Warnings: Mentions of physical/emotional abuse
Summary: What actually goes down in Lima Heights? And how do they react to one of the toughest girls of all of them coming out of the closet?
"I'm from a part of town called Lima Heights Adjacent. Do you know where that is? It's on the wrong side of the tracks." Santana
.***.
Santana had always lived in Lima Heights Adjacent. When she was three, she'd been using chalk to cover her two-by-four-foot front stoop in an inaccurate picture of Pooh Bear when a couple of five-year-olds stomped on her chalk and called her "a piece of shit" for crying. She never cried again, not in front of anyone from Lima Heights.
When she was six, her bike, which her mama had scrimped and saved to buy for her, was stolen. They'd cut the lock to get to a purple flowered bicycle. Santana didn't cry, but when she saw Carla Garcia riding it down the street, she launched herself at her and took her down, bike and all. It was the first time she'd ever won a fight.
When she was nine, she joined a loose group of friends that might have been called a "gang" on the local news stations. They didn't think of themselves as a gang, just a group of young kids trying to defend themselves against other groups of young kids. They were the tiburones, the sharks. She liked the name. She liked being a shark. Her abuela, while cursing her out during the commercials on her telenovelas, told her never to be a guppy, to always stay a tiburon, and no one could hurt her.
One of her fellow tiburones was a boy named Eduardo, who taught her how to punch someone so it hurt them more than it hurt her. When she was ten, she and Eduardo stole two Hershey bars from the local convenience store to celebrate Eduardo's birthday (god knew his family, with six other mouths to feed, wasn't going to remember.) He kissed her while they sat on the edge of the overpass, eating the chocolate. She felt something burst in her stomach - the bubble of childhood was gone.
"You know," Eduardo said, leaning back to look at her, "You'd look really pretty if you dressed like a girl."
"Callate el osico, gordoto." Santana spat, even though Eduardo wasn't really that fat. She ran to Maria's house - Maria was the unofficial leader of the tiburones. At fourteen, she was big, fast, and would curse out anyone who looked her in the eye. She was also known as the slut of Lima Heights. Santana adored her.
"Okay, perrita, escuchame. You want the boys to look at you, and not just that babozo Eduardo? You take these," she thrust shirts into Santana's arms, "And get different pants. Black. Tight. You use that booty that is the only things we Latinas get and you show off whatever you get up here -" she gestured at Santana's upper body, undeveloped at the age of ten. "Well, what you'll get eventually. Your mama show you how to put on makeup?"
"Mi abuela says that only whores wear makeup." Santana said slowly, staring at the vibrant shades of lipstick and eye shadow Maria was holding.
"Well, mi abuela said God would kill me if I kissed a boy." Maria muttered, unscrewing the cap on the eye shadow, "But we both know that won't happen, right perrita?" Santana blushed and let Maria show her how to make boys fall in love with her body.
Two years later, Maria was knocked up and the tiburones more or less disbanded. Santana didn't need them anymore by then. She got out of the shitty elementary school that Lima Heights filtered into and had moved onto the regional middle school, which had the advantage of having more boys. They all followed her ass wherever she walked. They were twelve.
By high school she was at the top of the heap in her neighborhood. After getting the obligatory cuts and scrapes, after proving she was always, at heart, a shark, she gained the respect of even the most fierce of gangs. Mostly because she had sex with all of their leaders in exchange for them staying the hell away from her. She thought it was a pretty good deal, especially if she wasn't stupid about it. Her mother had learned from Maria and gotten Santana on the pill as early as the doctors said it was safe. All the girls around her were using their bodies in exchange for protection, companionship, food. Why shouldn't she?
Joining cheerleading was the logical next step. All the boys in the high school already ogled her. Why shouldn't their fathers, brothers? Why shouldn't the opposing teams? She kind of liked feeling their eyes on her. At least then she knew her outside was beautiful.
Then things got weird.
