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  Jennifer had explained to her mother that the attack was because of the cupcakes. Her mother did not believe her, but it was the truth. She’d barely graduated from Lamar High School, but had picked up a few of life’s skills, such as baking, and put them to use. In the morning, she would fluff eggs and mix them with vanilla, flour, and cocoa powder. She kept the mixture waiting in the fridge until she acquired the dried, shredded hemp-leaf powder, the most essential ingredient. It made the cupcakes a hit on Saturday nights by Hyde Park or at Lola’s Depot, the dive on Fairview Street. The distributors lurked around these places, refilling orders and collecting their loot after the peddling. Soon enough, Jennifer graduated to selling their pills. Along the way, she picked up more tricks of the trade, including keeping some of the pills for herself, so she didn’t have to share all the profits.

  After her knife wounds healed, she realized she was underqualified for that job and chose the opposite path: enrolling in college. It had been the right choice, because it had changed everything—except the visions.

  They were invasive, visiting during the most sacred times. She watched herself step on a chair, next to the rope dangling like a carrot, and saw her feet suspended in the air. She couldn’t have been dangling, really, because she was in her bedroom. With Miles. Between his whispers, she saw herself hanging from the ceiling in various corners of her apartment. She was not present, and Miles felt heavy. His whispers became loud. She moved her head, leaving him to whisper to her arms and then her legs and then her feet, so she could not hear the promises he made her. Not even when he clutched her face between his hands, which were cracked and calloused, probably from too many hours of playing drums. His mouth moved to hers as if in amazement at a new wonder. His breath reeked like Joe’s Crawfish. He moved to her ears.

  She could hear his rapid breathing, not in synch with hers. Her tongue refused to form the words in her head, and the fear pressed on her lungs, interrupting her breathing. He was moving fast, as if his life depended on it. Her eyes became blurry and her body could not distinguish who was who. Her mind did, but she could not get them to work together. He pulled her hair ever so gently. The sharp pains sprang from her memory, moving from her head down her body, piercing her insides, and she became paralyzed. When Miles was done, he took a deep breath, rested his hands behind his head, and smiled. Her tears compelled him to pull her in for a hug. This was the part she longed for, actually. His arms wrapped around her faded the memories to the background, sharpened her affection for him. Their breathing finally fell into synch. She held him as he fell asleep. She had to fight to preserve this feeling.

  She watched him for thirty minutes, her body folded into the curves of his, because it was almost eight o’clock—time for him to return to the other who loved him. She did not want him to go, but if there was anything she had learned in the world, it was patience and kindness. Patience for the time they would finally exit Montrose together, and kindness for the other woman who cooked for him.

  When he was gone, she jumped into the shower and closed her eyes, listening only to the sound of the water. After, she hugged the pillow, searching for his smell. She tried to make new memories that involved moving away from Montrose with Miles, away from judgmental eyes. Life could be filled with an old pickup, rustic furniture, and a slow life, many towns away from Houston.

  * * *

  The months moved fast. The exhaust pipe of her blue Nissan collapsed, eaten up by the rust as the mechanic had explained, and set them back in their aspirations. Miles talked and Jennifer escaped to her memories. The nice ones, about him. She found a way to interrupt her visions of the chair by simply concentrating on the first time she saw him at the club.

  She thought about how, in school, he was no different from the others. It was as if, during their nights together, he was transformed from that person in the classroom.

  Meanwhile, she was many things to him—his lover, sister, friend, and mother. When he wanted to be careless, she gave him advice. She knew that for things to go well this time, she had to control everything, including his love for her.

  Finally, several months later, he insisted on leaving Montrose. He didn’t understand why they couldn’t just drive off and be together. She reminded him that money played a role in their lives. However, this no longer made sense to him. He wanted to know why she was so concerned with her job when he was sacrificing everything for her, including those he loved. He threw a glass at a wall, narrowly missing her, and then he left her apartment, banging the door on his way out and making new promises that did not include her.

