The summer I was nine, Rafa shot whole afternoons talking about whatever chica he was getting with – not that the campo girls gave us ass like the girls back in the Capital but kissing them, he told me, was pretty much the same. He’d take the campo girls down to the dams to swim and if he was lucky they let him put it in their mouth or in their asses. He’d done La Muda that way for almost a month before her parents heard about it and barred her from leaving the house forever.

He wore the same outfit when he went to see these girls, a shirt and pants that my father had sent him from the States last Christmas. I always followed Rafa, trying to convince him to let me tag along.

Go home, he’d say. I’ll be back in a few hours.

I’ll walk you.

I don’t need you to walk me anywhere. Just wait for me.

If I kept on he’d punch me in the shoulder and walk on until what was left of him was the color of his shirt filling in the spaces between the leaves. Something inside of me would sag like a sail. I would yell his name and he’d hurry on, the ferns and branches and flower pods trembling in his wake.