Teeth in Rows
ELENA NEGRÓN
When the white-toothed man in El Tibu Bar asked where I was from, I wasn’t sure what to say. He asked me in English—“Where are you from?”—meaning he thought I was a tourist, which made my stomach twist just a little. His r’s had a roll to them, his vowels came slanted. I could have told him I was sort of a local and then have him be disappointed in my mediocre Spanish, or I could have told him I was from the States and have him think that I was just like the other tourists instead of something in between. Or maybe to him, just by virtue of not being a true local, I would be just like the rest of them. He would bestow upon me the unwilling, begrudged “diaspora kid” title, which I neither connected to nor asked to be. I was visiting, but I wasn’t a visitor the way the others were, but I didn’t live there and I never had.
“I’m sort of from California,” I shouted, before elaborating: “But my Spanish is okay, if you want to do that.” The thudding reggaetón, so Caribbean that it made my heart heavy with a premature nostalgia for the moment, drowned me out a little bit. He leaned in to hear me better. My mouth brushed his ear. All I could smell was sweat and alcohol. My shoes stuck to the quicksand floor of the club, which sat right on the edge of the beach. I imagined myself sinking into the sticky, wooden boards just a few inches above the sand. El Tibu was busy, but it was open-air and the wind pushed through the crowd so that it felt like someone was blowing on my neck. I shivered, even though it was warm and damp outside, and the skin around my joints felt particularly tight and aching.
I gently pulled my arm from the man’s grasp and looked at his face. He was handsome, with a well-groomed beard and large eyes and a small, diamond stud in his nose. He was wearing a button-down shirt, the top three buttons undone and exposing a gold chain. In front of me, Maia had slipped through the crowd. The two tourists, pale men in Martha’s Vineyard T-shirts, whom she’d befriended earlier that evening, flanked her. I did not know their names nor did I care to learn them; they were the Tourist and the Friend. I had silently tried to signal to Maia that I was not interested in the Friend after he’d told me, “It’s pretty dirty around here, huh? Kind of third world.” Maia had blinked at me and shook her head and continued to talk to the man. Now, her eyes and palms were lifted as worshipping the words in the song that I knew she did not understand. The discoteca reflected in her eyes, her blonde hair illuminated as a purple halo in the strobes. She twirled beneath one tourist’s arm and didn’t catch my eye. Sand from the beach gritted between my sneakers and the floor when I turned to face the man.
Around us, other men with beards and earrings clustered around women in tank tops and chunky highlights. I wanted to blend with them; I wanted the other local girls to pour tequila into my mouth, tipped open like a baby bird, and take me into the bathroom and give me too-bright highlights right then and there. I wanted the boys with the earrings, with the absurdly stiff beards and the beach-dark skin, to grab my hips the way they did with the other girls and cup my face in their hands and hand me parcha drinks with tiny, difficult red straws.
I turned to the man and when the world did a sort of drunken lurch, I clutched the front of his shirt to steady myself. He pulled out his phone and typed something. He showed me: I am Ivan. He’d typed it in Spanish and translated it into English. I smiled, and it seemed that my lips were able to stretch further across my face than ever before. I leaned in and said my own name, to which he blinked and nodded, gave a thumbs-up. I typed into his phone: I speak Spanish, we don’t need to translate. It auto-translated to Spanish anyway. He tipped his drink at me and winked. I looked back at Maia, who had an arm wrapped around one of the boys. I couldn’t see, from my angle, if they were kissing or not. I saw the Friend, off to the side, looking at me with furrowed eyes, two drinks, and a sweat stain down the front of his Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt. I waved to him, a pitiful attempt to be apologetic, and turned back to Ivan who had a deep voice and was not sweaty and had no spit around his mouth. I took Ivan’s straw into my mouth and drank and realized how thirsty I was. I kept going until the drink was gone. It was rum, mixed with something sweet.
I’d been drunk almost all day, so it didn’t matter to me anymore what was in the cup.
We’d started the morning with a tequila sunrise for breakfast. Then, when the helado man had come down the beach that morning, he’d given us extra servings of ice cream for free and then little shooters of rum. He’d winked at Maia and said, “Princesa, tan preciosa,” and then gave me a quick nod. I stared at him open-mouthed; it was like a grandpa choosing a favorite grandchild—worse, like a grandpa choosing your white friend instead of you, his actual blood. I swallowed the indignation, ate the ice cream that had been bittered by the piragüero’s betrayal of the ancestors.
The beach stretched out on all sides of us, with condos and hotels creating a wall behind us. To our right, a group of young people smoked weed and to our left was a pair of heavy women with dark, leathered skin. Eventually, Maia gave me her rum shooter because rum “wasn’t her thing” and downed a small bottle of something clear. I poured some of the rum into my own cup and sipped, grinding sand grains between my molars. I asked if she wanted to go swimming. She shook her head, closed her eyes, and rested her cheek on her arm. She never went in past her shins anyway.
