She's Got Game Read online

“Oh, we will, Dwight,” Alicia said, giving him a little wave. Then she whispered to Gaz and Carmen, “We’re in.” And Carmen whispered to Jamie, “We’re in.” And Jamie said out loud, “Another pretentious nightclub; who cares?”

  Jamie was soon forced to take back her words. The club was hardly what they were expecting. Unlike most of the Miami hotspots, Ojos Así was totally futuristic, with Japanese-inspired decor. The stark white walls were illuminated by purple and green lights that flashed across them like spaceships in a video game. A giant sushi conveyor belt came down from the ceiling and wound around the lounge area. Several Dance Dance Revolution stations were lined up along the back wall.

  “Who’s hungry?” Binky asked. Immediately, Carmen raised both of her hands.

  “Great,” said Binky. “Anyone else? Sashimi or hand roll?”

  “Tasty,” Alicia said.

  “You know I’m in,” Gaz said, following Binky, Carmen, and Alicia to the conveyor-belt counter.

  That left Dash and Jamie—alone. At first, she tried to look everywhere but at him. She looked at the dance floor, at the main floor, at the door to the bathroom, but the whole time, she could feel his gaze on her and she shivered, involuntarily. Distance had apparently made her heart grow fonder. Or maybe she was just seeing reality for the first time. What had she been thinking? He wasn’t just “okay,” as she’d told herself while lying in bed. He was freaking handsome. Dirty-blond hair, ever so slightly in need of a haircut. Check. Chiseled cheekbones. Check. Perfectly kissable cupid’s-bow lips, electric blue eyes. Check, check. It wasn’t even that he was particularly Jamie’s type. It was more that he was the type for any woman with a pulse and clear vision—which apparently she now had. He was textbook handsome in a way that could have been kind of boring, but he was just scruffy enough that he was irresistible.

  “You hungry, too?” he asked, interrupting her mental size-up. “Or interested in something with more substance—like getting to know me?”

  For Jamie, it was like a particularly wicked round of Truth or Dare. Was she going to tell the truth to herself, and to Dash, and admit that she was interested in learning more about him? Interested in seeing if there were more to him than good looks? Or would she turn and follow her friends to the swirl of California rolls and unagi making its way down the conveyor belt and walk away from what could possibly be the coolest guy she’d met since she’d moved to Miami?

  She took a deep breath and called out to Alicia, Carmen, and Binky, “I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

  Smiling, Dash took her hand and led her to a little table tucked into a quiet corner. He signaled a waiter and ordered them both Kyoto spritzers.

  “I know this club is a little bit Miami flash,” he said when they had made themselves comfortable. “But I’ve been a fan of DJ Lucia since I was in junior high. I used to download her mixes off of MySpace. She blends old-school Latin music with everything from the Beatles to Beck.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “You’re really into music for a golf nerd,” she teased.

  “I think the term you’re looking for is ‘golf champ,’” Dash said, correcting her.

  Jamie tried to conceal the fact that she was impressed. “What tournaments have you won, exactly?”

  “Three time Junior World champ, but I don’t like to brag—or jinx myself. So, since I want to avoid that, let’s talk about you. Tell me everything about you, Jamie Sosa,” Dash said, his smile a picket fence of perfectly white teeth.

  Jamie could feel her face flush. Even though she didn’t know him, she had a strange urge to do as he said and open up. Tell him things she hadn’t even told Alicia and Carmen.

  And she suddenly wondered if that was what poets and philosophers meant by “love at first sight.” Not merely the desire to kiss a guy the moment you met him and kiss him again and again for the rest of your life (that, she had to admit, she felt), but the desire to tell a guy everything—as if the “friend” part of “boyfriend” were lit up in neon lights. Because, when Dash had said, “Tell me everything about you,” she hadn’t had the urge to feed him the same old practiced lines about growing up in the boogie-down, about how being from the birthplace of salsa and hip-hop had inspired her fashion and her art—even though those things were very much true.

