Tigers, Not Daughters by Samantha Mabry

Author:Samantha Mabry [Mabry, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2020-02-08T01:45:29+00:00

The Night Jessica Torres Made Out with John Chavez in Front of Everyone

It was the first party we’d ever been to.

That’s not true, of course. We’d been to plenty of birthday parties, block parties, baptisms, but this was different.

It was the first party we’d ever been to where we’d walked in, stood among the kids we went to school with, and felt like the smallest people in the world. Not small in stature, but small in spirit. We’d done everything, of course, to try to make that not be the case. We’d planned it to where we walked into Evalin Uvalde’s house on that Friday night in the early days of September, three months after Ana had died, like a pack, like a gang, with blasé-sneering expressions on our faces, intentionally two and a half hours late, dressed in our coolest clothes and wearing too much cologne. The goal was to make an impression while pretending like we didn’t care about making an impression. When we walked into Evalin’s house, however, we made absolutely no impression. None. People may have looked at us, but they didn’t see us. They looked through us. We were wallpaper.

The very first thing we saw when we walked into Evalin’s house was Evalin herself. John Chavez had her pressed up against the wall of the entryway—right inside the front door—and they were really going at it. Behind them and around them were tons of people drinking, laughing, and shout-talking into each other’s ears. All those people were acting like it was no big deal that John had one hand up Evalin’s shirt and was full-on groping her boob. Honestly, it kind of looked painful for Evalin, like John was squeezing the way someone might furiously juice an orange. And the sounds their mouths were making were so weird and 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

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