🎲 "Victim" - by Andrew Boryga

In a world where truth is malleable and ambition knows no bounds, Javier Perez navigates the fine line between deception and self-discovery, risking everything as he spins a web of lies.

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In this week's edition, you will read an exclusive excerpt of Andrew Boryga’s debut novel Victim.

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📚 The Stats

Javier Perez, a masterful hustler, manipulates his troubled upbringing into a compelling narrative that secures him a coveted academic scholarship.

As he delves deeper into the world of academia, Javier fabricates his past until truth becomes a distant memory, with only sporadic correspondence with his childhood friend Gio tethering him to reality.

A viral essay propels Javier into journalistic fame, but his past catches up with him as Gio, seeing through his charade, reenters his life upon release from prison.

Javier must now decide whether Gio will play along with his deception or if his carefully constructed facade will collapse.

🖋️ Quote from the Book:

📖 Chapter 1:

Reading time: 10 minutes

I wasn’t trying to play the victim until the world taught me what a powerful game it is. Believe it or not, all I wanted was to be successful. To hustle like my Pops, but keep my life and freedom in the process. My desperate chase for your approval was really all about that. I needed that approval to be considered successful. I needed it to feel like my life mattered.

The truth is: I didn’t create this racket. I was put on. I peeped game and realized I happened to be uniquely equipped to thrive in it. You see, there are many ways to go about it, but the absolute easiest starting point is to actually have had some tragic shit happen to you. It gives you something to pull from. A rock to stand on. I survived this... If you don’t have that but you’re the right shade of skin color, you’ll be okay, for now. If you don’t have the tragic story or the right skin color, but you grew up in the right kind of place with the right kind of poverty, and the right kind of people to back up that story for you, you might be able to work something out. But if you don’t have the tragic shit and you don’t have the right skin and you don’t have the right geographic background, you’re fucked. Get out of the game entirely—it is just not for you. Take your privilege, earn your cash, invest in your stocks, and for the love of God, stay off of social media.

Lucky for me, I had the trifecta: the right color, born in the right place, and tragedy to pull from—thanks to my Pops. There is a lot I could tell you about him. But that’s a whole book in itself. For our purposes, the last days I spent with Pops before he died are enough. I was 12-years-old and on a plane to Puerto Rico to see him. A few months earlier, Mom and Pops had broken up for like the 300th time. It happened right after the cops had shown up at our door looking for him while he hid out in a secret room of the building’s basement. Mom said she was tired of lying to the police. “I told you from the start that I ain’t going to jail for your ass.” Pops pulled me aside shortly after, got on a knee and gave me his spiel. “I love you mijito. And I’ll always be your Pops. But I gotta go.” I was long past the point of tearing up or even getting upset. I figured they’d be back together in a few months, Pops would be back in the Bronx, and the world would keep spinning. I patted Pops on the shoulder and conned him into breaking me off with a hundred bucks before he left.

When the plane landed in Puerto Rico, everything was bright, as if God had placed the entire island under a lamp. The stewardess handed me off to another woman. I sat in her golf cart as she drove me past a gift shop full of coffee, t-shirts, and fake machetes. In the pickup area a few people waited with signs. Pops wasn’t one of them. He leaned against a column near the carousel, talking up a woman. His jeans were tight and his cut-off shirt showed off his bulging arms.

I directed my guide to Pops and he pretended to be excited to see me. “Macho!” He hugged me, then quickly spun me around to show me off to the woman he’d been talking to at the carousel. She put a hand on her cheek. “So adorable.”

“I make beautiful kids,” Pops said.

The heat outside slapped me up like a schoolyard bully. Pops led me to a parking garage with paint chipped walls and put his arm around my shoulder like I was a little boy. Normally, I would have shook him off. But he missed me. And it felt nice. I can’t say I didn’t miss him. The way his thick mustache brushed against my face when he hugged me. His stupid jokes. The way he’d sometimes decide to splurge after a big hit, buying me new gear and video games just because. Then there were the things I didn’t miss: his booming voice when he yelled, the thunder after he’d slam our front door, the way Mom cried and smoked all those cigarettes, the heavy knocks at the front door, and the feeling of being on the other side, wondering who it was. We stopped in front of a shiny blue Mustang.

“Te gusta, macho?”

I liked his old tinted out Accord better. It felt like I was in a spaceship. But I didn’t want to hurt Pops’ feelings. He was clearly in a good mood.

“It’s tight,” I said.

“Sí, nene, sí,” he said. “Estamos en PR. If you’re my son, you can’t be some little gringo kid, entiendes?”

“What do you mean, ‘if’?”

He flicked my ear and threw my bags inside. I melted on the blistering seats. When the car turned on I blasted the AC, but Pops immediately turned it off and rolled down the windows.

“Do you pay for gas?” he asked.

I sat in the inferno of my chair. I wondered what was the point of him being a drug dealer if he was going to be such a fucking cheapskate. He might as well have cleaned toilets or stood outside fancy Manhattan buildings like all the other dads I knew.

A cigarette hung from the side of Pop’s mouth and wobbled like an antenna. His gold chain hid in the thicket of his chest hair like a medallion in a wild forest. “Your mom seeing anybody?”

“Not that I know of.” She talked all day about the white doctors at her job, the ones she answered phones for. But only as a fantasy. She wondered out loud sometimes what her life might have been like if she’d met one of those guys and resigned to being their hot Puerto Rican wife, instead of getting knocked up by Pops at 19. Pops put the car in gear, turned around and started to reverse out of the spot. When he was halfway out, he stopped, put the car back in park and pointed his cigarette at me.

