“Tell Me Who You Walk With” is revelatory fiction, a complex story that constellates what we owe each other, our families, ourselves. The author has an uncanny, almost preternatural ability to render a character’s emotional machinations with originality, precision, and the beautiful force of truth. I love how the writer applies pressure to Priscila from both near and far, and how the character is so deeply imagined that we long for her to find some semblance of shelter, knowing full well that storms are gathering speed and drawing near. —Guest Judge Bret Anthony Johnston
September 2017
Priscila met Eddie in the checkout line of a 7-Eleven in Georgia.
The first thing she noticed about him was that he had long arms—longer than average, Priscila thought, long enough to make her wonder what he had looked like as a child, awkward and uncoordinated, probably scolded for never knowing when to tuck in his elbows to let people pass him by, clumsy when he hugged his friends. She imagined him at twelve or thirteen, standing beneath the monkey bars in a park somewhere, suddenly hit with the realization that he’d outgrown them, that growth was inevitable, that he would keep growing and outgrowing. It made her feel protective of him for reasons she couldn’t explain.
When Priscila’s roommate, Marie, caught her looking at Eddie, she came up close behind her, put her chin on Priscila’s shoulder, and whispered, “Dibs.”
Priscila shrugged Marie off and turned around. “What?”
“I noticed him first,” Marie said. She nodded towards Eddie, her bangs slipping loose from behind her ears, reuniting with the rest of her hair, pin-straight and the color of saffron. “In the candy section.”
Priscila turned back around without responding. She watched as the cashier broke a roll of coins against the counter and emptied it into the register. The sound made everyone standing in line stop what they were doing and look over, which made Priscila want to look at anything else, if only to spare the cashier from another set of prying eyes. The first thing she saw was the cigarette display, arranged with all the Marlboro packs on one side and all the Camel packs on the other, separated by a sign that read: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.
Priscila began counting the cigarettes from left to right. It was a habit of hers, counting random things whenever she didn’t know what to do with herself, or whenever she was with someone who made her feel islanded, her mind distant but still inhabited. She got up to seventeen packs before Marie cut in front of her in line. Marie stood on her tiptoes and tapped Eddie on the shoulder, and when he turned around, he looked right past her at Priscila, who gave him a soft smile in return.
“Hi,” Marie laughed, waving, drawing Eddie’s attention away from Priscila. “I’m Marie.”
“Eddie,” he said, shifting his basket from one arm to the other to shake Marie’s hand.
“Eddie,” Marie repeated. “That short for Edward? Edwin?”
“Just Eddie. Super uncommon name, I know, so no worries if you forget.” Marie laughed too loudly at this. Eddie turned to Priscila, his arm still outstretched. “And how about you?”
“Priscila,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Like Presley?”
“Like my mom’s childhood best friend, actually.” She smiled, amused at how sure he was that he’d guessed correctly. “My parents did love Elvis, though, so maybe it was inevitable.”
It was really Priscila’s father who’d loved Elvis, but her mother had always been the kind of woman who took her husband’s interests as her own: anything he loved, she made herself love more. The same was true for the things he hated, even when it required her to hate herself.
“How big of fans are we talking here?” Eddie asked. “Framed pictures? Cardboard cut-outs? Because my mom made us celebrate his birthday one year, so I might have you beat.”
“Wow, yeah, that’s some dedication right there,” Priscila said. “And here I was thinking my mom was the biggest Elvis fan for Photoshopping him into my brother’s First Communion photo.” She paused and looked at the disbelief in Eddie’s eyes, a slick smile spreading across her face. “Kidding.”
“Anyway,” Marie interrupted. “Now that we’re all introduced, how about we go for drinks?”
Marie had a habit of doing this: staking her claim, pissing not on the thing she was after but on whoever she believed was after it, too. Priscila often wondered how anyone could go through life like that, wanting things just for the sake of wanting them, for the sake of taking them away from someone else.
The cashier called Eddie before he could answer. Priscila watched as he emptied the contents of his basket onto the counter: a six pack of Sprite, a bag of peach rings, microwave popcorn, condoms. When he finished checking out, he waited for Priscila and Marie by the door, arms at his side.
Priscila hoped that Eddie would decline Marie’s invitation. She hadn’t slept for more than a few hours that week, stunned awake each time she closed her eyes by the images she’d seen on the news: images of the hurricane sweeping across the island her mother called home, of fallen palm trees, of people wading waist-deep in water or cooking in the dark or singing alabanzas, their voices thick with tears. She dreamt of family she’d never met drowning in dirt-colored water or crouched down and crowded together on rooftops, hoping to be seen—just seen—as if hoping to be saved was asking for too much.
