One thing I learned while stuck in my small room, was that the color purple gave me migraines. And unfortunately, I was trapped in between four headache-inducing, lavender-colored walls.

I tried everything I could to escape them. Staring at the ground, at the ceiling - all it gave me was a dull pain in the neck. Staring at the now-broken clock, that seemed to taunt me with its little still hands, as if it was reminding me that from now on, time wouldn’t tick by. It would stand frozen at about twenty minutes after Sarah Kennedy’s estimated time of death, at 11:38 AM on November 9th, 2021.

I figured out that if I pushed the vanity just two feet to the right, I could sit on top of it and have a good view out of my small window. I figured I’d rather sit on the little wooden table and watch the treetops outside sway in the breeze, than lay on the bed contemplating my little prison cell.

Green was a nicer color than purple. Green was the color of hope. And of the bathrooms of people whose taste in interior design was still stuck in the seventies.

Ugly bathrooms aside, it was indeed hope that I felt when I glanced at the seemingly endless forest, right at the bottom of my window. Thick foliage, filled with birds and climbing vines, a maze of trees that I could run into and disappear in the blink of an eye.

It was almost as if I knew it, as if I had seen it a thousand times in a daydream before. As if I knew every tree, every path, every turn. As if I had already carefully thought out my escape plan.

I wouldn’t run in a straight line. I’d take a few turns, just to make my trail harder to follow for whoever could be chasing me. I’d get lost, but I’d get far, and eventually, I’d reach a road. Once I get there, I’d wait until a crowded bus drove by, or sneak along the side of the road all the way to a nearby town. I couldn’t just jump out in front of the first car, because odds are the person driving it might also be looking for me. Or, at least, that’s how what had happened the last time I had planned out my escape in a daydream.

People could make fun of me talking to myself all they want, but the daydreaming was finally turning out to be quite useful. By replaying the same scenario in my mind over and over, I could prepare myself for all kinds of obstacles, and cook up a well-calculated, strategized, flawless escape plan. I’d have tons of time stuck in here to think it out, and no one to interrupt my train of thought.

No one, except Pablo, who had just barged back into the room, startling me enough for me to slip off the vanity. He stared at me with his eyebrows raised and a mocking grin.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr. Juarez,” I answered politely. “I just wasn’t expecting you.”

He pretended to gag and smiled at me.

“Ugh, please, just call me Pablo.”

I nodded quickly and tried to hide my trembling fingers behind my back. Knowing his name didn’t make him feel any more human. He still seemed like a wild animal to me–unpredictable, dangerous, ready to pounce on me at the first sign of weakness.

He leaned towards me, eagerly waiting for me to answer, or move, or do anything, while I cowered in a corner, trying my best to hide in the thin folds of my satin robe.

He dropped a greasy paper bag on top of the vanity, close enough that I could smell the freshly cooked fried chicken inside of it, before he went to sit on my bed. I spun around on my heels, so as to keep facing him straight-on.

“I brought you some food,” he said, pointing at the bag.

I glanced over at it. Just a few minutes ago, I was so hungry, I could have eaten a rock. But suddenly, and for some reason, I didn’t feel like eating at all. A gut feeling, I guess. What if he’d poisoned the food and just wanted to watch me die? Or what if he had some weird fetish about watching chicks eat greasy food with their fingers?

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked, with an intense gaze that unsettled me down to my very core.

I breathed in deeply–a long, shaky, desperate breath. My spirit cracked along with my voice.

“Could you please leave?” I whispered, on the brink of tears.

He tilted his head to the side and frowned, obviously taken aback by my question.

“Why? You don’t want to get to know me?”

“It’s just...” I stuttered. “I’m a bit uncomfortable with you around.”

He squinted his eyes, and his nostrils flared in anger. I bit my lip so hard I could taste the blood in my mouth. I’d fucked up. Spoke too fast. Too direct, too honest. I was as good as dead–again.

“You’ll have to get used to it,” he muttered. “I’m probably the only person you’ll see for the rest of your life.”

A small teardrop formed in the corner of my eye. I caught it with my wrist before it rolled down my cheek. I inhaled sharply, fighting back the tears of fear, trying my best to not let my emotions and vulnerability show, and failing my task completely.

“I’d rather not think of that,” I murmured as my voice shattered into pieces.

He was glaring. He was fuming. His jaw clenched and his grip tightened on the edge of the mattress to the point his knuckles started to turn white. My heart dropped in my chest. If I wasn’t dead yet, I definitely was now.

“I spared your life out there,” he hissed at me. “The least you could do is be grateful about it.”

“Grateful? You ruined my life!” I blurted out.

“Oh, I did? Name me one thing you’ve lost,” he shouted back, raising his eyebrows sarcastically.

He lifted his chin and grinned proudly, as if he already knew my answer. I’d lost my dad years ago, and my mom not so long after. I was already losing my only friend. My flat, my job, everything else, I had wished I could get rid of anyway.

There wasn’t a thing I regretted, nothing to go home to. Aside from my freedom, maybe, or at least my phone–but what kind of a silly answer was that? I stared out the window for a moment while I tried to think of a better answer.

“If you can’t even answer that, then you didn’t have much of a life to ruin,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you just end it?”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. I glared at him in defiance, but it wasn’t long before my eyes started to sting. My temples started to tremble, and my jaw soon followed. My vision turned blurry as the tears gathered on my waterline, and I finally broke eye contact with Pablo, right before I broke down in tears.

