A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,13

Avenida.

Eventually, Ruben broke the silence awkwardly: “I forgot eggs.”

“We’ll have to go back to the market,” he added. “Rico’s coming over to the house later. You guys can come, too.”

The last part of his sentence was nearly drowned out as a cop car hurtled around the corner and screamed past us in the direction of the beach.

“Do you have a sister, Lucas?” Celia asked, as I unwound her limbs from around my body and set her down.

“No. Why?”

Celia didn’t get the chance to answer because Ruben took her by the hand and dragged her back toward the market. She did, however, look over her shoulder and wave.

Carlos and I waited until they’d crossed the street and disappeared from sight before hailing a cab to take us back to the old city. During the ride, we both stared out our windows and watched the same line of gray clouds descending from the eastern sky.

“I guess we forgot to tell you. La Lopez got promoted,” Carlos eventually said. “She’s a detective now.”

Last summer, when she was just a beat cop, Mara Lopez—nicknamed La Lopez by the neighborhood kids—hauled me in for underage drinking and drunk and disorderly conduct. According to her, some viejo down on Calle Vecinto called in a tip claiming that a group of kids, included el chico rico (the rich kid: me) were down on the pier, acting all borracho, smashing beer bottles and scaring las turistas.

Most of that was true—though, to my credit, I think the bottle smashing was dramatic flair on the part of the old man—but that doesn’t make up for the fact that Rico and Ruben and everyone else on that pier who was stumbling drunk had been sent off with nothing more than a stern warning. I, however, had been hauled down to the San Juan jail by La Lopez herself, where I’d spent the rest of the night in cell with a man in a grease-stained mechanic’s uniform who snored like a broken furnace and smelled like rum and bird shit. The next morning, my dad, dressed to the nines as always, came down to pay a “fine” I assumed was generous enough to wipe the charge from my record.

“You need to get a handle on your boy,” then Officer Lopez had warned as we were leaving the station, “before he does something he can’t buy his way out of.”

“You need to get a handle on how to run your department,” my dad had shot back. “Maybe you should try focusing on bringing in real criminals rather than kids who aren’t guilty of anything aside from a momentary lapse in judgment.”

But I’d been guilty of more than that, my dad had told me in the car on the way home. I’d been guilty of being the one white kid in a group of otherwise nonwhite kids. According to him, Mara Lopez was just like all the others. Puerto Rico was full of women like her, he said—women with icepick stares who hated the whites and always blamed them for ruining their island and liked to mete out punishment like it was their divine right.

I remember wishing he’d just shut up. He was ranting, and I had a headache. The car was filled with the spice-musk scent of his Burberry cologne. He’d put on too much this morning, and I was choking on it. The car was also full of his sense of entitlement, which stunk worse than his cologne. At one point, I remember wondering which was worse: being stuck in a town car with my dad or having been stuck in a jail cell with a snoring, stinking mechanic.

What my dad didn’t get was that Mara Lopez hated me not because I was white but because I was spoiled. I sometimes hated myself for the same reason.

Five

THE SUMMER I turned twelve, a daughter of one of the hotel maids taught me how to kiss. She was older than me, maybe fourteen, but she seemed much older by the way she dressed—in short jean shorts and cropped tank tops—and by the things she said. Nothing ever impressed her, and everything was lame.

For a reason I never figured out, she’d chosen to take me on as a project. Every day for a week she would sneak into my room during the hot hours of the afternoon and sit me down cross-legged on the floor at the foot of my bed. I’d listen carefully to her instructions. She’d point to the hollow between her collarbones