🔏Ch_33

Girl With No Name

Summer nights in Valparaíso were like cream. Incandescent street lights warmed the rusted sheet-metal and patchwork concrete, and the air was thick and sweet. Bicycles trundled up or flew down the hilly, sidewinder streets, clicking like insects. Beneath it all, the ocean fizzed like a slow heartbeat. Keiko and I queued up for the ascensor—the funicular that brought you up and down Valpo’s many steep hills. Sharp zephyrs from the bay knifed through the velvet of my dress. I hugged myself.

“Y’alright?”

“Yeah,” I said, shooting Keiko a nervous smile. “Chillier than I thought it would be.” 

“Really? I’m kinda warm.”

We got to the front of the line. I thanked the attendant as he slid the metal door open for us. K and I climbed into the cart, a red box with a graffitied bench and smudgy, plexiglass windows on each side. This side overlooked the port, with its motley hills of shipping crates and monolithic cranes. The sixty-foot drop to the crowded highway made my stomach do flips. 

“Here,” Keiko said. She had her jacket off, the sleeves of her men’s button-up voluminous on her stick-thin arms. “It should fit over your shoulders.”

“No way.”

“No way?”

“You’re not gonna trick me with that eighteenth-century crap. I already know you’re a criminal hedonist.” I hugged myself harder, turning back to the traffic. The ascensor started with a lurch that almost knocked me over. 

“What’s a.. hi… hidishi?”

“Hedonist.”

The tram trundled down its angled track.

“Hi-da-nishita. Hidanishita.”

“Nist. Hee-don-ist.”

“Nisshi-te. Hi-da-nishte. What’s it mean?” She unbuttoned her cuffs.

“It means…” 

Long, nimble fingers pulled the final button free. The fabric rolled back from her wrist like a curtain, revealing a swath of thin, pale skin, then a black slip of ink starting halfway up her forearm. But there she stopped, smoothing the rolled cuff so it demarcated the border. “It means… pervert,” I finished lamely, looking back over the highway, only to find we were rumbling into the station.

“Ohh,” Keiko drawled. “Can’t argue with that.” 

An attendant clattered the door open for us. I dropped two coins on the counter as we pushed through the turnstile, then emerged into the plaza. Keiko covered one bare forearm with her jacket, and I was full of warm disappointment. I wanted to tear that sleeve up to the bicep and dig my nails into the inked skin. In my head, Keiko whispered hi-da-nishita.

“We close?” Keiko sniffed the air, raising her chin as if to look over an invisible crowd’s heads. Indeed, the cozy scent and sizzle of grilled meat grew stronger with every step.

“Yeah, it’s up here.”

Valpo has a few plazas like this, open parks of paving stones made for vendors and citizens to convene. We perused the open-air market, a mix of stalls selling everything from sopaipillas to knock-off Lakers jerseys to hand-knitted patches that said things like “smash the gender binary” and “no one is illegal.” Keiko cackled at the photo of a completo at one cart, reading the ingredients aloud then ordering it with gusto. She chatted energetically in rudimentary Spanish with the mustachioed man manning the cart as he prepared it, heedless of his less-than-indulgent tone. When he handed her the overloaded hot dog, she laughed again and took a toothy bite. 

Keiko struggled with her food as we walked a block down, where I got a beef skewer and fresh, pulpy pineapple juice. We retired to a stone bench in the plaza. Keiko kept saying her food was “too much,” laughing at first, then woefully. She got a third into it before throwing up a white flag.

“You want the rest?”

“I got the food I wanted,” I said, haughtily sucking on my straw.

“Come on, I’ll trade you. That skewer looks good.”

“Nope, it’s all mine.” I waved the stick like a wand, then bit off the last chunk of grilled meat. Keiko hissed through her teeth. 

A gaggle of women on bicycles passed by. One arched her body in an S-shape as she rode, a mane of dark hair floating off her shoulders. The billow of her loose, cutoff shirt showed a hint of brown skin. As she rode past with a hiss of perfume, Keiko’s head swiveled, leaving me staring at the back of her greasy coiffure. The girl on the bike turned a corner, laughing a bubbly laugh.

“You see that?” she asked.

“You sure did.”

“What? She not your strain?”