The ground was so hot that I was sure it would turn to glass. I jogged most of the way towards the ocean edge, where the lapping water provided quiet relief. There were no crashing waves, no white peaks or wake. The ocean looked to me then like a tumble of sapphires, breaking and joining again, a dark blue that just kept reaching back, and back, and back. I went in further, sliding my feet against the bottom of the ocean floor. The water hit my hips, my waist, my chest. It was so cold and I relished it, the way my skin rose in bumps, involuntary adoration, as if to let the water get even closer. I ducked my head under the surface, my hair splaying out in every direction. Suspended there between the sun and the sand, I let the breath out of my lungs and opened my eyes. In the haze of stirred-up sand, pieces of seaweed hung between penetrating rivets of sun. A school of fish darted away and then came back, silver blades cutting through the water. There was no sound except for a faint buzz with no detectable source. It was me alone creating bubbles and making movements. If I could have, I would’ve tied myself to the pull of the waves and etched myself into every grain of sand. I would have stayed down there until Maia had forgotten all about me, until the fish took me in as their own, until the tide dragged me out so far that I could never get back. Instead, I surfaced and swam parallel to the shore. I floated on my back for so long that salt water clogged my ears. A large fish brushed my leg and after a few failed attempts of trying to grab it with my hand, I returned to the beach.
It seems ridiculous to imagine that I hadn’t seen it coming, the transformation that would take place later that evening. It had begun there, in the water, with my guts turning a black kind of red and my bones both looser and more calcified, my skin tightening just the slightest amount, everything preparing to sufficiently rip.
When I’d returned to the beach, Maia was asleep on her back and I could see her shoulders turning red. I hadn’t woken her.
The man in the club must have felt the sun heat through the thin fabric of my shirt. Ivan pressed his palm into my back and pulled until my body was flush with his. I pushed my hair out of my face clumsily and hooked my arm around his neck. We bobbed to a song that I only sort of knew. He pulled out his phone again and typed out in English: Do you like to dance like this? I nodded, although I wasn’t really sure what he meant. I shouted into his ear, “Podemos hablar en español.” He pressed me closer and turned his face into mine and then, suddenly, my eyes were closed and his mouth was on mine. It was dry, lips only partially open, hands pressed on each other but not moving. The people around us jostled. I pulled back to look at Maia, who was being helped up onto a platform by a bald man in board shorts and an open Hawaiian shirt. I turned back to Ivan, whose gaze flickered between Maia and I briefly before he put my face between his hands and pulled me back to him. At some point, we were no longer swaying and instead just standing, pushing into each other with our mouths open and our teeth clashing.
I pulled away for a moment and told him I was thirsty. He grabbed my hand. His palm was smooth in a way that wasn’t soft, like a well-worn stone. Heavy and comforting. I imagined mine was light and hoped it felt small, cool. I shoved us through the clumps of people. I stopped at Maia, who was swaying wildly, and tugged at the hem of her skirt. She bent down and told me to text her if we got separated. I knew that we would get separated.
Ivan paid for both drinks. Instead of leading me back to the dance floor, he led me out of the club, away from the wooden floor and the pulsing music, and onto the beach. He took my hand again.
“This is okay?” he asked. I gave up on speaking in Spanish to him and nodded. We wandered down the beach silently with our fingers entwined. I imagined that we weren’t strangers, but best friends and soulmates and we would be together forever and we’d come back to this beach and lie next to each other, holding hands and looking out over the water. Maia would take some kind of credit for dragging me out that night but I’d be so happy that I’d let her. Waves bobbed in front of us. The air was thick with salt and the sand shifted where we stepped. Ivan continued to lead me down the beach. He asked me what I liked to do. I told him I was in a band, I was a CEO, I modeled on the side, I was the governor’s niece. I lied, all in English.
We walked to a wall of cement, where other young people were sitting. Some were talking, some were not. He smiled at me and repeated again, what do I like to do: “I mean saying, what you like to happen here? Like, after you hang out, when you are with a man?”
“Oh,” I said. My ears rang in the new silence, broken occasionally by the sound of people groaning or shouting or the crash of waves on the beach. I shut my eyes and took a sip of my drink, suddenly embarrassed.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We don’t have to do anything.” I tried to find flecks of disappointment in his voice, but when I looked at him, he gave me a bright smile. For a moment we sat in a sort of quiet that I tried to make comfortable, because the alternative was returning to Maia and the Tourist and the Friend. Ivan touched my arm. He told me I was so perfect. I smiled in spite of myself, warding off rising discomfort at the compliment. I whispered a thank-you and he leaned in again. I looked at his forehead, a point just above his ear, the apple of his cheek, anywhere except where I would see that he was looking at me. His mouth this time tasted like orange juice and his tongue felt like wet leather. My lips had become sensitive because I’d forgotten to put sunscreen on them before the beach. I let him keep going, mechanically opening and closing my jaw to match his. His hand went under the hem of my dress and surpassed my hips, started climbing up my stomach, which had been tense for what felt like hours. I let it for a moment, to signify that I was cool and not a prude and grateful that he wasn’t forcing me to do this—he’d given me a choice, said we didn’t have to. And so we did.
