Make money doing the work you believe in
The Other Cargo
Naida, deeper into the road. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
There were others. I want to start there, because for the longest time I thought I'd been singled out, like some specific bad luck reached down and picked me, and there's a weird comfort in being picked even by something terrible. It means you matter. Took me a while to get the worse thing, the real thing, which is that I didn't matter at all. I was inventory. And inventory comes in shipments.
After Guatemala City they put us on a bus with the windows painted over from the inside, this flat grey-blue, the kind you'd paint a cheap room. Somebody before me had scraped a little hole in the paint near the bottom of the glass, coin-sized, and I spent hours of that road with my cheek mashed against the seat just to get my eye to it, watching a thin moving slice of the world go by. Fence posts. A dog. A woman carrying a yellow bucket who never once looked up. I was so hungry for the outside that a stranger's bucket felt like a gift. And my stomach still growled, ¿verdad? My body still sweated through my shirt in that shut-up heat, the gooseflesh still came and went on my arms. All that loud living machinery was still mine then, and I need you to keep counting it, because the counting is the whole point.
I wasn't alone on that bus. That's the thing I hadn't let myself see on the first one, back when I was busy telling myself the story about the girl with her own room. There were maybe a dozen of us. A boy younger than me who never talked. Two women who I think had done this before, because they'd figured out the trick of not being there, of going somewhere behind their own eyes. And across the aisle, a girl about my age, hair tie on her wrist, good sneakers, and she had my exact same face on. The useful one. The grateful one. The one that says I'm no trouble, I'm worth keeping, please.
I knew her the second I saw her, because she was me. And looking at her I knew exactly how dumb my own face must have looked, and exactly how little it was going to save either of us.
We weren't supposed to talk. But once, when the bus stopped and the men stepped off to smoke, she leaned across the aisle and asked me where I was headed, like we were two normal girls on a normal trip. Norte, I said. She nodded. Yo también. Me too. And then we didn't have anything else, because there wasn't anything else, because the place we were going was a lie we'd each paid for, and we both half knew it already, and saying it out loud would've cost more than either of us had left.
So we just looked at each other. I've thought about her more than almost anybody. I never even got her name. I don't know if she made it. I hope she learned the thing the two quiet women knew, the going-behind-the-eyes, because by then I understood it wasn't giving up, it was a skill, and I wanted her to have it. I still want her to have it. Wherever she is, if she's anywhere.
Here's what the bus taught me, the lesson under the lesson. One man selling one orphan girl is a tragedy, and a tragedy can be an accident, a thing that just went wrong. A bus with painted windows and a dozen of us and two men who smoked on a schedule and counted heads before we rolled, that's not an accident. That's a business, and it runs on time. Somewhere there were books with all of us written in them. Somewhere a number had my weight and my age and my face stapled to it. And the lie that I was lucky, the one Mateo's father fed me at his door, he didn't even make it up for me. It was a script. They said it to the girl with the good sneakers too. They said it to all of us, same words, same gentle little voice, because it worked, because it always worked, because we were the kind of merchandise that walks itself onto the bus if you just tell it the right story.
That's when the gratitude died. Not all at once. It just ran out of anywhere to stand. You can't be grateful to a machine. You can only learn how it moves.
I kept my useful face on. Obviously. It was still the only thing that was mine. But it stopped being a prayer and turned into a tool, and that's a smaller, colder, harder thing, and it was the first little piece of the girl who'd claw her way back up out of the dirt. I didn't know that yet. All I knew was I'd stopped saying thank you inside my own head, and the quiet where the thank you used to be felt, weirdly, like the first room on the whole road that was actually mine.
