My mother tells me not to go alone, so I bring a friend to be weighed along with my charter plane carry-on. We diffuse our sweet blood with repellent, chat up the hostel culinary staff, flail our arms to techno after curfew. The town’s name ends with -ita, the diminutive applied to things you either love or look down on. Now that foreigners have driven the natives out, the town is virgin enough to be novel and White enough to be “up-and-coming,” safe for surfers but dangerous for girls after 1 am now that the local rapist got out of jail. Every morning is filtered with thunderstorms and motorcycle exhaust, every night is heavy with people too afraid to dance until someone else does, expats used to seeing beautiful women, reminders that I’m not one of them.

We walk barefoot to create traction against the mud, learn to cover our torsos on alleyed roads because women’s bodies reverberate louder than our screams and the local men tend to muffle us with their eyes. We fawn over the sunsets and sleep as our surf instructor plays salsa in his pickup truck. He calls us chiquillas, lindas, hermosas, asks us how old we are and if we have any boyfriends. He tells us to do chicken leg, cobra, “agachidatas” so we can stand up on the whitewash. He has broiled chicken skin from swimming against the tide, callused feet from walking on stones, boxing moves for foreigners who steal his waves. The boards bruise our skin and our hip bones grow coarsely netted like burlap, reminiscent of abuse. My hair fizzles like wool and I wonder what it’s like to be a woman who can immerse herself in water and let her hair dry with the wind, soft in nature and outside of it. Each passing day, the shy bathing suit model takes our orders, the photographer who documents surfboards and cappuccinos lingers with the cool kids, the dreadlocked dealer twirls fire to avoid his migraines.

We visit Turtle Island to glaze ourselves in shrooms and love our bodies as others do. The foliage pulses, the red of our skin coils into mandalas, the sand juts like living Legos. We boat back after dusk to see the bioluminescent glow of crashing waves, dive into open water so glowing evil eyes bead down our bodies like aquamarine stars. Shirtless men linger at the bloodied dock, crowding around a cobalt fish, longer than you, longer than me, scaled like a sunrise and domed like a flattened crown, glistening like a knife reflecting the dock’s stale artificial life into something leathery and alive. It lies on the floor and looks at us with fierce, vanquished eyes. We piss on the concrete change into dry clothes, deadened by the night, turning to see a man with a wheelbarrow packed with fish flopping in their ocean sweat as he runs barefoot on the main road, waddling against the rain for a paycheck, carrying fish someone will eat and never see, like the one I order the next evening with spicy mayo and a side of coleslaw, searing into my tongue as I sit in the hostel with its menus and mirrors, my body salted in exhaustion, convincing myself that tuna is small and foil-skinned, pink-fleshed and pink eyed, nothing regal, nothing to cry over.

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