The protest halted on the tip of my tongue. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with other queer women. One girlfriend in high school, a few college parties, unconsciously chasing the model of a bisexual woman that my channer h@x0r friends expected. A smirking acceptance of their dirty jokes and suggestive desktop backgrounds. Only dating men. To them, my attraction to women was an adjective, not a noun, and only a verb when they were there to watch. I don’t think it was because they were big James Baldwin fans. “It’s not a bug,” a smirking ex told me once, “It’s a feature.” It didn’t make me feel accepted. He meant the feature was for him, not for me. 

So talking about women to another queer woman was new but oddly comforting territory. “Girls like that always made me nervous.”

“Girls like what?”

“Y’know, like…” I brushed my hair back, put on a fake smile and vocal fry, “hot girls.”

“I have some good news for you,” Keiko said, leaning in. “You’re a hot girl.”

“Yeah, I’m real Harper’s Bazaar cover model material,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s not really a looks thing, it’s... an attitude, like they’re born walking on air. Fashion magazines and YouTube makeup tutorials can’t teach me that.”

“Mm. They feel like a different species sometimes, yeah? I remember when I started trying to date girls, it felt like going through puberty a second time. I wanted ‘em so bad, but they terrified me.”

“Ha, yeah. I remember...”

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s a stupid story.”

With a clean slide, Keiko closed the space between us to nudge me with a wiry elbow. “Come on. We smoked drugs together, you gotta gimme the goods.”

I coughed a laugh in the middle of sipping my juice. “I’ll only tell you if you promise not to say ‘smoked drugs’ ever again.” Keiko stayed next to me. I didn’t move away. “So, I always liked computers. My first actual hack I was like… twelve? We were in computer class, being walked through a lesson that was supposed to take the whole time, fifty minutes. I finished it in five. I was bored out of my skull, so I started nosing around the computer’s settings, but I couldn’t change anything unless I signed in as an admin.”

Gentle salsa music crackled from somewhere in the plaza. Keiko pushed up from the bench. We tossed the half-eaten completo, empty cup and bare skewer stick in a green egg of a trash can. I followed her, continuing the story as we walked. “I logged out of my student account, clicked the admin login, just to see, but of course it was password-protected. I figured that was the end of it, resigned to utter boredom. But then, just to check, I tried typing in ‘password.’ Lo and behold…”

“Eh? How did you figure that out?” Keiko looked genuinely alarmed.

“Uh, it’s… like the most common password there is. I modded a hash-cracking program to start with every keystroke variation of ‘password’ before trying personal information. It cut the crack time in half.”

“So… password is a bad password to have?” Keiko asked, staring into space.

“Yes… K, are you using- oh my God. Go now and change it.”

“Wait, I want to hear the rest of the story!”

“Your password is password! I just told you how a twelve-year-old could hack your account!”

“I don’t remember what I even used it for. Don’t matter, come on, tell me.”

“I can’t believe you’re supposed to get hired as cybersecurity. OK, so, I got into the admin account, which gave me control of every computer on the school’s network.”

“Uoh! All of them?”

“Yeah, K, that’s how networks work. Do we need to go over networks again?”

“Oh, no. You’re not turning a night out into work. Finish the story.”

“Fine. So I’m wracking my twelve-year-old brain for what to do with this newfound power. There was this girl in the class, Georgiana Astor. WASPy, blonde, a cute accent—I mean she could have been the quintessential southern belle if she wanted.” I picked up my pace; Keiko’s long-legged stride meant she continuously had to stop and wait for me to catch up. “But, instead she dressed kinda punky. Got in trouble once for wearing a Nine Inch Nails shirt to school.”

“Ohh, so that’s your type? Blondes?”

“I don’t- no, not blondes. Uhm… rebel girls, I guess. I mean, I don’t know, I was twelve.”

“What’s a ‘rebel girl?’ Like a delinquent?”

“I guess so.”

Keiko grinned, almost literally, from ear to ear. “I was queen delinquent back in the day. Got kicked out of three different schools.” 

“That’s… not exactly what I meant.”

“So, blonde girl.”

“Yeah, Georgiana. She told people to call her George, which I thought was really cool. I don’t know if I knew then that I liked her-liked her, just that I wanted her to like me. Y’know, just... be super-best friends, spend all our time together.”

