10: Her Sin
Beneath the Weight of Water | 1980s Mexican American Women’s Fiction
Previously:
Lucia agreed to spend the day at the beach with Matteo, even though water still carried an old terror her body had never forgotten. His promise not to push her made the invitation feel possible, but not safe. As her world opened, with Matteo, with Sheri, and with the girl she was trying to become, the barrio began watching.
New to the Serial? Start Here | Need the previous chapter? 9: Between the Shore and the Sea
Lucia
To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The swing creaked beneath Lucia as she finished The Call of the Wild. Buck survived by trusting no one. Each line of Buck’s loneliness and distrust felt like it had stolen something private. Yet Buck had loved again, and death had taken everything. Her chest tightened, old losses cutting through. She opened White Nights, Matteo’s favorite book. Love was for those who could afford to fall. Not her.
“Wow! You look so different!” Penelope cut through the fall afternoon.
Once, they’d shared books like secrets. The best parts underlined, pages dog-eared, giggling at scenes neither of them were old enough to understand. Now that same voice grated against her nerves, too loud, too close.
“First, the hair and now, makeup! Everyone is talking.” Gossip was like breathing to her, and to all the women in the barrio. Even in church, the gossip drifted through the sacred liturgy.
“It’s nothing.” Lies were safer.
“You look great. Now we just need to change how you dress.”
“No, too expensive.” She forced a smile, but her body leaned toward the front door.
“So, what’s brought about the change?”
“When Sofia showed me how to braid my hair, I realized I need to begin competing for internships.”
“Who is Sofia?” Her question loaded with curiosity and intent landed between them.
“A friend’s sister.” Another truth tucked away in a lie. She twisted a loop between her fingers, the pattern of the braid grounding her.
“Do you want to learn how to do a French braid so you can change things up?” Penelope sat beside her, swing tilted.
“Sure.” The motion recalled their last argument.
“Don’t sell yourself short by becoming a ‘super immigrant,’ Lucia,” Penelope had shouted that day, her voice carrying up and down the street. “You feed their power, running in circles, chasing after the American Dream. One you can’t catch because they keep moving the goal post.”
Lucia had no time to indulge in ideals. She had to wipe down tables and count tips to help her grandmother while Penelope vacationed at her family’s beachfront house in Ensenada. After summer, the silent gulf between them had only deepened.
“Scheduling at Collwood is a mess. Hope you got your classes.” She opened the book on her lap and pushed the swing, hoping the motion would soothe her as she searched for a polite escape.
“Who the fuck taught you to put on makeup?” Ellie cut in, voice slicing through the air. “Wannabe white girl one day, india the next.”
Lucia hated how lighter-skinned Mexicans used the word “india” like a weapon, as if any of them were safe from being called “spics” or “beaners.” Her father’s picture flashed in her mind. He had been taller than most Mexicans, his features more like his French father’s, but his skin golden-brown like his Wixárika mother. Lucia was tired of being asked to erase him when she saw him in her own reflection. It was time to take ownership of her identity.
“I look like me.”
Color flooded Penelope’s face and neck. “What’s your damn problem? Lucia looks great.”
“Don’t you know who you are?” Ellie had suddenly become the barrio’s self-appointed expert on cultural authenticity.
Heat surged through her, not shame but conviction. She straightened her spine, her vision sharp around the edges. “If it mattered that much, you would’ve offered to teach me.”
Penelope’s face froze, like someone watching a car crash in real time. She shook her head in warning.
Even as Lucia’s pulse raced, she refused to heed Penelope’s warning. The air between them thickened. Her dark brown eyes locked on Ellie’s. “But you didn’t, did you?”
“We don’t have the same complexion.” Ellie shrugged because they all knew her alabaster skin and green eyes made her untouchable. She wasn’t just the most beautiful girl wherever she went, but also the only one who was White-presenting.
“Not the point, is it?” No matter how she changed, she would always be too brown. She wished they’d leave her alone to read her damn book, to breathe, to exist.
“If it mattered to you,” Ellie retorted with a smug smile. “You would have asked for help.”
Adrenaline surged through Lucia’s body, hands tingling as they clenched into fists. Her voice cut clean through the silence. “Go fuck yourself.”
The words hung there, solid in a way they had never been. Ellie’s smug smile froze for a second. Lucia had done it. Finally shut her up. Her rejection made her feel she’d claimed her space. She had stopped making herself small.
Almost imperceptibly, the expression on Ellie’s face changed. With predatory precision, her gaze moved over Lucia, pausing where it would cut the deepest, on her small breasts, her pear-shaped hips.
“Someone has forgotten her place.”
Lucia’s skin crawled, but she didn’t flinch. She wouldn’t back down this time. Maybe it was a small battle, but she had to start somewhere. This was it. She was determined to keep her confidence and dignity, her new sense of self. Hands on her hips, she didn’t blink. In the sting of her heartbeat, she found the answer.
“I decide my place.”
Ellie smiled, taunting and triumphant. “Really? Bruno makes you his bitch anytime he wants.”
Lucia’s jaw ached from years of pushing down snide remarks, each one trapped behind clenched teeth. Now they surged at once, boiling over too fast. Her hand moved before she could reason. The crack of her palm against Ellie’s cheek echoed loud and final. Lucia gasped. “No more!”
Her words hung between them, making the air too thick to breathe. The porch tilted beneath her. Her hand dropped to her side. Tears broke loose. What had she done? Self-control was all she’d ever had.
Penelope stepped between them as if they were about to fight. Ellie shoved her aside and grabbed Lucia, words spilling in a frantic rush. The sounds crashed over her, too loud, too fast. Penelope’s voice tangled with Ellie’s until they merged into a single frequency that drilled through her eardrum. Ellie’s perfume burned her throat. The world pressed too close, shrinking to noise and pressure. Her pulse hammered behind her eyes.
Thoughts clawed for space. She needed to pull herself together. Breathe. Think. Reason. Ellie continued talking, fast, faster: explaining, apologizing, justifying.
Through the chaos, Lucia remembered Matteo’s voice, the way it carried a quiet weight, deep and steady, carved into him over time. There was warmth in it, but not the kind that let everyone in. It was the low and steady heat of embers. The sound steadied her breathing, anchored her to her skin. It wasn’t wrong to fight back.
She tore herself free and turned without a word. The door slammed behind her; sharper than the crack of her hand.
Thank you for reading
Beneath the Weight of Water.
Have you ever had a moment when keeping the peace no longer felt safe?
Next Chapter
11: Dignity Recall on July 4
Previous Chapter
9: Between the Shore and the Sea
We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea… we are going back from whence we came.
~President John F. Kennedy
Lucia’s fear of water breaks open at the shore, and Matteo’s patience tempts her to trust the safety she has spent her life refusing.
Author’s note
This chapter turns on the first moment Lucia physically defends herself.
There is a specific terror in the breath before a victim fights back. Not courage. Not even anger. Terror. Something inside the body understands that another line is about to be crossed, and if it is, something essential will not survive it.
So the body answers.
For Lucia, that answer does not feel clean. It carries the bullying, the waterboarding of incessant jokes and insults that would not let her breathe, and the physical pain she once believed could not get worse, until it did. Most of all, it carries the horror of being forced to take strike after strike alone while being called friend and family.
Then, almost as quickly, the fear turns inward. If she can strike back, what does that make her?
That is one of abuse’s cruelest afterlives.
It teaches victims to fear their own self-defense.
If Lucia claiming her place has you wondering what it will cost her, subscribe for new chapters as they are released.
Copyright © 2026 Angelica Thorne
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