PRAISE FOR ALISA LYNN VALDÉS

  The Dirty Girls Social Club

  “The feel of a night out with the girls . . . charming . . . undeniably fun.”

  —Miami Herald

  “This lively debut novel . . . reads like the Hispanic version of Waiting to Exhale.”

  —New York

  “As a guilty pleasure it ranks somewhere between Valrhona chocolate and Jimmy Choo shoes—I simply could not put it down.”

  —Whitney Otto, author of How to Make an American Quilt

  “The summer’s must-have beach book.”

  —Latina

  “A fresh spin on the best-of-friends novel that’s funny, touching, and exhilarating. A winner!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Crusie

  “The Latina community has a rich new voice, and Valdés-Rodriguez is it.”

  —Jeffrey Kluger, coauthor of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13

  “Dirty Girls sets out to prove Latina can mean anything—Black, white, rich, poor, Spanish speaking, not Spanish speaking.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Valdés-Rodriguez has written an incredible first novel, told in six distinct voices and points of view.”

  —Library Journal

  “In the end, it’s the complex, finely drawn characters who make the book work.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A heartfelt, fast-moving, and often funny page-turner.”

  —Booklist

  “This season’s most scrumptious book . . . a summer must.”

  —Advocate

  “Those who liked The Joy Luck Club or The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood will enjoy The Dirty Girls Social Club . . . It is heartfelt, fast moving, and often funny.”

  —Oklahoman

  “An affecting debut that takes a long, hard, and funny look at life in the US for Latina women . . . an upscale telenovela with well-drawn, charmingly flawed characters from an author who explodes some myths.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Marked by fast-paced dialogue and a pop-culture sensibility, this engaging novel, each section of which is written from a different woman’s perspective, carries an unmistakable message.”

  —Book

  “The writing is strong, fluid, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.”

  —Pioneer Press

  “Valdés-Rodriguez’s compelling characters are enhanced by their racial identities but not at all inaccessible to the non-Hispanic . . . an enjoyable read.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Valdés-Rodriguez’s novel delivers on the promise of its sexy title with a diverse group of women that defies stereotypes. The book addresses serious questions—prejudice, the difficulty of winning respect from Latino men—but balances them with enough romances . . . to satisfy any chick lit fan. This is a fun, irresistible debut.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Dirty Girls on Top

  “The perfect chaser to the Sex and the City movie.”

  —People

  “Valdés-Rodriguez’s follow-up to her 2003 debut, The Dirty Girls Social Club, has Sex and the City written all over it—in sassy Spanglish. The six sucias return with hilarious and raunchy tales of Latina-tinged love, marriage, and sex told from each character’s point of view. A–”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A fast-paced, sexy tale.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Caliente is the best word to describe this steamy sequel to The Dirty Girls Social Club . . . a madcap, full-of-heart adventure.”

  —Redbook

  “If the Sex and the City flick leaves you longing for more girl-bonding, then Dirty Girls on Top is the olive in the martini . . . this summer’s juiciest beach read.”

  —Latina

  “The Dirty Girls Social Club always demanded a sequel, and here it is.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Valdés-Rodriguez . . . has once again written an extraordinary and impressive book. Told in six unique voices, from six unique points of view, her follow-up has a universality about it that makes it, like her first book about the sucias, an important addition to the fields of friendship novels and Latina literature and an excellent choice for fiction collections of all sizes.”

  —Library Journal

  “The sequel to The Dirty Girls Social Club, about a posse of Latina friends still trying five years later to figure out their careers and love lives—Carrie and friends, but with café con leche.”

  —Saint Petersburg Times

  “Passionate and provocative . . . the prose is fast and casual, and the plot moves at a fast clip.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY ALISA LYNN VALDÉS

  The Feminist and the Cowboy

  The Three Kings

  The Husband Habit

  Dirty Girls on Top

  The Dirty Girls Social Club

  Playing with Boys

  Make Him Look Good

  Haters

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2023 by Alisa Lynn Valdés

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781662507175 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781662507168 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 9781662507182 (digital)

  Cover design by Ploy Siripant

  Cover image: © Matilda Delves / ArcAngel; © CreativeHQ / Shutterstock; © Kilroy79 / Shutterstock; © Olga_i / Shutterstock; © Rebeccakarenza / Shutterstock; © robbin lee / Shutterstock