She just wanted to rest, that was all. And she wanted, more than anything, to be able to say this to Marie without being questioned about why she was so tired.
“So, what do you say?” Marie asked Eddie on their way out.
The sun had gone down while they were inside, and now, standing in the parking lot, the neon lights of the 7-Eleven sign were glowing bright, catching on all of their faces. Eddie glanced at Priscila. He seemed to be searching her eyes for some indication that they were in this together.
“Sure,” he said after a beat.
“Great,” Marie squealed. “You pick the place and we’ll meet you there in an hour.”
Eddie was visibly confused by this arrangement, his eyebrows scrunched together, his head tilted sideways like he was trying to reorient his world to make it align with Marie’s. It was disarming, Priscila thought, his willingness to show them that he didn’t understand something, not for lack of pride but out of a humbleness Priscila had yet to learn herself.
Marie lifted one of the plastic bags hanging from her wrist and said, “Ice cream,” as if this were a sufficient explanation, and as if it weren’t an obvious lie.
Priscila had never understood the point of lying about small things, though she still did it sometimes, mainly as a way of humanizing herself, of pretending she’d had the same experiences as other people—had heard the same music, had eaten at the same restaurants—just so they would have something in common. She wondered if she would lie to Eddie that night or if, by some chance, he would only ask her questions she already knew the answers to, even if they were boring ones.
Eddie walked Priscila and Marie to their car and, after they all exchanged numbers, he headed in the opposite direction. Once on the road, Marie released a giddy sigh, then a laugh, while Priscila fiddled with the radio dials, trying to find a news station that would tell her if things had gotten any worse.
* * *
Back at the apartment, Priscila drank coffee while Marie finished getting ready.
They were in Marie’s room, sitting on the floor in front of her full-length mirror, surrounded by piles of rejected outfits and empty bottles of ginger ale. It was the bigger of the two bedrooms in the apartment, still arranged the way Marie had had it when she shared it with her ex-boyfriend, only emptier now. All of the walls were painted navy blue except for one, which had become Marie’s palette for testing out new colors, whites and pinks and yellows, and on which she had painted a childlike seascape. The few pieces of furniture she had were made of white wicker, and there was something distinctly unnatural about this to Priscila, who was grateful that Marie’s ex-boyfriend had taken most of the set with him when he left.
Priscila had never met Marie’s ex-boyfriend, but she knew that his leaving was the reason for her coming, and that on some level Marie would always resent her presence in the apartment, minimal as it was. Still, Priscila could never bring herself to blame Marie for this, because she knew how easy it was to resent the people left standing in the wake of a personal tragedy—even if it had nothing to do with them, even if they arrived after the fact—and who become the beneficiaries of it, some intentionally and some without ever trying to, like Priscila, who was only looking for a way to survive her own.
“I don’t know if I’m up for this,” Priscila admitted. She finished the last of her coffee, now cold.
Marie was leaned in close to the mirror, carefully overlining her lips with a bright red pencil and filling them in with lipstick and gloss. She turned around with a huff and rolled her eyes.
“Don’t be a killjoy,” she said. “Not tonight. I need this, okay?”
“But what do you need me for? I’ll be third wheeling the entire time.”
“Not true,” Marie scoffed, throwing a tube of mascara at Priscila. “The plan is to get you a fourth wheel. Maybe a good ol’ fashioned bar bathroom blowjob? His tip, your tonsils?” She cringed at her own phrasing and bit her cheeks to try and keep a straight face. “Help me out here.”
Priscila threw the mascara back at her. “You’re obscene,” she laughed.
Marie winked at her. “And a poet—don’t forget that part. That was great alliteration.”
Sometimes, in moments like this, Priscila believed that Marie had been her older sister in another life: that it was Marie who’d taught her about all those things she found herself having to do in adolescence, like shaving her upper lip instead of tweezing it even if it meant the hair would grow back quicker, or figuring out which tampon size to use, or learning how to reduce the size of hickies with cold spoons and sábila. But there were other moments, more moments, when Priscila knew that this was impossible.
“Now that I’ve revealed my master plan,” Marie continued, “will you come?”
Priscila ran her hand across the carpet, beige and coarse and in need of cleaning. She thought about the last man she’d had in her bed: a driving instructor named Samuel, a tall watchtower of a man who’d tried to hide the fact that he was bow-legged by changing the way he walked, faltering somewhere between a rehearsed strut and a tense trudge. He was smug, mostly, and quiet, sometimes, but wholly committed to making Priscila laugh, even if it was his own head that got caught in the guillotine of his humor.
