after me, dragging me back to their office, forcing me to do things I didn’t want to do, forcing me into a path where there would be no turning back. Finally, I couldn’t run any longer and stopped, my side hurting me, my lungs screaming for air. I turned around, and the street was empty. No one was chasing me.
Forget the job, Reyna. Forget the horny boyfriend. Focus on school,
I heard the other me say. As I sat at the bus stop waiting to go home, I took my glasses out of my purse and everything came back into focus.