It happened some time after she joined the Glee club and started thinking that she was more than a nice body and a cheerleading scholarship. She remembered that she could sing, something she hadn't really done since she was little and her mother had forced her into her church's choir. She started hanging out with the boys, and Puck, who wasn't quite Lima Heights Adjacent but was definitely not on the right side of the tracks, had told her she was beautiful. He was probably lying. It was probably one of those things boys said when they fucked. But Santana had felt a rush of pleasure all the same, especially when it was over and he lay next to her and touched her hair and told her again and again how beautiful she was.
And even before that there was that...thing...with Brittney. She loved her Britt more than anyone else in the world, because when she moved that middle school and all the boys were staring at her, Brittney was staring at her too, and asked if she wanted to have a sleepover. It was a nice sleepover. They braided each other's hair and watched Austin Powers movies. They didn't talk about boys or sex or stealing. They talked about school, and their parents, and their feelings. Brittney was the first person, maybe in Santana's whole life, who'd ever cared about her feelings.
That was the heart and soul of it, wasn't it? Brittney had cared and Santana had let herself care and she'd fallen down a slippery slope until she was hopelessly in love with a girl.
.***.
They didn't know she was a lesbian until the commercial ran, because Santana wasn't stupid enough to tell them. There was being proud of who you were and there was being just plain dumb. Announcing to Lima Heights that she was no longer into dick and, according to most liberals, had probably never been that into it in the first place. Apparently she was born this way. Santana couldn't tell you one way or the other if that much was true - she'd definitely liked making out with boys, had felt something when Puck acted aloof and asked her out, had felt something when Eduardo had kissed her on the overpass all those years ago, his mouth tasting like chocolate. But now she would be 100% team gay if it meant being with Brittney.
A week after Sue had shown her the commercial, which was a week after doing Adele and a week after slapping Finn and a week after realizing her life was going to change, Blaine dropped her off near the tracks. (yes, there were literal train tracks, splitting the town in two. how cliche was that?) Looking at the ex-Warbler, you'd never know he lived so close to her side of town, but she was grateful for his proximity, especially when Glee didn't get out until after dark, as it was wont to do a week before a big competition.
"You want me to drive to your house?" It was the same offer Blaine made every time, and Santana always shook her head. Everyone and their mother knew Blaine was gay, but more than that his car was - well, not new, but shiny, and Lima Heights liked shiny things. "At least let me walk you home."
"I don't need a fairy to light my way, thanks." Santana said, and Blaine's eyes darted away from her face, a blush creeping up his neck. And he liked to claim that words didn't hurt. The resident bitch sighed looking at him - he really was only trying to help. "Look, if you walk me home, then I'll have to walk you back to your car, and you'll have to walk me home...you see the endless cycle that can arise from this?"
"I can take care of myself." Blaine said, "I -"
"Started Dalton's branch of Fight Club. I know. Finn told me how you got all Brad Pitt with him in the locker room. And yet you still have bruises on your arms." She nodded to the band of mottled blue skin sticking on his wrist and Blaine pushed down his sleeve. "You can be my knight in shining armor when you can tell your dad to stop whaling on you every night." Santana got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked away without looking back.
There's this law in the universe that states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And the world is nothing but law-abiding (also, slightly sarcastic.) So it would of course be the night that Santana turns down company on the ten-minute walk from the tracks to her home that she gets accosted by people who, yesterday, she would have called her old friends.
As you grew up in Lima Heights, gangs would split and merge, splinter and splice throughout the years. Now Eduardo was the leader of the new tiburones and he stood under the light of a streetlamp, looking nothing like the pudgy little kid she'd kissed. Now he looked lean, and mean, and dangerous.
"Hola, Eduardo." Santana could feel people moving from out of the shadows, surrounding her. She turned slowly, hoping no one could hear her heart slamming in her chest. "Jorge. Oscar. Fabio." More and more boys, most she knew, some new faces - young faces. All male.