  The longing that kept her alive began to escape, inviting fear in its place. The vision reappeared, causing spasms that felt like they were pushing her heart out of her body. She clutched her chest and reached for her cell phone. In that moment, she realized that it had been her all along. They could have left anytime. She said this to a voice recording on his phone. Then she waited.

  Past midnight, the door unlocked and he fell into her arms. She felt her breathing stabilizing and thought about how close she had come to losing everything. Just like the first time, she cupped his face and kissed him, and her entire body was riddled with a blinding happiness. His hands were not as active as hers, she realized. Then the trembles started. At first, they were small tremors, but they grew as the minutes stretched. She lifted her face from his chest and looked at him. His pupils had disappeared.

  Jennifer felt terror. She needed to act, and fast. First to save him, then to save their love.

  It was better if he was outside. If they found him in her apartment, there would be too many questions, then repercussions that would foil their plans. She took his cell phone and shoved it into her back pocket, then she kissed his mouth, even as it foamed. She pulled him from the couch and toward the door. With his limp arm over her shoulders, she dragged him by the waist, out into the streets in the dead of night. She did this out of love.

  At the street corner, she called for help. She kept her breath steady and enunciated her words correctly. Any mistake she made, such as giving the wrong address, could cost him his life.

  She felt an urge to cover his shivering body with her own, or with her jacket or a bedspread from her house. But this could be traced back to her, so instead she left him words filled with love and plans to escape when he got back from the hospital.

  As she entered her house, she heard the siren and breathed a sigh of relief. For the rest of the night, she thought only of packing as she waited for him to burst through the door. The hours were not many, but they were long.

  They stretched into the morning, into her workplace. One hour into her history lesson, the principal appeared at her door and motioned for her to step outside. Jennifer walked in silence next to the principal, whose usual jovial spirits were missing. Jennifer broke the silence, but the principal assured her the matter was better broached in his office.

  Had they found out? she wondered. The familiar longing emerged within her. Inside the office, Jennifer stood still, waiting for the principal to say something. She motioned for Jennifer to take a seat on the couch next to her, opposite the mahogany desk. The principal said Miles’s heart had stopped in the early hours of the morning, and that the doctors had done everything they could.

  For a second, Jennifer felt relief, because it meant the principal did not know. Then the reality of what she had heard set in, and her mind went blank. She did not hear the principal offering to tell her students that their classmate had succumbed to a drug overdose, or saying how heartbreaking it must be for Miles’s single mother, who had sacrificed everything to get her son to college.

  Jennifer went straight home from school. Just like in her vision, she stealthily stepped onto the chair. She carefully placed the rope, like a necklace. Then she pushed the chair.

  PART IV

  UP-AND-COMING AREAS, NEWLY REVITALIZED

  HAPPY HUNTING

  by Icess Fernandez Rojas

  North Shore

&
nbsp; Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they’re in the game. —Paul Rodriguez

  The dark-green Ford F-150 skids across the three lanes of Beltway 8’s feeder road, tires smoking like a dying fire. It roars past abandoned gas pumps and overflowing garbage cans, then rumbles to a stop at the convenience store. Its front door is only a few feet away, close enough for Marisol Gomez to see into the brightness inside.

  She grunts as she steps out of the truck. Since the killings started, her muscles have forgotten how to relax. Glaring at the cashier through the thick, dirty store windows, she almost smells him—the foulness of what he is.

  “Murderer,” she whispers.

  This Stop & Shop is the only convenience store still open at night in the crumbling, frightened East Side. Inside, he perches on his stool like a fat toad behind the counter. Reading. Hardly paying attention. In plain sight. He’s taunting her, she knows. She wishes she’d figured it out sooner. Maybe then, Demetria and all the other women would still be alive. Children would have their mothers and boyfriends, their loves.

  The oppressively hard rain has been beating on more than just pavement and buildings. Marisol is damp all over. Her clothes cling in an unbearable hug and her hair is wild with frizz. Her perfectly applied makeup is long gone. Everything she thought made her intimidating has washed away. Everything except the 9mm at the small of her back.