What Priscila remembered most about Samuel was the way his beard had always smelled like the shampoo she used as a child, like black cherries and almond, and how heavy-handed her recollections of home became whenever she breathed him in. Some people are time machines and they don’t even know it, she’d think to herself, curled up next to him in bed, their legs braided together.
Sex with Samuel had been forgettable. It was shirts-on, pants-around-the-ankles, utilitarian sex. But after a few weeks, Priscila had noticed that there was a tenderness between them, an understanding that revealed itself in quiet moments, like when he kissed the insides of her palms as they danced to La Lupe.
“I think this is getting too serious,” she’d told him when she ended things. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Samuel shrugged, his hand suddenly tense on her thigh as they sat on the couch that doubled as his roommate’s bed. “What’s wrong with being serious?”
Priscila had begun to realize that it was what she liked least about herself: how serious she’d become in the years since her leaving, no longer the kind of person who could laugh in the face of reality, but who felt the full weight of it, and who felt it laughing back at her.
“Nothing,” Priscila had said. She removed Samuel’s hand and placed it on the cushion between them. “It’s just not who we are, right? I mean, we met on an app. I thought our intentions were pretty clear.”
“You know what, beba? I feel bad for you if you think intentions can’t change.”
She’d kissed him then: rougher than normal, then softly, like clipping the thorns off a rose and giving it back to someone after they’ve already been cut.
It wasn’t that Priscila didn’t want to be in love. It was that she preferred how inconsequential being out of it was. She was never expected to be consistent with any one person; she could choose to be not a weekly tithe but a one-time offering, paid in a currency that never ran out.
Just then her phone buzzed, yanking her back to Marie’s room, into a reality where all the intangible feelings she could not name were beginning to outnumber the ones she could.
“Fine, I’ll go,” Priscila said to Marie. “Eddie just sent the address.”
Marie checked her own phone and scoffed. “He does remember I invited him, right?” she said. She went back to applying makeup, feathering her eyebrows to make them appear thicker, reapplying lip gloss.
Priscila shrugged. “He probably got our names mixed up.”
“Whatever.” Marie glanced at Priscila in the mirror. “Want some product for your hair?”
“No thanks. I’m good.”
“If you say so.” Marie adjusted the silver nameplate necklace she’d bought from a kiosk at the mall earlier that week. It was a cheap necklace that said Mary instead of Marie, like those keychains at rest stops, Priscila thought, with names that were just close enough. “Come on. We should head out.”
Priscila got up from the floor and gathered her hair into a ponytail. This had become her go-to hairstyle since moving to Georgia, where the humidity made her skin feel like flypaper, each strand of hair sticking to her face like something alive, buzzing. Deep down she knew it was a heat she could have loved if she was born into it, like her mother in Lares, who told her of a heat like medicine, a balm you could always find so long as there was sun. But what of this balm, she wondered, now that the hurricane had swallowed all of the light?
Priscila looked at herself in the mirror, then at Marie, unrecognizable beneath the layers of bronzer she’d applied. This was not the same girl that Priscila had met when she moved in four months earlier: the quiet girl with bitten nails and hair full of barrettes, who had been so eager to please that she’d tried learning how to make all of Priscila’s favorite foods, including the ones with names she couldn’t pronounce.
“Will you teach me to make something?” she’d asked Priscila once, proudly showing off the collection of overpriced Goya products she’d bought at their local chain store. Priscila picked up a jar of olives and thought of her wela: how she hid an olive in the masa of every pastele she ever made, how she somehow managed to keep it whole despite the rolling, the tying, the boiling.
She put the jar down and smiled at Marie so as not to betray the longing she felt for those blips in time she could only recreate in the one-dimensional space of her memories: moments that were now flat and one-sided, vignettes of the people she loved instead of the people themselves.
How could Priscila look at Marie, at the whites of her eyes bloodshot with good intentions, and tell her that there were some things she wanted to keep for herself? That some things only legacy could teach?
And how could she look at her in the mirror, four months later, and act as if she believed Marie’s intentions were still good? Or that they ever were. Or that this girl, with her newfound ability to make herself the guest of honor at every party, who could become the party herself, would ever invite Priscila in.
* * *
By the time Priscila and Marie made it to the bar, Eddie was already on his second beer.
