Read Online Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera - Free Book Online Page A

sucio fest here in Portland.
    I parked my curvy ass on an open window seat and counted how long I could hold my breath. Phen was unfazed and judging by the ocean deep sweat marks under his pits, he felt right at home. I sat there breathing all crazy and feeling demasiado grossed out. How was I supposed to survive here? These Portlanders were an entirely different breed of white people.
    From an all-girls Catholic school in Westchester County, New York to the private liberal arts college I attended in Baltimore, Maryland (yea scholarships!), I was used to the buttoned up, wealthy, Casper-skinned whites that always spoke in their library voices and used words like sassy and spicy to describe me. I was used to white people that embodied the suburban American dream. White people like Lainie’s parents, who wished their daughters weren’t dating me but tolerated it and engaged me in discussions about affirmative action and how I benefited from it. White people that informed me that my fellow Latinos were “genetically more violent” than the average white boy all while inviting me to their summer home on the Cape. I was comfortable with white people that only sweat during a friendly game of tennis with their law school buddies. Those law school buddies would often have sons who would try and seduce me in secluded walkways and darkened corridors in other wings of their giant homes. They were careful to avoid their perfect cheerleader girlfriends while putting the moves on me. Flawed as the set-up was, those were the blanquitos I knew. The devils you know and whatnot. These cats over here made me wish I had santos to pray to for guidance. I didn’t know how to navigate hippie white.
    A storm cloud of hypocrisy slid over me. I felt kind of sick. My mother didn’t raise me this way. Who was I to assume that these stinky ass people had no home training? Or that they were any worse than the other uppity whites I was more familiar with? Who was I to judge how these hippie-types chose to live in their own bodies? I closed my eyes and breathed in these new people. Still stanky. After a few long minutes, I got used to the rawness of it and filed the smell in my brain as earthy . I could do earthy. I swiveled around and went back to scoping everyone. Some of these hippie white girls looked summer-sweet like the type you make wild love to lakeside somewhere surrounded by dandelions, possibly on hallucinogenic drugs. Damn that girl in the corner is beautiful with her brown dreadlocks, blue eyes, and grass stained overalls. She smiled at me and I couldn’t help but grin back. Beautiful-hippie-stranger girl reached for the yellow tape to indicate her stop and a chia pet of pit hair popped out from under her arm. I choked and spun back around to look out of the window. Being open-minded about everything earthy entailed was going to take a hot minute.
    Phen stared at me, unsmiling. He crossed his arms over his chest and asked, “So Juliet, how do you identify? What are your preferred gender pronouns?”
    â€œI’m sorry, what? How do I identify what?” I asked, my voice quiet. A gender pronoun? I wanted to ask what a preferred gender pronoun was but Phen’s face, his raised eyebrow, his entire manner kept me from feeling comfortable. The way Phen asked—so casually, like this was common knowledge—made the air between us shift into a hazy thickness.
    Phen half rolled his eyes, “Oh c’mon, do you identify as queer? As a dyke? Are you trans?” he asked, spitting phrases at me, amused by my ignorance. “And PGPs are so important even though I think we should drop preferred and call them mandatory gender pronouns. So, are you she, he, ze, they?”
    I shrugged and said, “I’m just Juliet.” I chewed my pinky nail, looking down at the floor.
    I was surrounded by hippies and the only person in the world who knew my name on this bus was sitting across from me speaking