  This is her moment. She’s done something the puto cops couldn’t do—or didn’t want to. Her hustler’s brain has figured out who the serial killer is, and she’s going to bring him to justice. North Shore justice.

  This could go one of two ways: a long chain of devastation and sorrow ends, or she becomes a statistic—one more body for the cops to find and put in the unsolved file. Marisol stuffs that thought down inside herself as she walks to the door, opens it, and steps in from the rain.

  This one is for her girls.

  * * *

  “You’re scary when you get like this.”

  Yessenia, timid as a newborn cat, tried to cool her fear with frozen yogurt. It was more soup than yogurt, with chunks of mango floating like ice cubes. The more she heard about Marisol’s crazy plan, the more the soupy yogurt found its way into her mouth. Her best friend had conjured a plan that terrified Yessenia. Marisol wanted to capture the serial killer hunting brown and black women all over the East Side—North Shore, Channelview, and Sheldon—meaning every woman they knew. The plan would result in either jail time or death, and Yessenia didn’t think her friend would look good as a corpse.

  “It’s gonna work, chica,” Marisol practically yelled, her voice ringing through the interior of Menchie’s frozen yogurt parlor. She used her siren-red manicured fingers to mimic shooting a gun. “Two pops to the head and it’s over!”

  The two young women sat in the long, narrow establishment that screamed with hot pinks and lime greens. It echoed with bad pop music, meant to keep up customer spirits. Outside was a sweltering wet heat; inside was comfortable enough for a penguin and his family to enjoy. But the blinding colors and air-conditioning couldn’t keep customers’ minds from the news: there was a serial killer on the hunt.

  So far, eight women had been found in nearby parks or wooded areas, each strangled with a piece of clothing they’d been wearing: shirts, bras, panties, even shoelaces. Not raped. Never touched below the neck. It wasn’t about sex. Yessenia said it was about control, winning, or maybe even ending something. She and Marisol knew all the victims—they were all friends, friends of cousins, or former classmates. That was the East Side: more connected than a politician and only half as shady.

  “Aren’t you tired of this shit?” Marisol asked, hands gesturing to accentuate every word. “It’s like the freaking Hunger Games. It’s to the point that we’re not sure if our own friends are out to get us.”

  “They aren’t. Probably aren’t.” Yessenia tucked a sliver of dirty-brown hair behind her ear, avoiding Marisol’s wildly gleaming eyes.

  “Come on, Yessenia.” Marisol’s own hair—curly, wine-red, crunchy with hairspray and gel—shook with her words. “You haven’t left your house in three weeks. Every time I call you, you’re too scared to answer.”

  “We have to let the police do their thing, Mari. Just chill.”

  “Those bunch of good ol’ boys? They love brown and black extermination. Since Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, we’re being hunted. And with that dude as president, it’s open season. You heard the latest, right? No? Amber in Channelview. Check this out.”

  Marisol whipped out her cell phone in its glittery pink case and tapped the screen, bringing up a video of two deputies aiming guns at two men in a bright-blue mustang. Yessenia recognized the car. She looked away. The gunshots sounded like firecrackers on the phone’s small speakers, reverberating throughout the shop. Marisol identified the wounded, and those names sounded familiar too. Everything was too familiar.

  “That went down after finding out about Marissa. Them boys are mad as hell. And after Dejah, the streets are lit. How many more have to die before this fool gets caught?”

  “Why us, though? Like, why can’t the homies . . .” Yessenia trailed off and wrapped herself tighter in her brown cardigan.

  “The homies ain’t about handling any business but their own. Amber had kids, man. I met them. She brought them to the house to pick up a registration sticker. Now they’re orphans—part of the system. It ain’t right.”

