Excerpt from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

On her pink-and-gold name tag it said Savarino.

"This is true." I adjusted my glasses. "But I think you'll find me to be an excellent addition to the sales team. First of all, let me tell you that I'm enthusiastic." I stuck out a thumb.

"And I'm hardworking," I said. "I'm detail-oriented, a team player."

I mean, how many more repulsive things could I say?

"I don't know." Savarino looked down at the résumé. Shook her head. And you could tell she was sizing me up, probably thinking that I wasn't cute enough, wondering if customers would buy bras from a dopey-looking girl like that.

Savarino was probably like fifty, but she'd preserved herself so she looked closer to thirty-five. Dark red pin-straight hair that she'd probably been burning with a flat iron for the past seventeen years. And she was a vain woman—the type of woman, you could tell, who'd looked down at those less attractive than she was her whole life. Picture the evil queen in Snow White, except with the illest old-school Brooklyn accent.

The one thing that comforted me was that she was a smoker. And I could smell it, the burnt enamel of her teeth. When she spoke, she wheezed a little bit. And even when she stopped speaking, her breath would creak like a piece of air blowing through an open window. Whenever I felt anxious, I looked at the thin noisy crack between her teeth.

She shrugged and reshuffled a stack of résumés. "I'd really like to do something for you, but…"

Bitch stopped.

And I was thinking, Okay, fine, that's it. I give up. Nobody will ever hire me. I'm done. Let me crawl my broke ass back to Ma's place and babysit Jessica's kid forever. Then just like that, an idea seemed to eclipse the doubt on Savarino's face. The air conditioner in her office coughed and came back to life. "You speak Spanish?"

Shit. "Of course," I lied. Then I looked at her and smiled.

"Your English is pretty good, too, huh? That accent's not even that bad."

Which made me think: Wait, who's the one with the accent? I tried not to look too surprised, though.

After all, there was an opportunity here.

"You know," I said to Savarino. "I learned English at a very young age."


Because I was new to Mariposa's, the more experienced salesgirls (who were sixteen years old and still skipping high school) made me work the shittiest hours. Six to eleven p.m. every weekend. During closing, I'd spend twenty-five minutes untangling drawers of string thongs that became stuck on each other's rhinestones and security tags. If I was lucky, sometimes my teenage bosses put me in the fitting room, where it was possible to sit down in secret without Savarino aggressively whispering into the headset to stand the fuck up. Literally: "Stand the fuck up, Ramirez. What do you think this is?"

Excerpted from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez. Copyright © 2023 by Claire Jimenez. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.