He sat in a booth near the entrance, wearing the same army green Henley they’d seen him in earlier, the sleeves scrunched up to his elbows. Priscila wondered if he did this to give off the illusion that his arms were shorter than they were, and if anyone had ever believed it. Eddie stood up to greet them, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, a relaxed smile giving his face a tender quality that made Priscila instantly smile back. Marie disrupted Eddie’s stance with a hug, which he quickly turned into a side hug, pulling away from her and sliding back into the booth. Priscila and Marie settled across from him, their knees knocking together.
“Do y’all want something to drink?” Eddie asked them, breaking the silence. He lifted his empty pint glass and removed the coaster that had gotten stuck to the bottom of it. “I should probably go return this.”
“I’ll come with you,” Marie said. “Priscila, could you stay here and watch our stuff?”
Priscila thought about the friends she’d had in Philly: the kind of friends who would tell her when her shoelaces had come untied, who would stop walking in the middle of crowded hallways and wait for her to tie them before walking on ahead. There were rules back in Philly, she thought, though maybe it had nothing to do with location. Maybe it just had to do with loyalty.
“Yeah, no problem, you guys go ahead.”
“You sure?” Eddie asked her. She nodded. “Well, uh, what can I get you?”
“Jack and Coke,” Priscila told him. “And a water, please. Thanks.”
Priscila watched as they made their way to the bar, where the bartender wiped down the counter in that too-cheerful way she’d only ever seen in stock photos and pharmaceutical ads. She looked up at the wall next to her, decorated with flamingo-shaped string lights and a poster of a black cat holding a bottle of vodka.
While she waited for Eddie and Marie to return to the table, Priscila took out her phone to check the news. She saw that she had six missed calls from her brother and a text that read: “Call me.” This was not Benjamín’s usual tone, and the longer she studied the text, the more it began to resemble the hostile voicemails their father used to flood her phone with on school nights when she’d stay out past curfew. When she would spend hours at the library or at a friend’s house, being fed by someone else’s mother.
Marie and Eddie returned with a tray of drinks: Priscila’s Jack and Coke, Marie’s Long Island iced tea, another beer for Eddie, this time in a bottle. In the center of the tray, there was a wooden block that held six shot glasses filled to the brim with tequila, their rims glistening with salt.
“Would you excuse me for a minute?” Priscila said, sliding out of the booth.
“Everything okay?” Eddie asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I just—I’ll be right back.”
Priscila stepped out of the bar and into the parking lot, where three men sat smoking in the bed of a truck, a Confederate flag decal on one side of its bumper and a sticker of the Cuban flag on the other. A fourth man peed in a bush. She stayed close to the door and dialed Benjamín’s number.
“Manitaaaaa!” he shouted into the phone, clearly drunk. “I have news—big news.”
Priscila relaxed her shoulders and laughed. She could hear music and voices in the background, snippets of conversation where every other word was coño or cabrón.
“Dímelo,” she said, covering her other ear so she could hear him better.
“Yara…she’s pregnant, manita.” Benjamín paused. Priscila heard her brother swallow, and when he spoke again, the panic that had been rattling against the back of his throat was gone. “I’m gonna be a papi. Can you believe it? And you’re gonna be a titi. And Víctor—¡oye, Víctor, get over here!—is gonna be the best damn padrino that Philly’s ever seen.”
“Oh my God, Benny, this is—”
“Pérate, pérate,” he cut her off. “I need to take a piss, okay? Here, talk to Víctor.”
“Hello?” Víctor said into the phone.
Priscila hadn’t heard Víctor’s voice in five years, not since she had left home. It was deeper now, more like the voices of the reggaetoneros they’d grown up listening to. She was afraid to reply, afraid that her own voice had changed so much that he would no longer recognize or respond to it the way he used to. That it had become permanently damaged by her leaving and his memory of it.
“Hello?” he repeated.
Priscila had never figured out if she’d been in love with Víctor, though there were moments when they were together where she’d believed she could be, as much as any seventeen-year-old could be, trapped in the borderland between need and want, riddled with guilt and sentimentality. Even now, it was impossible for Priscila to think of Víctor without also thinking of the way his hair once felt between her fingers, of her arched back and whimper.
“Hey, Víctor,” Priscila said finally.
“Exciting news, huh?”
“Yeah,” she laughed. “Definitely the last thing I expected to hear tonight, though. When I got Benny’s text, I thought…I don’t know what I thought.”
“Yeah, you do. The hurricane, right? You can say it.” She could tell that he’d moved into another room, the music now faint, the voices distant. “We’re all thinking about it more than we wanna be. And drinking about it, too, even though everyone here swears tonight’s about Benny. Not much else we can do.”
