Disclaimer: Rent is not mine. At all. In any way.

Mimi

I never thought it was Angel's fault. Angel thought that I thought it was his fault… I think he thought I thought it was his fault because he thought it was his fault. Like maybe if Angel said yes, we would have gone and laid out a bath towel on the couch, since he shared his bed with like three little siblings, and he would have done that weird in-and-out thing and I would have known that it's not all the great. Actually, it sort of hurts a lot and leaves you bruised in new places, leaves you feeling puffy and raw. I guess had I known, maybe I would have died a virgin.

It was two years after that day. I still saw Angel when he came to stay with his parents, or came to visit me, or I went out and found whatever cheerful little hole had become his home for however brief a time. And Angel starting becoming she, which was sort of surprising because I always thought Angel was just gay, but apparently he preferred being a woman. Which is fine. I did, too, up until I had to do woman things. Y'know. Get fucked.

This girl in my class, Juanita, had a really cliché quinceñera in her parents' backyard, and invited every girl in our year. Her parents gave her earrings with bloodred stones about the size of her ears, and she wore them all night, proud, stretching her piercings into gaping wounds. Somehow I ended up paired with her cousin from out of town, Reynaldo, who was actually all right except that he wore too much cologne and had stubble and stuck his tongue down my throat. He had a sort of cloudy left eye, but it didn't seem to hamper him. I had to dance with him all night. I'm still not sure why, but Juanita kept saying it would be totally offensive to just ditch him.

You know what happened at Juanita's quinceñera, with me in my pretty pink dress that I argued about because it was too girly, too conservative, like that mattered. I don't need to tell you what went on behind the garage in her parents' house in Queens, except maybe to say that the thistles grew knee-high and I was wearing white Keds. And I guess it would be redundant to say that afterwards I cried, or that the last thing he did before walking away was grab my breasts and say, "Honk, honk."

I stayed behind the garage for the rest of the party. I traced designs in the dirt and nettles stung up the fleshy place inside my arm and after a while I was joined by those nasty-ass ants that bite you up. I stayed until my mom was there to pick me up, and she yelled at me in Spanish for being dirty, right there where every girl in my class could hear, and for months held against me that I ruined my pretty pink dress the first time I wore it when in the dressing rooms I had been so excited I said I would wear it to prom.

We were getting drunk, years later, all of us, Angel and me and Collins and Roger and Mark, and Maureen was there, and everyone was talking about "My first time…" like Roger and Mark was any surprise, or Collins and some foreign exchange student named Jacques, and Maureen told some weird story about a painter who had her model for three days and then "made love" to her while they inhaled turpentine. Then she said, "What about you Mimi?"

I looked to Roger, but he wasn't objecting, so I just said, "Angel." I guess that's what matters the most in a friendship, someone trusting you enough to just agree, or maybe I was just manipulating Angel because Roger's the kind of douche to make this a big fucking deal and look up Reynaldo and shoot him.

So I said it was Angel and Roger spat out his beer and Collins asked if he needed kleenex or was just going home to change.

The truth is whatever you can convince someone to believe.