“Yeaaah, I remember that phase. This one time we got back from a school trip to the beach, sand everywhere, stinky fish smell, yeah? And one of my friends said she couldn’t wait to go home and take a bath, that it would be delicious. I thought about that ‘delicious’ for, really really, years after. Didn’t realize why until after I graduated. Well, I mean, I didn’t graduate, but stopped going to school.”

“Of course that would be what stuck out to you.”

“Oh, yeah, baby. He-do-nist.” 

“Don’t call me baby, hedonist. Anyway, they put tape on the monitors to show which computer was which on the network. So I opened the network list and scrolled until I found the number for her workstation. I think I was just learning about remote access back then, so I pulled up RDP and connected to her desktop.”

We cut through a wide alley made by two turn-of-the-century buildings. It was clean, with neat paving stones and street lamps. We passed photo-realistic, spray-painted portraits of Chuck Norris, Che Guevara, and Tupac Shakur. “I copied a script for a dialogue box from a repository website. It had a button for yes, and a button for no. I backspaced the placeholder ‘hello world’ message, and I typed in ‘do u like me?’”

“Uoh! Really goin’ for it, huh? You were a pretty brave kid.”

“It was anonymous. Like slipping a note into someone’s locker. With admin access running the script on her machine was a snap, even for my preteen copy-and-paste routine.” My shoulders slouched; lids lowered. “I remember hearing the thunk of the dialogue coming up, the slight change in color on her face in the dark lab when it showed up on her screen.”

Keiko rubbed her hands. “And that’s the story of how you first got to first base?”

“No. George called the teacher over.”

“Tch. Narc.”

“Yeah. The class started whispering, and the teacher walked around, looking at people’s monitors. I fumbled all my programs closed, alt+f4ing notepad and command prompt, clearing the history on Netscape Navigator, logging out from admin and back into student user. I’d redone the assignment six times already, so I just started that again.”

“Uoh! So they didn’t catch you?”

“The teacher didn’t even check my screen. She assumed it had been a boy.”

“Ha! Good. Fuck ‘em.”

I swallowed a smile. Rebel girls. Maybe that was my type. “So what about you? What’s your type?”

K spun to walk backwards and grin at me. “You.”

“Whatever, I’m the only girl you know here.”

“I know Martina,” she said, spinning to walk beside me again. “And Cat. She is definitely in the family.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Please, any chick that good at snapping people in half has a stack of titty mags under her bed.”

“So you and Cat?”

“Psh, no way. Not my type at all.”

We approached Plaza Sotomayor, brick pavers making whorling patterns and a lofi radio muttering oldies under the buzzing street lights and sighing ocean waves. The center market was closed—a dozen pitched, plastic roofs huddled together, like birds sleeping on a wire. A flaking wooden platform, big as a handicapped parking spot and painted the same shade of blue, was tucked in one corner. “Martina then?”

“I don’t date older chicks.”

“That’s not a red flag.”

“I’m not sayin’ there ain’t some buffer,” K said. “I just did it a lot when I was young. Figure it’s my turn to be the daddy.”

“Gross.”

Where were we going, anyway? The ascensor to Cerro Concepcíon was near here. Had I walked this way unconsciously? The song on the radio faded, giving way to gentle acoustic guitar and some Motown crooner.

“Uoh! I love this song! Hold my coat.” Keiko didn’t give me much choice.

“This song? It’s… old.”

“It’s from one of my favorite movies!” K backed away from me, skipping towards the wooden platform like a big kid. She hopped onto it to two-step with an invisible partner, singing along. “But don’t forget who’s taking you home, and in whose arms you’re gonna be.” Her singing was awful, but she danced a neat square, nimble on her scuffed-up oxfords.

“Wait, you like, actually know how to dance.”

K repeated the expert ballroom circle. “Yeah, I was in a club in school. Short on boys, so I got to dance with all these cute girls with small faces.”

“Small… faces?”

Keiko must not have heard me over her own nasal singing. “Baby don’t you know I love you so, can’t you feel it when we touch… You want me to teach you?”

“Me? Ha, no way.”

“Come on, the song’s almost over! It’s easy, you’ll see.”

She was so excited—giddy even—it seemed almost mean to refuse. I draped her jacket over my shoulders and stepped onto the platform. “Fine, OK, what do I do?”