“It must be nice, at least, to be around people who actually care about what’s happening. Right?”
“You might be giving us too much credit,” Víctor said. “Like, we care, obviously, but mostly I just think we’re glad we’re here and not there. But no one wants to say that out loud.”
“Right. No, same, I mean… Better to not talk about it than to say the wrong thing,” she said. “So this survivor’s guilt—is that part of FEMA’s recovery plan or just something we’re doing for fun now?”
“It is, actually, they listed it right under the section teaching us how to be self-hating Diasporicans,” he laughed. Priscila loved the way he laughed, always with his tongue pressed to the back of his two front teeth, always with his whole body. “I don’t know. It is what it is.”
Priscila looked around the parking lot. The men in the truck were gone now, and crowds of people were walking past her and into the bar. She would have to go back inside eventually, but right now, nothing seemed more important to Priscila than staying where she was, than talking to Víctor, even if every word out of their mouths sounded like a new and tragic headline.
“You heard anything since it all started?” she asked him.
“Just what’s on the news,” he sighed. “It’s bad over there. Nobody can reach anybody.”
There was no body count, Priscila thought, no number to tell them when they were safe to mourn. How was anyone expected to grieve if they didn’t yet know how much they’d lost? She thought of losses still on their way, trapped in fallen telephone wires, in the air swirling above the Atlantic.
“I can’t even imagine,” Priscila swallowed.
“I know you can’t,” Víctor said, his voice suddenly hard. “You wake up every day and choose not to reach your family, Priscila. I wake up every day wishing I could reach mine.”
Priscila’s body tensed. Her heart felt, suddenly, like it had been raided, robbed of all of its blood. She removed her hair from its ponytail and let it fall around her face.
“If you’re mad at me, Víctor, you can just say that.” She wiped her sneaker against the yellow parking block in front of her. “But if you’re gonna try and simplify something that’ll never be simple—I mean, come on. That’s not fair to either of us and you know it.”
“I’m not mad at you,” he said, low and calm. He sighed, released his hurt with a laugh. “Anyway, I should probably go check on Benny, make sure he hasn’t burned a hole in his esophagus or some shit.”
“Yeah, good call,” Priscila said. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Bye, Víctor.”
“Hold up, one more thing.” Víctor cleared his throat. “I’ve been practicing my Spanish.”
“Oh yeah? Say something, broki.”
Without hesitating, Víctor said, “Te extraño.” Then he paused, waited for a response. “Todavía.”
Priscila felt her mouth fill with words that were well past their expiration date, words like overdue library books that had never even been opened. She said nothing. They listened to each other’s breath for a moment longer. Sometimes there is only this, Priscila thought. Only the sound of another person’s living, which is also the sound of a machete hacking fruit from a tree, which is also the sound of the fruit splitting open, bleeding sweetness. Víctor let out a soft, nervous laugh and hung up.
Priscila cleared her throat and went back inside. The bar was packed with people now, the lights dimmed, the floor newly sticky, an Arctic Monkeys song playing over the sound system. Eddie sat alone in the booth, slowly scrolling through an article on his phone. Marie was dancing in the middle of the room, sandwiched between two men, her jean skirt riding up, her movements loose and slinky.
Priscila took off her jacket and joined Eddie, who seemed relieved by her return. “All good?” he asked, putting his phone away.
“All good.” Priscila took one of the shots of tequila that was left for her, then chased it with half of her Jack and Coke. She motioned to Marie. “I take it dancing isn’t your thing?”
“Wrong song,” he explained. “Besides, those guys swooped in pretty quick.”
“Maybe I should go get her.”
“Or,” he said, “I could come over to your side of the booth and help you keep an eye on things.”
Priscila took the lime wedge from the rim of her glass and dropped it in, then moved her jacket onto her lap to make room for Eddie. When he sat down next to her, she caught a whiff of his cologne, and she realized that it didn’t remind her of anything or anyone she knew. It was just him, thoroughly novel to her.
She tried to ignore the way he bounced his leg up and down underneath the table, tried to resist the urge to put her hand on his knee and tell him that there was nothing to be nervous about, but she knew that this might only make him more aware of the fact that they were strangers, that she was someone who didn’t yet know him well enough to understand his nature. She wondered if he’d ever understand hers.
Eddie motioned to Marie with a nod. “So how’d you two meet?”
“Craigslist,” Priscila told him. “I answered her ad for a roommate and, well, now we’re here.”
