‘Her First Cruise Ship’: An Exclusive Excerpt from ‘Something Followed Us Home,’ a New Anthology of Latiné Horror Edited by Cynthia Pelayo

Ileana smoothed her clothes for the hundredth time that morning. She didn’t know why she was so nervous; it was a simple retail job for fuck’s sake, but there was something about the day’s impending tourist invasion that upped the tension in the normally tranquil atmosphere of the small store. To calm herself, she kept busy arranging and rearranging the hand-painted coconut shell jewelry in the rectangle of glass cases that was the main counter.

It was her third day working at Artisanal Puerto Rico, and she had begun it feeling confident. The summer job in Old San Juan was a placeholder, after all, until she figured out what to do next: graduate school, travel, work for her father’s soul-sucking investment firm. Actually, that last one absolutely wasn’t on the menu, not even on the table; she just pretended it was to keep her tyrannical father off her back.

“You okay, mija?”

Ileana jumped a bit. She hadn’t realized her manager, Carmen, was standing next to her. “Oh! Yeah, sure.”

Carmen smiled warmly and patted the younger woman’s arm. “The first cruise ship is always nerve-racking, but pretty soon it becomes pan comido.”

Ileana tilted her head. “Eaten bread? Eww.”

Carmen laughed. It was a light, bell-like sound that had a calming effect. “It’s like ‘piece of cake.’ ‘Easy.’”

“Still gross. I keep picturing gummed bread mush in an old person’s toothless mouth or something.”

Carmen chuckled. “You’ll get it, amor.”

Ileana smiled back, though she couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t some judgment tucked under Carmen’s kindness. Like “Check out the gringa dissing our Spanish” kind of thing. But Ileana knew that was just her insecurity talking. Everyone was so patient with her sluggish attempts at her father’s language. Truth was, she understood way more than she spoke, but it was the regional idioms that always tripped her up. That’s why she decided to get a job in the city while she was on the island. Otherwise, it would be too easy to settle in with her bilingual cousins and jabber away in English (though, truth was, she felt like an outsider even with them). It was embarrassing to be Puerto Rican and not speak Spanish fluently. She planned to remedy that this summer.

The coqui song sounded—the recording of the beloved tree frog’s voice was how they knew a customer, or customers, had come in—and Ileana looked up to see the handsome face of David, who worked next door at the cosmetics store. He had this wavy chestnut hair that moved when he talked, and when he smiled, it went all the way to his eyes. She was a sucker for boys who smiled with their eyes.

“Buenos días, señorita,” he said in his oddly unidentifiable accented Spanish.

She flushed a bit, and it embarrassed her. “Good morning, David.” Those dark eyes brushed her up and down with their thick black lashes, and she felt heat rise again behind her face. But Carmen had warned her off him on her first day. “They hire particular people because they’re so seductive, mija,” she had said, and it was true. Yesterday had been quiet and Ileana had watched through the store’s large front window as the handsome guy worked his charm on the tourists who walked up and down the street, flirting with men and women alike, gently leading them inside the store and into his floral-scented web of two-hundred-dollar hand creams. There was something . . . vampiric about all the pretty people who worked in that store. So, she would settle for a little flirting and admiring David from afar. Besides, a venereal disease was not the souvenir she needed from this summer.

“David!”

Ileana looked toward the door, and Vanessa, a leggy girl with silky mahogany hair, was leaning in. They locked eyes, and the woman gave her an equally seductive smile.

Maybe they were vampires.

He answered, but didn’t take his eyes off Ileana. “What? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“The ship’s already docked. Get your ass back in here.”

David sighed, then picked up Ileana’s hand and pressed his soft lips to her knuckles as he stared into her eyes. He smelled spicy and warm, like summer cinnamon.

After she watched him saunter out the door and out of sight, she reached for the bottle of rainforest-scented sanitizer on the counter and applied it liberally to her hands. No judgment, but who knew where those lips of his had been?

“Ileana, do you want to watch them come into the city, since it’s your first time?” Carmen now stood by the store’s open doorway. Misty air-conditioned air escaped around the woman like horror movie fog, tumbling out the door and over the blue cobblestone street.

The assistant manager, Sol, yelled from the other end of the counter, near the books, “Ooh! The virgin gonna get her cruise cherry popped!”