While I sobbed loudly, rolled up in a fetal position, and buried my face between my knees, he stayed silent. He waited for me to quiet down, and when I felt the strength and courage to lift my head up again, his face had softened.

“I don’t mean this in a mean way,” he said, “but how bad did your life suck?”

I exhaled through my nose with a faint smile. I wondered if it was really worth telling him. Would it change anything? Unlikely. He wouldn’t let me free, nor would he kill me for it. Would it be embarrassing to open up to a complete stranger? Extremely.

Although this complete stranger had already become my only company, and it wasn’t like he was likely to go around telling everyone my life story. Would it feel good to get everything off my chest? Maybe. So I did. I told him everything. In full detail.

From the start, how I grew up in a modest but happy family, from my first memories building pillow forts on my front porch with Ana, and how my dad would bring us cold glasses of homemade lemonade with strawberries from the garden. How I’d wait for him every night after work to play cards, and how a drunk driver suddenly took him away from me, on a cold winter night.

How my mother withered away, slowly killing herself with alcohol and pain meds. How she tried to replace him with so many other men, each of them worse than the previous one. The times they’d scare me and I’d run away in the middle of the night to Ana’s house, and the one time I stayed with the Perez family for two full weeks before they walked back home with me and screamed at my mum and her boyfriend in Spanish while poor Ana had to translate.

How, that night, Ana snuck out her window and ran down to my house in her pajamas, and we sat on the porch until sunrise while she told me how she had changed every word her parents had said, and then taught me all the insults they’d thrown at my mom.

Midway through my speech, I grabbed the bag of fried chicken and took a bite of it. It was the epitome of comfort food - warm, tasty, delicious, and probably the best fried chicken I’d ever eaten, but maybe it was because it was the first thing I had eaten in over a day.

Pablo listened to me with great attention, never cutting eye contact and not once interrupting me.

I told him how I’d developed a sense of humor. The only way I’d get attention from my mother was by making her laugh. At first, I’d just reenact the SNL sketches we had watched together, and then I started telling my own jokes.

It got harder and harder every passing day to get any emotion out of her, so I tried to remember every smile as if it were to be her last. And after one overdose too many, it was as if she was gone. The last time she graced me with a grin was when I imitated the weird grunts my boyfriend did while we had sex, that sounded awfully similar to a Minecraft Villager.

I told him about that boyfriend, too, how our relationship went nowhere, how we’d spend entire nights together and not say a word, how after two years he still felt like a stranger, and how we just stopped texting one day and never spoke again. He came to the restaurant I was working in one day, with another girl. They seemed happy, and I was happy for him, but I still asked my coworker to take their order.

I told him I was twelve when I realized my life sucked and I convinced myself I’d go nowhere. I was fourteen when I started my first job, after my mother and I almost starved to death. I was sixteen when I had my first cigarette, boyfriend, and hangover. I moved out when I was eighteen, and ate Taco Bell for two months straight.

And then, nothing happened. I slowly turned bitter, tired, and dry. Ana got a scholarship and went to college, and she came back with some new friends. Those friends were nothing like me–they were skinny, rich, pretty, and happy. They called me fat, ugly, depressing, annoying, and dug a rift between Ana and me.

I made the mistake of telling her how I felt, she took pity and tried to drag me around with her everywhere, despite neither me nor her new friends being particularly keen on it. I ended up even more miserable than when I was alone, but couldn’t muster up the courage to cut her off.

I knew she still loved me like a sister, but I felt like such a burden. She had an amazing life to live, and I was holding her back. Yet I knew losing her as a friend might hurt her, but would also certainly destroy me.

“I came on this trip with her, maybe a bit selfishly,” I explained as I ended my story, licking the grease from the chicken off of my fingers, “I think I didn’t want her to be happy without me. And now, we’re here, and she thinks I’m dead. So, I don’t know how to feel about that. But yeah, long story short, I guess my life sucked pretty bad.

He waited for a few seconds after I stopped talking, nodding slowly.

“They called you fat?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess compared to them I’m a little chubby,” I said between two mouthfuls of chicken, “But I think it’s kind of unfair, because I’m really not that fat. I’m average.”

He smiled and leaned on his elbow. He watched me eat for a little, and amusedly asked, “Can I call you fat?”

“What?”

I put down my chicken wing for a second, and stared at him with a frown so deep it hurt my forehead. I’d been asked weird things in life, and met strange people, but I had never been asked ′Can I call you fat.′ Pablo was hands down the oddest person I’d ever met.

"Gordita," he said, “It’s a nickname here. It means fatty. But in a nice way.”

I shrugged. At this point, I didn’t really care who called me fat or ugly or silly.

“You can call me whatever you want.”

His grin widened from cheek to cheek, lifting his mustache and wrinkling up the corner of his eyes again. The man was bizarre–an absolute mystery, a psychological anomaly. I would have paid to see what was going on in his mind. Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s cocaine.

He took a quick look at the golden watch on his wrist and jolted up. I braced a little as he walked up to me, unfortunately, hard enough that he noticed me jump and stopped in his tracks for a second.

“It’s getting late, Gordita, I have to go,” he said as he backed up towards the door, “If you need me, just shout.”

“Shout?” I asked, chewing on a thick chicken thigh.

“At the door, just shout Pablo, or whatever. I’ll come. If I can.”

He quickly walked out of the room, as the door shut and locked immediately behind him, as if he was but a gust of air on a stormy summer night.

Gordita

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