“Gotcha,” he laughed, adding, “I didn’t get the sense that you liked each other much.”
“No, I like her.” Priscila shrugged. She stirred her drink, using the straw to mash the lime. “She just has the tendency to…shrink whoever’s around her.”
“That’s the perfect word for it.”
“Thanks. My backup was ‘eclipse.’”
“Also a good choice.” He took a sip of his beer, then another. “Makes it sound kinda positive, though, doesn’t it? Or like it’s something worth watching, at least.”
“Isn’t she?”
They both turned to look at Marie again. She was dancing towards them, putting her hair up as she sang along to the Queen song that was playing. When she reached the table, she took Priscila’s drink and brought it to her face, breathlessly declaring how good the cold felt against her skin.
Eddie excused himself to the bathroom.
“What’s his deal?” Marie asked Priscila as they watched him go. She switched the glass from one cheek to the other and sat down across from Priscila. “Whatever. He’s boring anyway.”
“I swear half the people you call boring are actually just quiet.”
“What’s the difference? Look, if we’re lucky, he’ll bail soon and then we never have to see him again.” She gave the table a quick once-over. “Round two?”
Priscila pried her drink away from Marie’s face and put it on the table. She removed the straw and placed it on a coaster before pushing the glass back towards Marie. “Here,” she said. “You can finish mine.”
“I don’t want yours. It’s all watered down.”
“Do you really wanna pay for another overpriced drink?”
“Who said I’d be paying?” Marie looked over her shoulder and waved at the men she’d been dancing with. “I’m sure they’d buy you one, too.”
Priscila finished off her Jack and Coke and downed the last shot left. “What’s the plan here, Marie?”
“I like them,” she said softly, standing up. “I’ll be safe.”
Priscila watched as Marie returned to the men, taking both of their hands in hers and guiding them towards the staircase that led to the bathrooms. It was obvious Marie was putting on a show now, and when they made eye contact from across the room before she disappeared down the stairs, Priscila realized that it was for her, and that it wasn’t a show at all but a taunting, a challenge, one that Priscila did not understand the rules of, and which she had no choice but to forfeit.
Eddie returned to the table just as “Hotel California” started playing, and before he could sit back down, Priscila stood up and asked him to dance.
“Right song?”
“Right girl,” he said, trying to conceal his grin, pleased with his quip, though it only made Priscila wonder what he considered the wrong kind of girl to be.
They made their way to an open area near the back door, where they started to sway with their bodies pressed together, off-balance from the drinks they’d consumed. The simple fact was that Eddie could have been anyone. Priscila just wanted to be held, not by him but by a world kinder than this one, a world she didn’t need to forgive constantly, where the difference between fault and blame was clear-cut and immutable. Where words like emergency and aftermath ceased to exist.
It occurred to her that dancing with Eddie only felt comfortable because she knew that her cousin, Cara, would have liked him. Cara, who was not alive but should have been, whose death could have easily been Priscila’s, and who Priscila never stopped trying to resurrect among the living, in both herself and in other people. What could she say about Cara? Teacher and secret-keeper. The only cousin from her father’s side who felt like family. Lovechild of grace and grand gestures.
When the song was almost over, Priscila felt Eddie’s breath quicken, his chest rising and falling against her cheek. She pulled away and looked up at him, studying the handful of acne scars scattered across his cheeks, the small bump on the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t want to start anything between you and Marie,” he told her.
“You really think you have that much power?”
“Have I not mentioned the six friendships I’ve broken up? And that’s just this month.”
“Well, far be it from me to ruin your streak.”
When he kissed her, he tasted like sweet figs and sweat. It was a quick kiss, interrupted by a group of women coming in through the back door, then by a rush of guilt that hit Priscila like motion sickness.
This was a new kind of guilt for her, not based in any harm she’d caused but in a harm she knew she wouldn’t stop herself from causing: learning to love Eddie, staying with him for as long as he’d have her, if only because her life had become tethered to one grand and impossible wish that things were different, and to her hope that she could somehow—by settling for something simpler, by not asking for more, even if more was what was owed to her—stop herself from counting her losses, of which there were many.
Gabriella Navas is a Puerto Rican writer hailing from Jersey City, NJ. Her work has previously appeared in [PANK], Storm Cellar, Fractured Lit, Quarterly West, The Masters Review, and Sequestrum. She is easily distracted, frequently smitten, and always willing to talk about the healing powers of Chavela Vargas’s discography. She currently lives in Columbus, OH, where she is working on her first novel.