“You’d tell me if she was seeing anybody, right?”

I leaned my head on the side of the window, trying, desperately to pick up a gust of wind to cool me off.

“Yes,” I said.

“Sí.”

We pulled up to the McDonald’s just before the city center turned into a maze of small streets. I smiled. Mom never let me eat McDonald’s much, but when I was with Pops, it was what I subsisted off of. Inside, salsa played behind the speakers. The woman at the front of the counter was young and cute and Pops got to flirting immediately.

“Why is someone as beautiful as you working here?”

She responded as you’d imagine. I asked for a Happy Meal and looked at a plastic display showing off the toys I might get. All Lilo & Stitch themed. I stared at the Stitch figurine and prayed for it. Then I realized who I was with.

“I want that one, Pa.”

“Cómo se dice?”

I sighed. “Yo quiero eso.”

“Por favor,” Pops said, pretending for the pretty young thing that he, of all people, cared about fucking manners. Pops ordered nuggets and a soda. He pulled out the thick wad of cash he always seemed to be carrying around. A wad so thick it could knock someone clean out. He peeled off way more bills than the meal cost and winked at the girl, pointing at the Stitch toy. The girl’s smile revealed bright braces. Before we left, she scribbled her number on a paper bag with a pink pen and signed it with a heart. We ate in the car with the windows down. Pops sipped his soda and matched the conga beat coming from the radio with taps on the steering wheel. I devoured the first of my two cheeseburgers. As I started on the second, a man approached my window. His hat looked like it’d been run over a few times and his t-shirt had holes in it. In his hand was an empty large soda cup that he jangled around. He rested his hands on Pop’s car. “Señor, me regalas unos chavitos para comer?” He smelled sour, like the drunks and fiends I was used to seeing in The Bronx. He rattled his cup of change once more and was just about to go into his spiel, when Pops shushed him.

“Cállate, cállate. No más. I don’t want to hear it. Get the fuck away from my car before I shoot you.”

The man was undeterred. He must not have believed Pops. He shook his cup once more. “Por favor, señor . . .”

Pops reached under his seat and pulled out a black pistol. In a split second it was cocked and aimed. “Qué te dije, cabrón? Muevete.”

The man put his hands up and slowly backed away from the car. I bit into my second cheeseburger. When the man had moved on enough to Pops’ liking, he put the gun back under his seat.

“Me cago en tu madre.” He looked over at me. “Never be like that, Javi.”

I scrunched up my cheeseburger wrapper. “What? Homeless?”

He pushed the side of my head with his finger. “No, smartass. A beggar.” He pointed out the window at the man dragging his feet, heading toward another parked car in the lot. “Ese tipo, he’s got no chance. Tú sabes? He goes around feeling sorry for himself instead of taking shit into his own hands. Entiendes? You can never live like that. You don’t feel sorry for yourself. Si te caes, te levantas. Así es. That’s how I live my life. That’s how you need to live yours.” Pops seemed pleased with his speech. He reached into my bag and stole a fry. He looked at his gold watch. “Vamos.”

Pops drove on narrow streets that were theoretically supposed to be two-way streets. I stared up at the electrical wires crisscrossing the sky, creating something like a mosquito net. We pulled up at a faded concrete house by the water wrapped in thick metal gates. A man I didn’t recognize sat out on the patio, rocking in a chair. I never recognized the dudes Pops visited. They always just seemed to appear from the sky. Faceless people who handed him bands of cash and spoke a few mumbled words.

The man scratched his belly and waved us in. Near the entranceway, a little girl sat cross-legged on a Winnie the Pooh blanket playing with Barbies. She was seven or eight tops.

“Juega con ella,” Pops said, depositing me next to her.

“What am I, a babysitter?”

“Cállate.”

I missed the Bronx immediately. Although I had nursed high hopes for this trip on the plane—the mall for new sneakers, maybe a new gold chain, tons of Pokémon cards, maybe a new Gameboy, a beach where I could actually see my toes through the water—I was instantly reminded of what life in Puerto Rico was really like with Pops. Driving from house to house while he conducted business and I was left to interact with random strangers and confront my wack-ass Spanish. I sat on a corner of the girl’s blanket. She gave me a skeptical look. I showed her my Stitch toy. She squinted, then rifled through a bucket and pulled out another Barbie.

“La esposa de el,” she said, in a sing-song voice.

She handed me the Barbie and I held the two toys in my hand, unsure of what to do. I heard a chicken croak and a motorcycle engine pop. Everything felt slow on the island, like God was playing life on half-speed. The girl, annoyed, put her hand on her hip like she was 25. “Que se besen, chico.” In the distance I could hear Pops laughing in a back room. Like an idiot, I brought the toys together in a kiss. The girl rolled her eyes and snatched the toys from me. She brought the lips of Stitch and Barbie together mad hard, but twisted the toys slowly and sensually.

“Así. Bien tranquilo.”

I looked at her stringy arms, tan like a block of dark wood. Bright purple beads were scattered amongst her short braids. I wanted to ask how she knew so much about kissing, but I didn’t know how to say that correctly in Spanish. I was too afraid of making a grammatical mistake and exposing myself as a gringo. So I remained quiet. Eventually, Pops whistled and I felt saved. The girl didn’t look at me when I left, but she made the Barbie give Stitch a peck on the cheek goodbye.

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