She couldn’t help it. She tried to breath in deep, to let it out slow but it just didn’t work. It never did.
It was that smell, the pomade, Tres Flores that Cortez dragged across his pomp.
It was the way he stood above her. He was just like her Tio Tony, the uncle that took her when she was 6, the first of that side of the family to try a bit.
She’d cried the first dozen times and then it was just well, funny to the fading Nolita. So hilarious that she was left with him over and over. Ridiculously hysterical that nobody noticed she was paler than before. She wasn’t their little girl anymore. She was something else in-between that’s never supposed to exist. A lost little creature.
She became ticklish. That scent, that hair grease always got to her. It made her shift inside the rags her mother hastily laid out for her before she left for work each morning at four a.m.
The same one’s Nola washed thoroughly after his "visit" before her mother returned at eleven each night.
She giggled again.
It was a familiar thing that almost gave her a comfort. It did something else to Nolita, too, something she’d never experienced nor expected.
It made her tall.
Her spine straightened lifting those curves like a forklift.
Cortez was furious! She dared to laugh at him! She was going to pay and pay more than anyone has ever paid. That laugh was going to be very expensive for Nola.
She got the bill, she knew the cost. She wasn’t frightened, it was the damndest thing. She was euphoric.
Josephine did an inside shiver and made ready. She saw the lift of the lovely Bride in the chair and she knew the smack of the snicker would send him over.
And she knew something else: This was Nola’s battle. Her fight and hers alone. It was decades old and it was a beaten and bruised baby that needed to finally swing back.
Win or win, she knew the war.
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