It all started in the fluorescent food court at Winrock Mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Whitney and I were hunched over paper plates, licking school bus-yellow cheese from the center of our Hot Dogs on a Stick. “You’ll need new jeans,” she said, eyeing the zip-off cargo pants I’d stolen from my brother.
“And do you own anything from Hollister?” I had never heard of Hollister, but by the end of the day that dusky, sweet pea perfume cloaked corner of the world would become my Holy Grail, the zenith I would bushwhack towards for years to come. As girls landlocked by desert, the surf-themed clothing store was the closest we could get to saltwater. Or the closest we could get to a kind of beauty that seemed natural to girls in Southern California: honey-colored waves and hairless thighs, surfboards wedged between their ribcages and biceps.
Whitney ran her hand down my forearm. “At least you have this.” She was talking about the tan I’d developed.
Little to my knowledge, this trait would become the most enviable thing about me. Eventually, someone would even start a rumor that I had a tanning bed in my living room. But the reality was far more disappointing.
Very simply, I had been in the sun. For the last three years, I had been living in Port of Spain, Trinidad—the southernmost country of the Caribbean—where my mother had taken a job in public health. The last time I was an American resident, I was a child, only ten years old, with almost no understanding o.
