People Like You - Lamine Yamal

Prologue

Barcelona at night smells like spilled beer, shitty rotting fruit, and cigarette smoke that never quite leaves your lungs. The city is alive, sure, but it's a hungry kind of alive, the kind that wants to chew you up and spit you out before dawn. Sometimes I walk past people's windows and I smell a faint scent of jasmine, and it feels nice. Nice when everything else smells toxic and vile.

I'm seventeen, and I moved here alone because my parents didn't want me anymore. Kicked me out like I was garbage. "Get your shit and leave," my dad said, like I was some bad debt. So I took a one-way ticket to Barcelona with a cracked phone and a suitcase too heavy for what I had. I always told my friends, the ones I had anyways, that I wanted to come here.

My apartment looks like a storage unit someone forgot to clean. Four walls painted the color of sadness and this run down yellow-white color, a mattress on the floor with a blanket threadbare from a hundred washes, and a single window that opens only halfway, facing a brick wall plastered with graffiti I can't even read. The air is thick and still, no AC, just the buzzing of a ceiling fan that sounds like it's about to give out. It's cold in the winters, and blazing hot in the summer.

I can't afford much else. The electricity gets cut off sometimes, every five hours, and when it does, the dark wraps around me like a cold chain. I sit on the floor and listen to the distant sounds. Footsteps, shouting, the crack of a bottle somewhere down below. And I wonder if anyone else feels this lost. If I'm as alone as I think I am.

The diner where I work is a neon-lit cage on the edge of Las Ramblas. It's called Frank's, though I doubt anyone named Frank has ever set foot inside. The uniform they make me wear is a joke. A blue short-sleeved button-down shirt that clings to my body and a blue and white checkered skirt so short it barely covers my hips. Every time I bend over to clear tables, I feel eyes on me, hungry and unapologetic. The white sneakers they gave me are supposed to be "comfortable," but after twelve hours on my feet, they feel like knives stabbing into my arches.

I clock in at 5 PM, already dreading the long, hot shift ahead. The diner fills with tourists who can't understand my broken Spanish, with locals who're too drunk or too tired to care. I'm already sweating by 7 PM, horny old men staring straight at me while I just suffer. Some of them smile like they want something more than just food. I smile back anyway, because I don't want trouble, and I survive off their tips.

At 1:30 AM, I lock the doors, count the day's tips which barely cover my metro card, and walk the five blocks back home alone. Hoodie up, shoulders hunched. The streets are quieter but not safe. Sometimes I hear footsteps behind me. Fast, slow, uncertain. But when I look back, there's nothing but shadows. It freezes my heart every time, even though it's happened again and again.

Sometimes I stop at the corner where the bus stop glows under the streetlight. There's this massive billboard across from it — one of those perfume ads with a model half-naked, hair slicked back, lips parted like they've never tasted struggle. Above that, there's always some new poster of a footballer — fresh-faced, rich, glowing with the kind of life I can't even imagine. Sometimes it's the same boy for weeks. Clean jersey. Diamond earring. Gold watch. A smirk like he knows the whole world is watching.

I stare at them too long. I can't help it. I always wonder how someone gets so lucky. Not just rich. Untouchable. I wonder what it feels like to know the lights will never turn off on you. To have people scream your name for no reason but existing.

People like me don't end up on billboards. We clean up after the people who do.

Back in my apartment, the heat hits me like a wall. No air conditioning. No fans. Just sweat and silence. I strip down and lay flat on the mattress, the tile cold beneath my skin. The ceiling stares back at me. Cracked, peeling paint. I count the cracks like prayers. I count them to sleep.

I think about my parents. The way my mom looked away when I tried to talk. The way my dad slammed the door so hard I thought the walls would shake. I don't miss them. Not really. But I miss feeling safe. I miss having somewhere to go.

If there's one thing that's dangerous in this world, its not hate, it's apathy. Hate is closer to love than indifference, because you have to love to dislike someone to hate them.

Some nights, I cry. Soft tears that make little trails down my cheeks but don't wake me up. They feel comfortable sometimes. Like a warm hug on my cheeks. I cry because I'm lonely, because the city doesn't care about me, because I'm scared. But I don't let the tears fall too long. They run out after a while.

And still, somewhere beneath the sweat and the exhaustion, beneath the noise and the loneliness, there's a tiny flicker. A thought I catch when I'm brushing my teeth or wiping down a sticky table. Maybe this is just the beginning.

It can't get worse than this anyways.