Tryst Six Venom by Penelope Douglas

the school. She’s only being nice to me, because there was a suicide with a
public school student a couple days ago. Allison Carpenter—Alli for short.
Everyone here seems to think every gay person knows each other, so she
probably thinks I lost a friend.
I knew of Alli—small town and all—but I didn’t know her. It was still
awful what happened, though. And it happens too often.
But not to me. I’m almost done surviving them. Just a few more months.
I enter through the front doors, heading down the hallway. “¿Qué te gusta
hacer?” I repeat with my Rosetta Stone app. “¿Qué te gusta hacer?” I push
my tongue behind my teeth, trying to form the syllables with a pronunciation
to match the voice on my phone. “Te…gusta…?”
Damn Aracely. The next time some ex of my brothers’ calls me shit in
Spanish, I want to know what they’re saying. I guess I should be speaking it
already. I’m one-fourth Cuban.
Or maybe an eighth, I’m not sure. The only thing my family prides
themselves on is the other fourth—or eighth—of Seminole blood that keeps
us on our land.
Blood that also came in handy when I applied to Marymount four years
ago. A little diversity looks good on the school’s yearly accountability
reports, and even shaved a little tuition cost off for me when I won their
scholarship.
I mean, I guess I didn’t win it. I was the only one who applied for it, but
still.
I breeze past my locker, around the corner, and push through the door to
the women’s locker room.
“¿Cual es son tu pasatiempos?” I repeat, opening my gym locker and
hanging my backpack inside. I pull out my school skirt and black Polo,
shaking out the wrinkles and hang them on the hook inside, feeling the girls
around me turn to quickly pull on their workout gear and cover themselves.
I’d learned a long time ago, even before Clay’s mother and the rest of the
school board forked over fifty grand for a complete remodel of the locker
room showers to give us all private stalls “in the best interest of everyone”,
that it was best to just come up with a routine that put me in these situations
as little as possible. I come to school in my leggings and tank top on workout
days. I change in a stall after school before practices. I go home in my dirty
gear afterward and shower there.
“¿Cual es son tu pasatiempos?” I say again, trying to act oblivious to the