Read The Queen of Water for Free Online Page A

and dance and sing in front of the mirror. Jaimito dances with me, bouncing up and down, wobbling his head and clapping and laughing. He sings too, opening his mouth wide, sticking out his tongue and shouting Yayayayaya.
    I love watching my reflection, how my face gets shiny and sweaty like I’m under hot spotlights. But there’s a nagging problem. It doesn’t look right to see a famous singer in indígena clothes. Indigenous women cook and clean and work in fields and take care of children; they don’t sing in the spotlight on TV to thousands of fans. I need a sequined dress, or at the very least, regular mestiza clothes.
    It’s been almost a year since I left home, and the few clothes I brought with me have worn out and gotten too small. One afternoon, the Doctorita comes home with three blouses. They are ugly indígena blouses, used and grayish white, the color of dirty laundry water. I can tell just by looking that they’re way too big for me.
    “Try one on,” the Doctorita says.
    The neck is so large it slides off my shoulders. The stitches of the embroidered flowers are big and sloppy and all wrong. The thread’s cheap dye bleeds into the fabric. Without a word, I fold the blouses and stuff them in my cardboard box where I don’t have to see them.
    A few days later, in the kitchen, the Doctorita demands, “Why aren’t you wearing those new blouses?”
    I shrug.
    “Tell me.”
    I stare at the potato I’m peeling. “I don’t want to wear them.”
    The Doctorita slaps my face. “Tomorrow you’ll start wearing them.”
    “No,” I say, bracing myself for the next blow.
    Another slap. “Longa tonta,” she spits. Fool longa.
    With trembling hands, I set down the knife. At my sides, my fists tighten. I look at her beady eyes lined with smudged mascara. “I want to wear clothes like other girls around here.”
    “You’re a longa, and you have to dress like a longa. ” And she turns and walks away.
    The next day, once again, I refuse to wear the new blouses.
    She hits me. “Ungrateful longa. ”
    But I hold my ground. I will become a star someday. And I will not wear indigenous clothes.
    Once, when I was about four, I pretended to be a mestiza. I remember it clearly, like a vivid photo that stands out from all the other, blurred ones. I was in the giant cornfield, helping Mamita pull weeds from the still-short plants, scratching at the lice on my head, feeling my sun-warmed hair, tangled as a bird’s nest, and squinting into the dry wind to see if anything more interesting was happening outside the edge of the cornfield. Just other workers, mostly women with fachalinas folded on their heads to keep off the sun, some with babies strapped to their backs, all bent over, faces close to the earth. A few rows over, my cousins Zoyla and Gregoria were pulling weeds and wiping the sweat from their foreheads, crisscrossing their faces with streaks of dirt. Beyond them stretched more cornfields, a few whitewashed houses with red tile roofs, and, towering in the distance, mountains.
    I picked at some flea-bite scabs on my calves, which were split and caked with dried mud and hardened blood. At the sound of voices speaking Spanish, I straightened up, alert.
    Alfonso and his wife, Mariana, were walking by. Alfonso wore snakeskin cowboy boots with heels that made him look taller than he really was, and an expensive leather hat. His hand rested just above Mariana’s rump, which swished in a short skirt that revealed doughy legs teetering on spiky heels. The cloth of her shirt seemed stuck to her rolls of fat, and her hair was long and spiraled into a large ball pinned to her head.
    Once they moved on, I hitched my anaco up to my knees, tucking it into the faja at my waist. I smoothed my loose blouse close to my belly and tied it in back. Then I twirled my hair into a knot. Grinning, I put my hands on my hips and cut through the rows of corn to Zoyla and Gregoria. “Get to work, you indias ,” I scolded them in a