The Game

Isabella, the night she ran the room. The fifth of Eyes Open.

Let me show you how it actually worked, because everybody pictures it wrong. They picture a scared girl and a bad man, and the bad man wins. Sometimes. Not the way they think, and not as often, because the bad men were lazy and I was not.

There was one, somewhere past Tapachula, who liked to talk. The crude kind. The kind that is not really about wanting you, it is about watching your face to see if he can make you flinch, because the flinch is the whole point. The flinch tells him he is bigger. He started in on me in the back of the truck where the others could hear, saying the things, watching for it. And I have to be honest, what came over me was not fear, it was tired, because I had heard it. I had heard all of it. There is nothing a coyote in a truck can say to a girl that her own father did not say first and worse, and that is not a sad thing when I say it, it is a weapon, because it meant I had no flinch left to hand him. He was spending all his ammunition on a target that was not standing there anymore.

So I did not flinch. I went the other way. I picked up his crude and I doubled it. Said the next thing, the thing he was working himself up to, said it flat and bored before he could get there, and then I said the one after that, and I watched it happen, the thing I lived for. I watched him lose the floor. Because a man like that has a script, and the script only runs if you play scared, and the second you take his lines and read them back to him better than he can, calmer than he can, he has no second move. He had never needed one. Nobody had ever taken the crude out of his hands and given it back sharpened. By the time I was done he was the one who could not hold eye contact. The others had gone quiet. And I sat there, eighteen and filthy and technically his cargo, running the back of that truck like I held the keys.

That was the game, and I was a master of it, and I am not going to pretend it did not feel good every single time. Not good like safe. Good like the one thing I was great at. You take what they mean to shame you with and you make it the thing that shames them. You make yourself so much more than they bargained for that they forget, for a minute, what the arrangement even was. I did not pick that up anywhere you can enroll. I picked it up across a kitchen table before I could see over it. By the road I could do it in my sleep.

Now hold all of that against this, because it is the trap the whole story is built on. I won that truck. I won most of the trucks, most of the nights, the way I had won every room my whole life. And the truck kept going north. That is the part nobody tells you about being the smartest, most dangerous girl in the cargo. You can run the whole room and the room is still on wheels, and the wheels still go where the man who owns them points, and that man is never in the room with you. I beat every coyote who ever tried me. Not one of them was driving. I was magnificent, mija. I was a thing to see. And I was being delivered the entire time, on schedule, winning all the way down.

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