“Here, come face me. When I go forward, you’re gonna step back with your left.” I stood a few feet in front of her as she explained the steps, gesturing at our feet. “Then I’ll go back, and you step forward with your right. Back, left, forward right. You got it?”

“I… guess?”

“Here, listen. Back,” she stepped forward, signaling how I would flow backwards in response, then returned both feet to the middle. “Forward.” She stepped back with a beckoning hand. “OK, now do it with me this time. Back. Feet together. Forward, yeah that’s it! You see, I told you, easy.”

Staring at my feet, I wasn’t sure I agreed. As the song rumba’d on, K used her hands to direct me like an aircraft. “OK, now we turn. Back, center, forward, now turn, turn.” K took two perpendicular steps until she was facing away from me, then turned back. “And you rotate around this way. You got it?”

“Not at all,” I laughed at my feet.

“Here.” K leapt behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders. It didn't feel lecherous, not an excuse for contact; she was too enthusiastic for that. “Back, middle, forward, and now do middle again, but turn them like… this.” She rotated me to the side as I stumbled my heels together. “You see?”

Her firm grip on my shoulders was distracting. “I think so.”

“OK, let’s go again.” She stepped out in front of me in two long-legged strides; spoke the instructions in time, until we’d drawn a few clumsy squares on the platform. “Slow, slow, quick-quick,” she hummed under her breath to the beat, watching my feet as hers effortlessly went through the steps. “Great! Ok, let’s try it.”

“Weren’t we just-“ I began, then K swept forward, one hand on my back, the other taking my own. My eyes shot back down to my feet.

“Back,” she whispered, so much closer now, cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. “Center. Forward. OK, and turn.”

We turned, but watching my feet, I turned the wrong way, stomping on K’s dress shoe. 

“I-tata…” She grinned through a grimace.

“Shit, sorry.”

“Nah it’s fine. Let’s start again.” She beckoned me to step back up against her, but I didn’t. 

“The song’s over.” Now it was a DJ advertising in rapid Spanish.

“Ahhh, too bad. You were just getting the hang of it.”

“Sure. I think I’m gonna two-step my way home now, this evening has been a little too weird for me.”

Keiko darted to my side. “I’ll walk you home.” 

I slowed to a stop. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

I expected some sleazy proposition, a clever comeback, even an invitation back to her grimy apartment. What I didn’t expect was the crestfallen expression; the flat, humbled smile; the hands stuffed in pockets. She looked young, and I felt like a teenager. “Right. Yeah. I get it,” she said.

“It’s just that… no one in the gang knows where I live.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?”

Because the fewer people who know where I live, the safer it is for all of us. I handed her jacket back. “It’s just… it’s private, I guess.”

Keiko studied me; sighed. “Alright,” she said, draping the jacket back over her arm. “Well, stay safe walking back. There’s criminals out here.” She smiled, that crooked grin—the one I was starting to see more in, and coming to like far too much. Keiko backed out of the lamplight, lit a cigarette, then strolled back towards the ascensor.

Halfway up the hill to La Mesa, I remembered my coat and the bike. I was too exhausted to deal with the logistics of retrieving them from Keiko’s place tonight. Trudging up to my room, I convinced myself it wasn’t an excuse to visit her rathole apartment again. 

My bedtime routine started like a daemon: stripping, washing my face, tugging on a soft pair of pajamas and putting my hair in a scarf, barely cognizant.  It wasn't until I huddled under the covers with my laptop that my thoughts started dancing in a ballroom square. My spine fizzled when I remembered how her voice sounded whisper-close. I’ll walk you home. I peered at the file window—my downloads folder. Aoi’s text log.

Bad idea, I thought. I right-clicked it. A list sprouted up, the image I'd seen for only a moment flashing in my synapses over and over. Maybe the worst idea. There might be more in her and Aoi’s message history. My cursor hovered over “close.” I shifted under the covers, then scrolled to “open.”

---

Oh my~

footnotes:

1. The movie Keiko references is a Japanese film called Shall We Dance? (Sharu wī dansu)

2. The song is Save the Last Dance for Me by The Drifters.

Hunkering down for hurricane number two 🙃 I’ll update next wednesday if I survive!