"Rumor has it you turned out to be a lesbo." He moved closer. Santana could smell the cigarettes he'd been smoking, the alcohol he'd drunk. "What, you forgetting all those nights we spent with you on my polla?"
"¡Que te pires, gilipollas!" Santana spat, moving to go around him. When he grabbed her arm, she spun and used the palm of her hand to push his nose into his skull, breaking it in three places.
...Or, at least, that's what she meant to do. Another boy darted out of the circle, lightning-fast, and grabbed her arm before she could begin to swing it. She stomped on his foot, kicked Eduardo where it hurts, and tried to run.
One, two, three boys caught her, wrestled her against a pole. She shouted at them, every curse in every dialect spoken in Lima Heights. Spanish, Mexican, Columbian, Puerto Rican all came flying out in rapid succession. The boys laughed and held her tighter. One tried to cover her mouth with his hand and she bit it. The blood ran hot and metallic down her throat. The boy she'd bit swore and slapped her face so hard that for a heartbeat the world went white.
"Not her face, mamonazo!" Eduardo shouted, shoving one of the boys away, "We want her pretty, don't we?"
They were going to rape her. Ten, twelve boys were going to rape her, humiliate her, violate her, and she couldn't fight them all. She started screaming then - a shrill cry that even people who heard screams every night couldn't ignore.
"Shut her up!"
"Guarra!"
"Shut up, bitch!" She felt something long and cool pushed against her neck, trace a line down to her bare stomach. A knife. "Or I'll shut you up."
Santana was sure she'd seen this somewhere. A movie, or a television show. She remembered thinking that, given the choice between rape and being stabbed, she'd go down fighting. She'd go down screaming.
So she screamed again, and Eduardo, who she'd once stolen a candy bar with to celebrate his birthday, who'd been her first kiss, stabbed her in the stomach.
The boys dispersed after that. Or was it after the car came barrelling towards them, someone leaning on the horn? Santana didn't know. She'd already fallen to the ground, and the world was a blur of sounds and voices. She'd always thought being stabbed would hurt like hell, and it did, but it wasn't the pain that made her gasp. It was honest-to-God fear. She could die now. Die in Lima Heights like a dozen other kids she knew, a victim of gang violence, and they'd turn her death into a lesson and force her into a pile of statistics and she'd remain dead.
And she'd never really gotten to have a girlfriend.
The person who was approaching her was definitely male. One of the boys coming back, realizing that a bleeding body is still a warm body? But when the wiry arms wrapped around her she could hear the voice hitch, high and scared. Well, if it had to be a boy who found her, she was glad this boy wasn't into girls. She couldn't stand another scumbag touching her, not today.
"Santana! Oh, Santana, what'd they do to you? I called an ambulance, it's on its way. Did they -? Santana, just nod or..."
"I was only gone for five minutes," Santana muttered. And what a long five minutes it had been. "Do you think they had time?"
Blaine's relief was palpable. He pulled her body onto his lap and put one hand over the gash in her belly and she gasped, bucked her hips against the pain. "Shh...I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. It'll be okay. You'll be okay. I'm so sorry."
They sat like that, Blaine holding her and whispering meaningless things, Santana trying not to black out, for two minutes, three. "Should I call your mom?"
"No..." Santana gasped. Not until they had some good news to tell her. "Britt -"
Blaine nodded and pressed down harder on the wound that was dripping a puddle into the street. Santana blacked out then, sinking into the blissful darkness. Her last thought was that, if someone had to be sitting here with her, holding her, telling her it would be okay, she wished it could have been Brittney.
.***.
this one was prompted by literarylesbian37, who wanted something to go down in lima heights. she wanted santana's girl to save her, but we gave her a gay guy instead.
sorry for all the spanish. we thought that was probably how they talked on the "other side of the tracks." mostly they're curse words.
if you have an idea for a story where everything goes wrong, drop us a line.