Besides, Leticia’s body was all curves like mine. Sometimes, when we stood side by side, randos would ask if we were related, as if all hermanas are family because we have the same hair color. As if we couldn’t be more than just hermanas, maybe lovers or even frenemies, or whatever we wanted to be.
Randos and their labels.
“Is this it?” I asked.
Leticia kept staring at the movie, so I asked again.
“Is this it?”
It was Saturday, another Saturday, and I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t spend another day staring at this film that I could now recite lines from like the obsessive fan Leticia was becoming.
“We’ve got to do something,” I said. “Go somewhere. Come on, Leti. Let’s go to the swap meet.”
There wasn’t much to do at the swap meet. It wasn’t as if we had much money between us. I had twenty dollars I’d stolen from my older brother’s wallet when he wasn’t looking. Leticia probably had less than that. But the luchadores practiced there on Saturdays, and our friend Pablo always snuck us in to watch. He’d been trying to get with me since we were in ninth grade and I let him make out with me in the back of his cousin’s car. Pablo tried to play off like he didn’t think about that night, but I could tell by the way his eyes twinkled when he saw me that he’d never forgotten having my tongue in his mouth.
I wasn’t interested in Pablo or any of the luchadores. I just liked the attention. Leticia didn’t mind it either, especially when they bought snacks or shared their edibles with us. At least the swap meet beat anything we were doing right now.
“I don’t want to go to the swap meet,” Leticia said. She adjusted her bandana and fished for her eyeliner to finish the bottom rim of her large eyes. “Let’s do something different. Let’s go somewhere new.”
New? There’s nothing new to do when you’re broke. I prayed she didn’t say go for a hike or some BS thing like seeing nature. Nature is not meant for girls like us. We’re wild enough. I grabbed her eyeliner and practiced drawing a wingtip. The wing became longer and longer until I looked like an ’80s punk rocker. Leticia rolled her eyes, not approving my look.
“Guess what?” she said, but I knew she wouldn’t let me guess. I waited for her to spill it. “I got a gas card.”
I smiled. With a gas card we could fill the tank of my crap car. A full tank meant freedom. Freedom to get the hell out of our dumb city and ignore the lustful luchadores and the disapproving abuelas and the infinite boredom. A full tank meant we had options. I didn’t even want to ask how she’d gotten the card. Maybe from one of the luchadores last week, when we met them at the drive-in. Maybe it was her ama being kind, for once. It didn’t matter. My car would soon have gas, and we could actually break out of this hell.
I pulled out my phone and popped up the Notes app to the list I’d been keeping of places to visit. Salvation Mountain was number one, right above Las Vegas and riding the Ferris wheel at Pacific Park in Santa Monica. Las Vegas was out of the question, because we needed more than twenty dollars to spend there. Santa Monica we could visit anytime, really, if we just planned it.
“Salvation Mountain,” Leticia said with conviction. “We can take pictures and post them and make everyone jealous for not being us.”
Leticia searched for images of Salvation Mountain. The trippy, neon-colored monuments were straight from a hippie’s dream. So seventies and beautiful. I wanted to live there, to sleep besides the man-made folk art. I bet my dreams would become Technicolor too.
It was Leticia who’d found Salvation Mountain. She’d heard that the owner had recently died and that the art installation would soon die too. “Who’s going to take care of it?” she’d asked, and I’d called her stupid for worrying about fake mountains so far away. Leticia swore her superpower was empathy. She claimed my superpower was being a total bitch and that was why we complemented each other.
She stared at the phone. Her fingerprints smudged the screen.
“We should go,” she said.
“What if it’s closed or something?” We could waste a perfectly good tank of gas for nothing. She typed on her phone and searched the ’gram. So many wannabes posing in front of the gigantic art installation. They wore their Coachella uniforms—cutoff jeans, fake flowers in their hair, ankle boots covered in dust. A fact was a fact: we didn’t belong there. Not us dumb girls from El Monte with our ratty black T-shirts and our skinny jeans and our rolls of fat bulging out.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why not? You want to do something. This is what we can do,” Leticia said. “We fill our water bottles and grab a couple snacks. We make sandwiches and head out right now. It will take about two and a half hours to get there.”
The film was showing the part when Thelma and Louise are at a honky-tonk bar and people are line dancing. Cowboy boots pounded the floor in rhythm of the music. Leticia waited for me to respond.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said.
“Yesss, bish. We going fishin’!” Leticia screamed at the top of her lungs, doing a poor imitation of Thelma. Or was it Louise?
The first time I met Leticia, she offered me half of her tamale. We were both seven years old. It had been my first day of school, and I hadn’t liked the school lunch so I’d
