This story is unusual in that it’s told in the first-person plural: we. A group of teenage girls hang out with a slightly older girl, Sylvia, whom they both admire and hate. “If we discovered a new drug she had already overdosed on the same substance. If we discovered a band we liked, she had already got over her fandom of the same group.” When Sylvia takes up with a young man they all fancy it becomes a horror story, a kind of Argentine Carrie. Enríquez is brilliant at evoking the inchoate power of adolescent female sexuality.
First published in English in The New Yorker, December 2020, available to read here. Collected in the UK in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta 2021
A Personal Anthology 