Eli Danhauser.
For a minute, Rosa sat frozen and motionless, her hands on the steering wheel, feeling shame pulse through her with each beat of her heart. Here was the retribution that she always knew was coming; here were the consequences you could postpone but not avoid. Soon she’d be exposed as the worst kind of liar. And Gabe, her angel, the one person she’d managed to love successfully, the only relationship in her life she hadn’t ruined, the one person she’d never betrayed, the one thing she’d done right in her life, Gabe would hate her, too.
* * *
Rosa Alvarez Andrews had grown up in Los Angeles. Her mother, Maria, had emigrated from Mexico, slipping over the border with two of her brothers and one of her sisters. The Alvarez siblings had picked strawberries and lettuce on the big farms in Ventura County. Eventually her mother had fallen in love with and married Glenn Andrews, whose family owned one of those farms. Maria and Glenn had moved to a suburb of Los Angeles, where Glenn, who’d never much liked farming, had run a garage and Maria had been an administrative assistant in the city’s school district. Glenn and Maria had three kids—Emmanuel, Rosa, and Amanda, the baby—and there was a path those children were meant to follow, a path that began with a high school diploma and continued on to college and white-collar, respectable employment, followed by marriage and families of their own. Manny, Rosa’s big brother, got a chemical engineering degree, and made his parents proud. Mandy, Rosa’s little sister, was a professional party girl until she turned twenty-one, settled down, and went to cosmetology school—not ideal, but still okay, still a profession, especially since Mandy eventually ended up owning her own salon. Rosa, who’d never liked any of her classes besides art and music, who’d been the prettiest girl in her high school, the lead in every musical, had completed a single semester of community college at her parents’ insistence. When she turned nineteen, she’d packed her belongings—mostly clothes and makeup—taken the money she’d saved, and gotten on a bus to New York City. Her parents wanted her to be a nurse or a dental technician or a paralegal. Rosa, with her long, dark hair and big, dark eyes, had other plans. She wanted to be a singer, a dancer, a star.
Rosa found an apartment in Crown Heights that she shared with three roommates, and a job as a cocktail waitress at a nightclub in Manhattan. She could have made more money stripping, or letting the customers at the nightclub take her home. Some girls did. Rosa didn’t judge them, but she wasn’t ready for that—at least not yet. She signed up for dance and acting classes. She got a subscription to Backstage and started going out to every open audition and casting call for every show that she could find.
It took Rosa maybe a month to realize that being the most talented girl in her high school did not make her even close to one of the best singers or dancers in New York; that having been prom queen wasn’t enough to allow her to compete for the spots in the chorus line with girls who’d been models, or looked as if they could have been.
She hung on for two years, slinging drinks, singing with a cover band that played Pat Benatar and Heart and Fleetwood Mac songs at the local bars （but only on Wednesday and Thursday nights—they never got quite good enough to headline on the weekends）。 She got called back twice but, ultimately, wasn’t cast as Mimi in the off-Broadway revival of Rent, and she’d played Fantine for six weeks doing Les Misérables at the Bucks County Playhouse. That was the extent of her theatrical success.
Rosa kept trying. And while she was trying, she had sex. Lots and lots of sex. Being admired, being desired, being pursued, all fed her self-esteem, which was being regularly decimated by the audition process. Her sense of herself as beautiful and talented and worthy was diminished every time she didn’t get a role, every time a casting director hollered “Next!” without even looking at her face. Sex let her feel good about herself, even if only for a few hours—or, in the case of her trysts with the cover band’s bass player, Benji, a few minutes. Handsome men were, in her experience, the worst lovers, assuming that women were so thrilled to be in bed with them that they didn’t have to make any effort to ensure their partner’s pleasure, and gorgeous Benji with his glossy black hair and pillowy lips and the hollows under his cheekbones that made him look like a tubercular poet instead of a guy who hadn’t picked up a book since high school was no exception. When Rosa went to bed with a man, she could feel, again, like she was the most beautiful girl in her class, the most sought-after and desired, and even though the feeling never lasted for long, it could give her enough of a boost to get her through another week of waitressing and auditions. She counted on the Pill to keep her from getting pregnant, and the Planned Parenthood clinic to take care of any other unpleasant consequences of her adventures.