  First edition

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Natalia had no paper and no pen. No pencil. Nothing, really. Just her rasping breath and her asthma. Just this hole in the ground where the men kept her. She and the other two. Paola, the taller one with the high cheekbones, who kept talking about how her dad was going to rescue them all. And Celia, who was short and chubby and spoke with an accent and who hugged Natalia and told her everything was going to be fine. Celia, who promised to remember the letter Natalia was writing, here in their strange prison, without paper, pen, pencil. Between gasping coughs, she wrote the letter to her parents in her head and recited it to herself over and over—and, by default, to Paola and Celia too—so that she would not forget a word. She did not speak the story exactly the same way every time, but close enough. Sitting in the dark, on the cold, damp, deep, earthen floor, humid with the stench of their bodily functions—which they kept confined to one part of the hole but which stank up the entire thing nonetheless—Natalia hugged her knees to her chest. She was still wearing only her tangerine-colored swimming suit, a modest one-piece, and the white terry cloth cover-up. Or at least it used to be white. Now it was caked with dirt and mud and blood and sweat and tears and everything else. All the animal things. She rocked a little. Somewhere, she heard something tapping, up above them. A woodpecker, Celia told them. Focus on that sound, of the woodpecker; think of how free it is, that bird. We will be like that again.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  They were in the woods somewhere, far from civilization. Far from help. Far from home. Natalia rocked and rocked and tried not to scream. Rocked the way crazy people rock in movies about crazy people, she thought. So this is why they do it: because the feelings are so terrible and so huge that you have to move somehow or else they will engulf you, drown you forever. She spoke the words through chattering teeth, and her eyes just stared at the nothingness of the dirt that formed the walls of this dungeon. Nothing to see here but a hole, as though she were already in a coffin and buried. The girl in the well, she thought. That’s a thing, isn’t it? A meme. A joke. Until they threw you in. Then it wasn’t so funny anymore. There was nothing funny about this. Natalia wondered if she would ever laugh again. The two others just watched and listened. She begged them to remember the words to this letter, to tell her parents if she couldn’t.

  “Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I love them.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Celia. “You’ll tell them yourself.”

  “Yeah,” said Paola . “We have to stay positive. I’m telling you, my dad’s coming.”

  “Dear Mom and Dad,” said Natalia, ignoring them both, coping in the way she was able. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Not this again,” said Paola, banging her head backward against the dirt.

  “Don’t,” said Celia, placing her hand between Paola’s head and the wall.

  “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I didn’t mean to. I was swimming with Christopher, in the pool with the waterslides, and I know you told me to keep an eye on him, but I had to go to the bathroom so bad, and you were both in one of your discussions where you both look angry, and you had those umbrella drinks going, so I didn’t want to bother you; plus, Chris is twelve now, not three, and he’s a good swimmer now, probably better than me, and he was in the shallow end anyway, and there were, like, a million lifeguards. It was just number one, so I thought I’d be quick. So I just ran to the bathroom real quick, because no one likes you if you’re a pool pee-er. There’s no excuse to pee in the pool unless you’re, like, a baby. Which I’m not.

  “I didn’t see him there. In the hallway outside the girls’ bathrooms. Not when I went in. But he was there when I came out. Standing over by the soda machine. He looked sort of normal, but ugly, and told me one of the Coke bottles was stuck, and he needed my help. He called out to me, to get my attention. ‘Hey, kid.’ That’s what he said. ‘Hey, kid, do you speak English?’ It was a weird question. I said I did, and he said, ‘These days you never know,’ like it made him angry. He asked if I could help him by banging on the machine while he tilted it, and I was, like, to myself I thought, I know about stranger danger, but there are people around. So I said, ‘I can give you a dollar or whatever for another soda, if you need money.’ I held out a dollar bill I’d taken from the pocket of my cover-up. It was from that wad of money Dad won at the casino the day before and split with me and Chris, when he told us not to spend it all in one place. That made the rat man so angry, for me to offer him money. All, like, insulted. He looked around, and when he didn’t see anyone, he grabbed me by the hair, and when I tried to scream, he told me he had a gun and that if I made any noise, he would kill me and then he would go and kill my little brother. Christopher. He knew Chris’s name. That’s what made me think he was serious.”

  Natalia paused to cough. She was not crying anymore. The other million times she’d told the story, she’d broken down at this part. Now, she was growing numb. Physically numb but also emotionally numb. Nothing made sense. Tap, tap, tap.

  “My dad will look for me,” said Paola. Natalia noticed she sounded like someone from reality television, with that same kind of spoiled-rich-girl intonation to her speech. “He’s the tribal president, and he has a lot of power. A lot. He has his own police force. It’s going to be okay.”

  Natalia held a hand up—not to be rude but to try to keep focused on her letter. It was getting harder to think. She was so thirsty.

  “Dear Mom and Dad,” Natalia began, again.

  “Ugh, don’t keep starting over,” said Paola.