  Jamie Sosa wanted to tell Dash that even though she was always talking about how great the Bronx was, part of the time she had lived there it had really been a struggle. She wanted to tell him about how her father had worked two jobs six days a week, going from his day job as a shipping clerk to his night-watchman job in the evenings, and how her mother had used to work in a factory and had had to leave the house at four a.m. to take two trains and a bus to get to work. She wanted to tell him about how one day she’d been walking home from school and she looked across the street and all the kids started dropping to the ground, and she turned around, and right behind her there was this guy with a gun, jumping out of a car, pointing and shooting. She’d never heard a gun fired before then. She was ten years old, and all she could think was how the shots really went “bang, bang,” just the way they wrote in books.

  She wanted to tell Dash that although nobody on her block had been shot that day, the incident scared her mother so much that she wasn’t allowed to play outside anymore. She had to go to school, come straight home, and call her mother the minute she got inside.

  And inside wasn’t much better than outside. The walls of their rental apartment were a stark white, and when she asked her parents why they didn’t have any pictures in frames like at school, her father had said, “We don’t have money for that, niña.” So, one day, when the blankness finally got to be too much, Jamie borrowed some art supplies from school and began painting on the walls.

  When her mother came home from work that night and saw the painted walls, she woke Jamie up and threatened to ground her for the rest of her life.

  “This isn’t our apartment, chica,” her mother said. “If the landlord sees this, he’ll throw us out on our ear.” But the next morning, she decided that she liked what she saw, and she told Jamie to keep painting and leave the landlord to her. Seeing how happy it made their daughter, her parents started taking her to museums on Sundays. They took her to places like the Museum of Modern Art, the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Natural History. They went to them all.

  Jamie wanted to tell Dash how lonely and miserable she had felt at boarding school, how out of place she had been, how cruel people could be. Or how it had taken nearly three years from the time the guy had shot at people outside of their building for her mother to finish her master’s degree in social work and get a job working in social services. And longer still for their family to move out of Jamie’s grandmother’s cramped cottage into the little house her uncle had found for them in Coral Gables. Or how, although Jamie hadn’t wanted to stay in the Bronx, when the time had come, she had been scared to leave it. And the last thing that Jamie and her parents had done before they left for the airport was to paint each wall of their dingy little apartment white again. “That is my story,” she would tell him.

  But this was only her first date with Dash—and it was only sort of a date, at that. It was technically a quince-related get-together with Binky. And she couldn’t spill her guts in a noisy nightclub to a preppy rich boy whom she’d only just met, love or no love. So instead, she took a sip of her drink and said, “The DJ is playing my song. Let’s dance.”

  Truth be told, she considered anything by Pitbull her song. And she needed a break from her thoughts. She ran onto the dance floor. Seconds later, Dash was beside her, matching her step for step—no small move when the music was booming at 120 beats per minute.

  “You’re good,” Dash whispered in her ear, as his hands slipped around her waist and he pulled her close.

  “You should see me when I’m bad,” she said, winking at him. “I’m much, much better.” She didn’t know what it was about this boy—they hadn’t spent any real time together, but she fe
lt much more comfortable with him than she had with any of the guys she went to school with—which was bananas, because the guys at C. G. High were public school guys, and Dash was so much the textbook opposite that he might as well have had tattooed over each eyebrow the words preppy and rich. In any case, here she was, flirting and dancing with a prepster. She felt a stirring of something new, something real. As if maybe it weren’t all about being one thing or the other.

  When the others joined them for a few songs, Jamie’s mood stayed high. Binky’s dancing was as hopeless as her Spanish, but there was a certain charm to her total lack of rhythm that carried her through.

  Jamie would have been happy if the night never ended. But at ten forty-five, Alicia looked at her watch and sighed. “I’m about to turn into a pumpkin. My dad will be here in fifteen minutes to pick Gaz and me up. Who else needs a ride?”

  “I’m exhausted,” Carmen said.

  “Me, too,” Binky agreed. “What about you, Jamie?”

  Jamie looked at Dash quickly, out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to stay, but she didn’t want to assume he’d take her home.