  The stickers were an old argument between them. For Marisol, selling fake car registration and inspection stickers was a means to an end. Either you hustled, or you got hustled. Sometimes Marisol thought Yessenia considered herself too good for the East Side, with its taco trucks and discount grocery stores. Too good for the oil refineries and the upwind from Pasadena. She couldn’t bear to walk on a street with no sidewalks. Didn’t she know, sometimes folks need to make their own way in the world? That’s what Marisol was doing.

  Yessenia stirred her orange yogurt soup in disappointment. Marisol’s fake car stickers were bad enough. She also charged little old ladies to fill out their Lone Star card applications for food stamps. Twenty-five dollars a pop and no guarantees. But they kept coming, because they needed someone who knew how to read and write English. Grandmothers, the disabled, single mothers—Marisol took advantage of everyone equally. She even seemed proud of it.

  “I wish you’d stop doing that stuff.”

  Marisol rolled her eyes at her best friend. “Ain’t no one worrying about no damn stickers right now, Yessi. We’re being killed, pendeja!”

  Nearby, an old woman sitting with her young granddaughter glared at Marisol, who responded with an ugly look of her own, daring her to say something, before continuing her train of thought: “I bet you he’s a cop. They know about killing us and getting away with it.”

  “Mari, that’s not fair.”

  Yessenia’s phone buzzed. She glanced at its screen, then placed it facedown on the table. “Can we take a break from talking about this?” She pushed away her yogurt and stared out the window, her face flushed as snow.

  Marisol leaned over to hug her. “I’m not letting anything happen to you, I promise,” she whispered. “Ain’t no one messing with my girl. Nobody.”

  The promise hit Yessenia’s ear in a boom. This was how it was with them: the whispers were never quiet, and the secrets never stayed secret. Usually, there wasn’t anything Yessenia could keep from Marisol. So it surprised her that Marisol hadn’t noticed the new gold bracelet on her wrist or her dangling earrings. She was too caught up in her anger.

  * * *

  “Wet out there, ain’t it?” she says.

  Behind the counter and the thick glass, the cashier flips through a magazine and doesn’t acknowledge Marisol. His name is Roscoe, Yessenia found out. It’s obvious he wants nothing to do with his customers. He’s almost forgettable in his bright-blue cotton polo and khakis. Roscoe wears his role like camouflage, Marisol thinks, sizing up his prey without her knowing. She
’s just a woman alone, stopping into the store for a drink. Not paying attention to the cabrón about to crush her windpipe. He’s one of those East Side country white boys, cowboy boots and hat like an unwritten uniform. If not the cowboy uniform, then an old trucker hat like every man in his family wore after they went bald. That was years away for Roscoe. He kept his blond hair short on the sides and longer on the top. He wasn’t Marisol’s type, not by a long shot. She preferred her country boys like white noise, in the background and hardly noticeable. But this one, this one looked like he had something to prove.

  Even the hunting ground is incognito—just an average convenience store. This one is about the size of a thumb, with bright fluorescent lights flooding every corner. Not one place to hide. A strong smell of bleach punches Marisol’s gut. It’s like a hospital, but filled with snacks. She has to admit, it’s a logical setup. If she were a killer, she might’ve thought of it herself.

  “Bathroom?”

  Roscoe points to the back of the store where a gray door stands open.

  Marisol walks slowly past the rows of candy bars and motor oil, casing the area. No one but her and the guy behind the bulletproof glass.

  Fuck! How am I gonna get this fool to come out from behind the counter?

  If she can’t do that, the piece at the small of her back is useless. The restroom door scrapes against the floor with a loud noise as she closes it behind her.

  * * *

  “Where are you going to get a gun?”

  “I got a cousin,” Marisol said.

  “Of course,” Yessenia muttered under her breath. She wrapped herself tighter in her favorite brown cardigan—the one that made her feel safe. She’d put her hair in a messy ponytail, ready for whatever Marisol had planned for the night. Her jeans, however, were new, and had cost enough to fill the truck’s gas tank three times over. They were a gift, and she wanted to show them off, even if only to her best friend. But Marisol was once again distracted.