There was no conversation after that. There was us, kissing on the beach, and then him asking if I wanted to go swimming. I thought about Maia, how much she hated swimming and how she always just stayed on the sand. And there was me, shrugging and still trying to be relaxed and cool, and him pulling me towards the ocean. He pulled off his pants and left them on the shore. I kept my clothes on, resigned to getting them wet. I reminded myself that I’d never be this young again and that I’d never kissed anyone in the ocean before, that I bet Maia never had either, since she hated getting into the water so much. It was cold, and at first, we went only to our shins. He shivered and grasped at my hand. A sensation began to harden in my muscles, urging me further, building up something like courage. I pulled him in deeper, to our knees, my thighs. He pressed his mouth to my cheek, my forehead, my nose, my mouth.
He took my hand and trailed it down his body, letting it stop at the elastic of his underwear. “You are crazy,” he said. I nodded. Was I crazy, like that? Did he think I was? He whispered, “With your mouth.” I could, I decided, be crazy.
I put my mouth on him, all the way down, until I was kneeling and my teeth grazed the bottom of his stomach. The waves hit my shoulders and my back. He grabbed the top of my head. The water gave me a natural rhythm, a push and a pull. It hit the nape of my neck and I had to strain to stay upright. Sometimes it pulled me away from him and I was left for a moment just gaping, mouth salty and dry. After a few minutes, what must have been a few minutes, I realized the waves were getting stronger, that the water was reaching just under my chin. It began to seep in through the corners of my mouth. First, it was a trickle of ocean, and then it came in bigger and bigger gushes. I suddenly understood how people could drown—breathing less and less until they weren’t breathing at all, until it was too late and the surface was too far away.
But then, it began: something tugged at the skin on my neck, I thought maybe a clump of seaweed on the man’s fingers or the fin of a bold fish. I tried to brush it off and found that I had large scratches opening across my throat, and I could feel them getting wider. Touching them felt good. In fact, I realized that the more they opened, the easier it became to stay underwater, that blocking them with my fingers welled panic within me. So I kept going, the water falling down my throat through these new etches in my skin. At some point, when my mouth was entirely sea, I gave in completely. I let the water fill me, in and out through my mouth and my nose like air. I found something akin to breathing, a relief in my chest and between my ribs. The man was still there but my hands, moving between his waist and his thighs in order to stay in place, had turned into something different. I opened my eyes and realized my head was entirely submerged. But I could see perfectly, from the edges of my vision, that my arms were rough and turning to the color of dead gray skin. I could no longer feel around my own body because my arms had become long, thick planks of cartilage and new bone and flesh; I was ripping apart in some places and fusing together in others, undoing and regenerating. I kept going like it was nothing, and he let me keep going like he didn’t care. He kept his hand on my head, which was becoming slick with gray leather skin and salt water. I saw clumps of hair floating out around his legs and being sucked past me into the dark.
He went in and he went out like the tide, like the water in the new slits that had formed in my neck. I could feel nothing beneath the waves now, no sand between my toes—no toes at all. Instead, I felt a whole body, formed and united and massive, resting on the ocean floor. The current rushed past my cheeks and pulled at my eyelashes, but it was easier now for me to stay in place. I wasn’t moving, not going back and forth at all anymore. My eyes stung from the salt and my jaw grew, and grew. I ran my tongue over him and tasted bitter, and then over the roof of my mouth which had begun to raise in bumps. Rows and rows and rows of bumps, that in a single moment burst into teeth—miniature razors pressed up against raw, bleeding gums. And I couldn’t take it anymore. The water pushed between my lips, into my new mouth, and the tide was so far over my head and his hand finally released my head. It was, regrettably, too late. Everything became metallic and instinctual and alive. My body kicked and pushed towards him desperately, hitting the ocean floor. I gnashed my teeth. I thrashed my new body. I opened my throat against his pelvis. I breathed for the first time, let the saltwater sting the parts of me that were still adjusting. In the morning, Maia would return to the beach, maybe not even registering that I hadn’t come home, and the shore would be a foaming red. She’d find the ribbons of his torso and I would be gone.
ELENA NEGRÓN was born and raised in Houston, Texas, to a Houstonian mother and Puerto Rican father. She has been previously published in The Trinity Review, Glass Mountain, and BODY Literature. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. More of her writing can be found at elenanegron.com.
