What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

by Claire Jiménez

I ran away from home, too. Spent most of college making excuses not to come back for Christmas. Not because I did not love my family or was ashamed, but because it hurt too much to see up close what had happened to us over the years. And sometimes, during those rare holiday visits, the gravity of our situation was so strong it felt like being pulled into a black hole.

Mostly because I was proud of my depression. I’d read somewhere on the internet that it was a sign of extreme intelligence, and I’d started to consider depression as some type of X-ray vision, with which I could see the world clearly in ways that others could not—that is, not only the skin but also the skeleton.

at night, she enjoyed becoming extra difficult, which was hard to imagine, considering she’d spent her whole life playing hard-ass, finding creative ways to discipline decades of “at risk” kids, depending on whatever new educational trend was popular that year.

I know all of this because being frequently in trouble as a teenager meant I was in that office a lot, and when people think you’re nobody, they’ll say all types of stupid shit in front of you as if you aren’t there.

But me, as a mother? I never wanted that for my girls—to experience that type of violence, because sometimes getting hit like that made you think you didn’t deserve to fucking smile.

she realized in that moment that Yesenia could live with Ruthy being hurt as long as Yesenia wasn’t the one being touched.

And sometimes it just felt good to watch these women argue, when so much of your day-to-day life consisted of nodding politely or biting your tongue so that you would not be fired, so that you could buy groceries, so that you could pay rent and take care of your family.

Rolling his eyes, he sat his long ass down in the corner and managed to stare at the wall during the whole two-hour vigil without saying much. People forget that in the nineties kids didn’t have cell phones like that. So this was an incredibly impressive feat—it took a great deal of teenage asshole commitment to publicly disengage for that long.

You never fully knew what he was about, which, come to think about it, might have been purposeful; the pathological lying gave Ivan some power in his crew.

Was there an alternate universe where all of these girls were actually friends, co-conspirators, in which the ultimate joke was on us, the viewers sitting on our bored asses at home?

Like they always tell us, there is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.

It felt silly now, my efforts to find out what happened to Ruthy, because really what I always ended up thinking about was what happened to me, instead.

job…Look how beauty and subservience had so much more currency in this world than a bachelor’s degree in biology.