  “Stop saying that to her,” Celia told Paola. “She’s just scared.” Celia touched Natalia’s arm and said, “Tell us about them. Your mom and dad.”

  “My mom is a school principal. My dad sells cars, but he’s the manager. Toyotas. He used to be a teacher. That’s how they met. But they needed more money than he was making when my brother came along, and so he went into sales.”

  “I’m sure they’re looking for you,” said Celia. “It’s going to be okay. All right? I promise.”

  “Unless you drive me crazy, reciting that letter over and over,” said Paola. “Then it won’t be okay, for me. Until my dad gets here. I know he’s coming. I feel it.”

  “Let her say her letter,” said Celia. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Fine. Just—does she have to keep starting over? She never finishes it.”

  Natalia didn’t want them to hate her. She’d need them. So she tried to remember where she was. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll pick up where I left off. Okay?

  “I think about it now, and it’s obvious I should have screamed and kicked him or whatever, even if he shot me. That gunshot would have gotten everyone’s attention, and then he wouldn’t have been able to shoot anyone else, maybe. I don’t know. I was stupid, and when he told me to go with him, I went with him, because when people poke the end of a gun into your back, you almost always do whatever they say. I hope the resort has video. I hope you’re looking for me. I hope the police know.

  “He is so ugly, Mom. And Dad. Not just on the outside, where he looks like a skinny drowned rat, but on the inside. He smelled bad, like he never brushes his teeth, and his car smelled bad, like the cages at an animal shelter. He had it parked right outside the back of the restaurant. He made me walk across the hotel lobby with him, and people looked at us like they knew something was weird, because how many freaky rat men do you think should be walking around with a sixteen-year-old girl in a bathing suit? But nobody said anything or did anything. I think about it now, and I’m, like, so pissed at myself. I could have just yelled that I was being taken against my will, but that gun. All poking in my back. I didn’t want him shooting anyone else. I was in a daze, like. I couldn’t think. I didn’t understand anything that was happening. He said he knew where my parents lived and that he would kill you guys if I tried to get away. I don’t know how he could know that, because we were there on vacation; I see that now. Like, how would that guy ever in a million years know where we lived, all the way up in Reno, when we were just down in Las Vegas for a family vacation? It’s stupid. So I’m sorry. I was stupid. I was not thinking straight.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Celia. “You did what anyone would have done. Same as me. Same as Paola.”

  Natalia rocked and coughed, and up above, they heard the sounds of the men’s boots as they gathered around the opening of the hole. Someone moved one of the branches away, and Natalia heard the men muttering about taking one of them out. Deciding which one.

  “Dear Mom and Dad,” Natalia began, again.

  “Here we go again,” said Paola.

  “Stop it,” said Celia.

  “The young one,” yelled the rat man, and the others laughed. “She coughs like a seventy-year-old smoker. Maybe Travis can finally catch one. She’s slow.”

  Natalia rocked and tried to remember where she was in the story. The part where he’d pushed her up against the car with his body, like they were boyfriend and girlfriend or something, and pulled zip ties tight around her wrists, binding her hands together? Or was it when he’d told her to sit in the passenger seat like a good girl, “like we’re the best of friends,” or else he’d open the door when the car was moving and throw her “happy ass” out into moving traffic? Or the rest area, in the middle of the night, when he’d said he was sick of hearing her cry and let her have some of his warm Mountain Dew before he’d forced her into the trunk, with the cans of oil and the spare tire? How she almost suffocated back there, how she focused her mind and went over the dance-team moves she’d learned last year, tried to remember all of them, imagined herself at the football games again, remembered the way Mom and Dad beamed at her from the stands with their faces painted blue and white and gold to show their support for her high school.

  The rest of the branches were removed, and Natalia and Celia blinked against the brightness of the midday sun. Nothing but forest all around them. Natalia did not even know what state they were in, only that the rat man had driven for, like, three days to get here.

  “Dear Mom and Dad,” she said, only now it wasn’t just her teeth that chattered. It was her whole body.

  “You,” said the ringleader, pointing at Natalia with his pistol. He was tall and powerful, clean cut, and the others called him General Zeb. He reminded her of the youth minister at her church, one of those conservative guys who tries to look hip. “Climb up.”

  He unfurled a rope ladder into the hole. Natalia rocked and hugged and coughed.

  “Dear Mom and Dad,” she said.

  “Get her up here,” shouted General Zeb, “or I shoot you all, and we start over.”

  “Come on,” said Celia. She shook Natalia. “You should go.”

  Natalia snapped out of it. She looked at Celia. “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know. But you have a better chance of running and hiding up there than down here. If you see a chance, use it. Run, Natalia.”

 

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