  “I’ll make sure Jamie gets back safely,” Dash said, as if reading her mind. He turned to her. “If that’s okay with you.”

  She nodded. It felt as if her head were no longer connected to her neck. As if reality had gone out the window.

  Binky smiled knowingly. Then she gave her brother a big hug and reached for Jamie’s hand. But Jamie was too quick to get caught in a hug. Looking down at her dress, she said, “I’m too sweaty,” and gave Binky a double-cheek kiss instead.

  An hour after everyone had left, Jamie and Dash were still enjoying each other’s company. She’d taken off her high heels and was enthusiastically dancing barefoot. The DJ shifted into cumbia, and Dash took her in his arms and began to swing her around with the finesse of an old Dominican abuelo who had been a professional dancer back in the day.

  Jamie had never been the biggest fan of traditional music, because she really abhorred the notion prevalent in Latin dance that the man had to lead and the woman had to follow. She loved dancing with her father, and when she was a kid, she had loved dancing with her grandfather before he passed away. But letting some pimply teenage boy—a guy her own age—“lead”…Well, forgive the cliché, but no way, José.

  Still, as with everything else, dancing with Dash was…different. It wasn’t so much that he was leading, though he was obviously the better dancer. But what it suddenly felt like to Jamie, what she now understood for maybe the first time as he spun and dipped her and glided her from one side of the dance floor to the other, was that dancing was a conversation. And the things she couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell him yet in words, she could say with her moves.

  In honors English that year, their class had read James Joyce’s Ulysses. Jamie, who had found it interminable, had pretty much skimmed it, despite her teacher’s assertion that assigning them Joyce had been like giving them Christmas and Easter and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.

  Now, dancing with Dash, feeling the back and forth of his steps, all she could think of was the last line of Joyce’s book, from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. The prose told about a girl who wasn’t sure how to let herself fall in love. A girl who finally decided to take a leap and just say yes. Just as Jamie was deciding now. Yes, Jamie kept thinking, yes, I said yes, I will, yes.

  IT WAS NEARLY two a.m. when Dash pulled up in front of the Sosa house. Jamie sat in his mini Cooper convertible and tried to keep the silly grin off her face.

  “Well, I had a nice time,” Dash said after a moment of silence.

  Understatement of the year, Jamie thought, catching a glimpse of herself in the car’s side mirror. Her face was still sweaty—Carmen would have said, “dewy,” but Jamie called it what it was: sweaty. Dash, on the other hand, looked as if he’d just come from a leisurely day at the beach.

  “I had a nice time, too,” Jamie said, looking out the window, and praying that her mother had gotten her text message that she was out late, but hadn’t sat up waiting.

  Dash looked at her, as if contemplating what he would say next. For a moment, Jamie wondered if the amazing night had all been in her imagination. And then he asked, “Would it be okay if I kissed you?”

  Jamie sighed, stalling as she remembered the first time she had kissed a boy. Her mind flashed back to the Bronx. It had been so embarrassing. Fifth grade. Spin the bottle. Reinaldo Lopez. The moment had left a lot to be desired. Now she tried to think of something smart-alecky and clever to reply. But she couldn’t. So she just said the word that had been in her mind all night: “Yes.”

  Then his lips were on hers. They were pillow-soft, and Jamie felt herself get lost in the moment. This was unlike any kiss she’d had before—not that there had been many of those.

  Dash was an excellent kisser. So much so that Jamie soon found that trying to kiss him just once was like opening a bag of M&M’s and trying to eat just one. She kissed him again and again, happy, surprised that she’d found this person who could make her feel so comfortable and so good.

  Then she heard it. She felt it. Dash had unsnapped her bra.

  She pulled away. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry.” Dash held up his hands. “It was an accident.”

  “Bras are actually intricate pieces of technology,” Jamie said, growing furious. “They don’t come off by accident.”

  “I mean, it was an accident because I wasn’t thinking when I did it,” Dash said. Jamie couldn’t tell from the aggrieved expression on his face if he were genuinely sorry or just annoyed that she had pulled back.

