Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,41
loud. There were people laughing and shouting, there was music playing, but even still, over all that, we could hear the squish and slide and suck of lips and tongue. None of us had that much experience with making out—Hector claimed to have gotten to “third base” with Faye Gutierrez after the block party two summers ago, though Hector was very often full of shit—but what was going on between John and Evalin seemed super unromantic.
We were grossed out, but that didn’t mean we could stop staring. Eventually, Calvin elbowed Hector. Hector blinked and elbowed Jimmy. It was time to snap out of it and move. We turned ourselves sideways and started inching through the crowd. Of course, we knew that if we were in any way as cool as we had hoped we’d be, the crowd would’ve parted for us.
The last time we were in such a full house was when we were at Hector’s on the afternoon after Ana’s funeral. We’d been on a mission then: to gather up precious bits of information about Ana. This party at Evalin’s wasn’t at all the same, and we had a completely different, three-part mission: to convince the people we went to school with we weren’t total losers, to get tipsy on cheap beer, and to maybe talk to some girls. We kept our ears open, though. Maybe people were still talking about Ana; maybe she was still, in a way, alive to these people—like she was for us—in the swirls of stories and rumors.
For sure, Ana would’ve been in this house, at this party, if she’d been alive. She would’ve snuck out her window to get here. All the kids from school would’ve stopped what they were doing the moment she came through the door. They would’ve turned and looked. The noise level would’ve lowered. The crowd would’ve parted for her as she moved through it. There seemed to be a big, black hole in the middle of Evalin’s house where Ana should’ve been.
Did anyone aside from us think that? For sure, John Chavez didn’t.
See, there’s something else about John—something big, something we learned later from the other kids at school. John was the guy who Ana had been sneaking out her window to see on the nights leading up to her death. John was the guy who Ana had been sneaking out her window to see on the night of her death. John had watched Ana slip, Ana fall, Ana hit the ground. And he’d driven away. He wasn’t the villain in our story because villains typically have spines. He was lower than that—the ultimate, ultimate unrepentant coward.
From what we’d just witnessed in the entryway, John had very clearly moved on, and we didn’t understand how. That was a huge part of why we couldn’t stop staring when we’d first walked in. We were sort of transfixed, but we were also really, really pissed—even though John was known far and wide to be a grade-A dick, the more we thought about it, the more it made us slow-burn angry how he’d moved on, and with Evalin Uvalde of all people.
Evalin had a long-standing reputation for being really mean. Jessica Torres was also mean, but the two were mean in different ways. We’d always thought Jessica was mean because she was so full of life that it chafed at her from the inside out. She was always simmering, and it reminded us of a pot of stew on a stove. She contained so much beneath her skin, and when she got heated up, all those things tumbled and boiled. Evalin, on the other hand, was colder, crueler. She’d say and do mean things just to say and do mean things. Evalin was the type of person who would trip a kid to watch them cry and then deny ever having done anything—and then tell the kid it was their fault.
Less than ten minutes after we’d arrived at the party, Jessica Torres finally showed up. We ran into her when she was in the kitchen, by herself, pouring Sprite and vodka into a red plastic cup. She was wearing Ana’s clothes—a black denim skirt that didn’t fit quite right and an oversized blue T-shirt—but she was always wearing Ana’s clothes those days, so that wasn’t surprising. The cup she was holding was shaking because her hand was