Ileana rolled her eyes at them as the other staff hooted and hollered like a bawdy Greek chorus. She didn’t mind, though. Sol ribbed her, but they were kind and patient during Ileana’s training and made her feel at home despite her not being island-born. Damn, her own father couldn’t even do that.

She waved her hand dismissively at their continued cackling and turned back to Carmen. “I’d like that.”

She stepped out from behind the glass cases and followed her manager out onto the street and down to the corner of Calle Fortaleza. The city was quiet and almost cool in the midmorning calm, but soon the sun would blaze down, heating up the cobblestone until it felt as if you were walking through the fires of hell. Hence, the incredibly wasteful open doors releasing their seductive chill to lure unsuspecting passersby. But Ileana had chosen this store to apply to when every piece she picked up had Made in Puerto Rico stamped on the bottom. It only carried work from Puerto Rican artisans, none of the mass-produced plastic crap that was peddled in so many souvenir stores throughout the city. She was proud of that. Besides, it helped her justify to her father that she had taken a retail job for fourteen dollars an hour after he “spent a hundred grand on an art history degree.” God, she hated that she could so easily conjure his judgmental voice in her head. But the fact that he didn’t get it? It only made this work more appealing to her.

When they got to the corner, they looked down the hill and toward the docks, and Ileana gasped at the sight of the twelve-story, gleaming, white-and-blue behemoth that had appeared at the base of the city. The many decks were stacked like layers of an overly elaborate cake, and figures flooded the two gangways, like the red ants she stumbled on when she was five and visiting her abuela’s house in Bayamón. They had covered her lower legs, their bites spreading like fire as she screamed and ran to the house.

“Beautiful, huh?” Carmen asked, pulling her back into the moment.

Not the word Ileana would have chosen. “I mean, I guess so.”

“Well, the money they spend sure is beautiful. I’m going back inside; you can stay for a bit if you like. But come back before they reach Fortaleza, okay?”

“I will, thanks.” Ileana watched her boss walk away, then took a deep breath of morning air. The smell of the city was clear and new at this hour, with only a slight hint of spilled alcohol and urine from the previous evening’s partyers. But it smelled like life with a capital L, not the curated scent of her father’s gated community that she returned to each night.

As she waited for the disembarking to begin, she gazed off into the San Juan Bay behind the ship, its water a deep azure and the sky a ridiculous bright blue, and she understood why people flocked here. So much natural beauty and history in one small city. Directly across the street from where she stood was the historic Tapia theater building with its colonnades and, supposedly, two ghosts. Directly behind her? She could see the tops of the old-style black cast-iron lampposts of Plaza Colón, while she caught the buttery scent of Mallorca sweet rolls and dark, rich coffee brewing.

When she looked back toward the docks, the passengers had been cleared and began to funnel down the planks and spread onto the docks like sand in a just-turned hourglass. These tourists were the main reason her father questioned her choice of summer jobs. “They’re like locusts, Ileana, hungry and totally out for themselves. I offer you a corner office in the cultural and economic center of the island, and you choose that?” When he made statements like that, she would look into his calculating brown eyes and wonder how they could be related. What she’d wanted to say in response but didn’t—in truth the man frightened her a bit—was that she’d always choose being down here with the people over up there in his company’s glass tower.

The passengers crossed the highway near the piers and then surged up Calle Paseo de Colón. It was odd, Ileana thought. They really did look like a swarm of insects, almost moving as one. She shuddered, despite the warmth of the sun, but it wasn’t until the first few passed the post office that she began to notice something was wrong.

There was a man at the front, around her father’s age, overweight in the way so many American men of his generation were—the large, round belly leading in front like a basketball hidden beneath his striped, button-down shirt. His face was red and his nose enlarged, and Ileana could picture him in a recliner, yelling at a football game on the television, beer in hand. A typical American tourist, but . . . he kept stumbling. Not like he was drunk, but more as if he were falling forward, up the hill. A taxi swerved to avoid him as he stepped into the street without looking, and he didn’t even seem to notice the cacophony when the driver leaned on his horn. As he rounded the curved street and passed the Starbucks, he lifted his head, and his eyes caught Ileana’s. Locked onto hers. They were red-rimmed and huge, almost . . . hungry. Then a smile snaked across his lips, his mouth opened into a round, black void, and he let out a guttural moan that echoed against the sixteenth-century buildings on either side. Not long after, the other passengers behind him seemed to notice her, too . . . and they all picked up speed.