  “Clearly you weren’t,” Jamie said, her voice barely containing the rage she now felt. How could everything have been so perfect five seconds ago? She felt as if she’d been thrown back into boarding school. “Just because I don’t have money like you, just because I’m from the Bronx, you think you can slide to second just like that? I bet you wouldn’t try that with one of the girls from your fancy prep school.”

  Reaching for the handle, she flung the car door open and jumped out. She slammed it behind her, not caring if it woke up the neighborhood.

  Dash jumped out after her. “It was stupid. You’re just so beautiful, and I was so in the moment.…”

  “Well, guess what?” Jamie hissed. “That moment is gone, and you’ll never see the likes of it again.” Turning, she walked up the path to her house, leaving a flustered Dash behind her.

  Jamie opened the front door as quietly as she could. It was completely dark except for the light over the kitchen table. On it was a note from her mother:

  Late night, hija. Don’t make it a habit. Wake me when you get in, so I know you’re okay.

  Jamie went in and said good night to her parents and then went to her room and changed into her pajamas. She brushed her teeth and, as she always did, ever since she was a little girl, double-checked the locks on the front door. Through the peephole, she could see that Dash was still sitting in his car out front. It was a futile exercise. A cow would jump over the moon before she gave him a second chance.

  But as she climbed into her bed, she couldn’t help wondering, if Dash was the one who had messed up, why did it feel as though, in walking away, she was not hurting him but punishing herself? Why was she the one crying herself to sleep in bed?

  The next morning, Jamie woke up to the sound of her phone alarm playing an old Pitbull tune. The pulsating beat brought all of the memories of the evening before back. Groaning, she turned it off and stuck her head under her pillow.

  She’d had such a good time with Dash. Too bad it had turned out that she’d had him figured out correctly the first time. He was an entitled, golf-club-swinging prepster. And he’d thought he could get into her pants just because she was from the hood.

  She let out a big sigh. There was no time for dwelling on it. She was supposed to meet Binky and the girls in—she looked at her phone—twenty minutes ago! Sh
e jumped out of bed, brushed her teeth, took the world’s quickest shower, and begged her mother for a ride.

  Walking into Bongos, she began apologizing as soon as she saw her girls. “Discúlpenme, chicas. I kept hitting snooze, and, well, you know the way that movie ends.”

  There was a seat open next to Binky, but Jamie squeezed into the booth with Carmen instead.

  “My future sister-in-law!” Binky squealed, getting up to give Jamie a giant hug. “I told Alicia and Carmen that you were bound to be late. Dash didn’t get home until almost five.”

  “And since we know the club closed at one…” Carmen began.

  “We couldn’t help but wonder what you were doing for four hours!” Alicia gave Jamie a probing glance. “Is there something that you want to tell us?”

  There was a part of Jamie that really wanted to talk to her friends about the evening, tell them how confusing it had been, and get their help in figuring out why spending time with Dash had reminded her of great novels. Last night, she had felt like Molly Bloom in Ulysses. This morning, after all that fun dancing followed by Dash’s totally lecherous pass at her, the phrase that came to mind was from Dickens: the best of times and the worst of times. But she couldn’t say anything. It was her own fault. She had let vulnerable Jamie out to play, and that Jamie had ended up with a heart that, while not broken, was definitely bruised. She was going to have to go back to being Jamie from the block. Much safer that way. And much safer not to let the girls in on something that would amount to nothing in the future anyway.

  Luckily, she was saved from further discussion when Domingo approached them, dressed in his waiter uniform of crisp white shirt, black tie, and black pants. It was here at Bongos, unofficial Amigas headquarters, that Carmen and Domingo had met. He was already thick as thieves with the rest of the group, helping them to create a Web site and advising them on all things technical.

  “Hola, gorgeous,” he said, winking at Carmen. “Hola, amigas. I would ask for your order, but I think I know—crab empanadas, plátanos, black beans, and rice.”