The street was empty, illuminated by the glow of art deco hotel fronts like the whole place was as real as a lit-up plastic Christmas tree. They ran two blocks inland, a few trickles of bleary-eyed clubbers meeting their path, unimpressed by their half-dressed, panicky race toward nowhere. They ran past closed tourist shops full of mannequins, balloon-breasted women in bikinis, blank-faced men in silly T-shirts that said things like FBI: FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR. Rows of shot glasses, crystal dolphins, bleached sand dollars. Johnson with a hand holding his pants up, Johnson running with the wobble of a toddler taking its first clumsy steps.

It had happened like this: Johnson thrusting her into the sand and pinning her by the shoulders. Like this: a tiny crab scurrying inches from Jeanette’s sideways-turned head, minute legs like fingers running over a piano. She didn’t yell or protest. She didn’t say no. She felt the futility of language, that it couldn’t capture the knowledge that what was happening was exactly what she’d expected could happen, that she was disappointed that once again the unexpected hadn’t won out. That strange men in cars were exactly what everyone had warned they were. That sex was just sex and not something that would clean her from the inside out, deliver her new to the world.

As Johnson undid her shorts, as he tugged at her tank top, she wanted to yell that he should stop—not because she wanted him to but because why would he want to be exactly what everyone expected? Didn’t he know how exhausting it was? She couldn’t find her voice, but it didn’t matter. Jeanette knew it then: harder girls weren’t happy. Probably, nobody was.

Jeanette followed until she didn’t. She followed until Johnson no longer looked back. Then she stopped along an empty street and curled onto a bench. She wondered if Johnson would come back looking for her. She wondered what a sunrise would look like on this particular street, what a body would look like coming into the light.

5

FIND YOUR WAY HOME

Gloria

Mexico, 2016

When you first got there, to the detention center, I was afraid you would forget: the feel of bathwater (that feeling of calming suspension, like in a womb!), the way Miami smells of salt, what it feels like to run for miles and never hit a wall or fence. I was afraid captivity would shape you into something new and unrecognizable. I was afraid I would bear witness to a turning point, look back and think, That was the moment that shaped your life into disaster, or worse, I was the one who caused disaster.