Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia (year 2 reading books .txt) 📕

across a concrete wall, over sand dunes, all the way to shore. Eerie exit-sign green, Barbie-doll pink: they were awash in the palate of a night all wrong.

Jeanette spotted the hand first. Bloated, palm up, on the wet sand. Skin purple-red like a heart carved out of the body. She cheered it on, even. Yes, my little heart, run to sea and leave this moment. Then she followed the lines and angles, and a fuller graph appeared: an arm as the water receded, bobbing breasts as the water rushed back.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered. Shock gave her strength she couldn’t muster a moment before. Jeanette dug her heels into the sand and pushed Johnson off.

He tumbled onto his side, onto his elbow. “What the fuck?” He followed her gaze: water receding, body. “Fuck!”

They scrambled to their feet. Jeanette’s tank top was bunched under her armpits. Her nipples poked through a mesh purple bra. She pulled her top down and her denim shorts up from her ankles. They stepped closer to the water’s edge but stopped before the body like an invisible perimeter held them back.

Johnson said the obvious. Something like, “Holy shit. It’s a dead body.” The body was of a woman, perhaps in her forties, perhaps in her sixties. It was impossible to tell.

“What do we do?” she managed.

The dead woman’s eyes were open, the pupils fixed on some faraway horizon. They were milky, looked like they’d be pebble hard to the touch, and the mouth was slightly parted like death had come as she said something innocuous. How’s the weather over there? mouth barely closing over ere.

“Fuck, I don’t know. Fuck! I’m so high. Okay, give me a moment. I need to think. Give me a moment.” Johnson ran a hand through the wisps of hair left on his almost-bald head.

A moment ago Jeanette had thought she’d reached the precipice of who she wanted to be, thought she’d finally walk the halls of Gables High like a harder girl, like the ones with boyfriends who didn’t have to lie about sexual experience. They’d always both intrigued and frightened her. She knew they knew of things she only read about in romance paperbacks with worn spines or watched on HBO late at night with the volume muted so her parents wouldn’t hear. She believed the harder girls, the cooler girls, were contagious and she, dripping with want, could siphon their cool. She’d tried to move in their orbit, hoped they’d see her as one of their own. But until this night, she had lived with fear they’d find her out for the girl she really was.

Now she was standing in front of a dead body and knew of things none of the cool girls would ever know.

It started like this: Two girls in denim coochie-cutters hanging outside a gas station. Sasha’s car was parked in an IHOP lot. They’d just finished eating a stack of pancakes for dinner. They were bored. Sasha’s mom was at her boyfriend’s place in West Palm Beach, where she spent most weekends. Jeanette’s mother was home recovering from a tummy tuck. Her father was home drunk.

They’d split a joint and hot-boxed Sasha’s car at the car wash. They did that often: selected a deluxe super-plus wash, which meant the car went in and they didn’t have to pull out for like fifteen minutes. So nice, to be pulled along, car moving on its own, no decisions. In a haze of smoke, Jeanette had watched automatic rollers paint Sasha’s windshield with giant, clumsy, felt-robot hands. The robot and Jeanette had blown hot air at each other. Then, giggling, they’d rolled into the sunshine, opening the windows to air the car as a bored young worker took Sasha’s money and shook his head in disbelief and, probably, a bit of jealousy. Then IHOP. Then they’d wanted cigarettes. That’s why they went to the gas station.

Jeanette and Sasha had a routine. They stood off to the side, by the quarter air pumps, out of the sight line of whoever manned the cash register inside the shop. They watched for the right kind of guy getting out of his car. The best bets were guys over thirty, without girlfriends or wives or kids in the car. Jeanette was better at asking than Sasha. She’d never said it to Sasha’s face, of course, but Jeanette knew it was because she was prettier. Sasha, with her small chest and habit of wearing headbands, looked younger. The only guys who eyed Sasha at the gas station were the really old ones and they had agreed to draw the line at sixty. Old, old guys were creepy.

That Saturday, Jeanette had tried one guy before Johnson. The guy had been in his thirties maybe, with a crew cut and a tattoo of Florida that said GOD BLESS THE GUN-SHINE STATE in Old English letters below. She was sure he’d buy them a pack. But he’d brushed Jeanette aside with laughter while scanning her body and lifting the gas pump from its holster.

“Sweetie, I’m on parole, and you aren’t worth it,” he’d said.

She was mortified. So she tried extra-hard with the next guy, with Johnson: adjusted her bra so extra cleavage spilled over her orange top, sucked her stomach in, reapplied strawberry Lip Smackers and a light-brown lip liner. She’d dabbed some CK One between her boobs.

Johnson pulled up in a beat-up bloodred Toyota. He looked like a dad, or like one of Sasha’s mother’s boyfriends, in camouflage shorts and a white T-shirt that read TONY’S TACKLE AND BAIT SHOP in faded blue. He had green eyes and acne scars, muscular arms that strained his shirtsleeves. The Toyota had dark-tinted windows.

Jeanette chewed her gum as she walked up to him. She smiled her most pleasant smile, the kind her dad liked. Smile, it’s your best feature, he’d say to her as she left the house for school each morning.

Johnson looked up with his wallet in his hand. Sweat beaded on his forehead. She said