Signal to Noise (2 page)

“I remember you looked like a marshmallow in your
quinceañera
dress.”

“Oh, well. It was a while back.”

Meche put her earbuds back in and pressed play, hoping that was the last bit of chatter she would have to endure. She tried to stare ahead and focus on Nina’s voice, but despite her attempt not to look, she craned her head and glanced at Sebastian’s building as they drove past it.

She wanted to know if the curtains were blue.

They were green.

This made her feel relieved. Like the building was saying, “Hey Meche, it’s not 1988. You are here. In the present. Relax.”

There was movement by the curtain and, for a moment, Meche thought Sebastian was about to pop up, in the window, and she’d be looking straight at him. The prospect of seeing him there, framed by the old window, caused her to panic, as though it wasn’t just some guy she’d known as a teenager, but the damn shark from
Jaws
.

Nobody looked out the window and Meche let out her breath slowly.

Three blocks later Jimena parked the car. Meche pulled her luggage from the trunk while Jimena looked for the keys to the building, which were sitting somewhere in the abysmal depths of her huge purse. After a small eternity, Jimena pulled out her key chain and pushed the heavy front door open.

Meche dragged her bags into the hallway, stopping to glance at the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe sitting on its niche with the plastic flowers and the bare light bulb.

The long, dark hallway led towards a wide staircase. Meche rested a hand on the bannister. This building looked the same. The changes that had dotted the neighbourhood had not reached inside. Stepping up would mean stepping into a replica of her past. She was afraid of bumping into the ghost of her dad and slipping into bitter memories.

But hadn’t she done that already?

Jimena went past her, up the steps and turned to look at her.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Meche said, hauling her suitcase.

What the hell. She was here.

Mexico City, 1988

M
ECHE DID NOT
do sports. She resented the uniform they had to wear each Tuesday and Thursday: short white shorts and white shirt. As though they were trapped in the 1950s. Had no one heard of pants and sweatshirts in the intervening decades? Besides, she had no desire to chase after a ball, like an eager puppy.

As a result, Meche tried to spend as much time as she could evading gym class. When she was forced to participate in some group activity, she stood at the back, listened to her Walkman. Her classmates knew not to pass her the ball. A tacit understanding—Meche was invisible—took place.

When the students gathered in the central patio of the school and put up the nets Meche grabbed a cassette and began listening to Serú Girán singing Canción de Alicia en el País, about the dictatorship in Argentina. She had reached the part where the walruses have vanished when a ball hit her smack in the face.

Meche pressed her hands against her nose and heard the unmistakable, loud laughter of Teofilo spreading across the play yard.

Squinting, feeling her face tingling with pain, Meche stared at the boy.

Meche had a lot of little hates nestled in her heart, but she reserved the biggest for Teofilo, the bully of the class. He was tall, fat and liked to slap the asses of all the girls in his class. When he tried to slap Meche’s ass, she told him to go to hell and he had made it his mission that fall to get back at her.

One day she found her Math book had been defaced with a big red marker. The pages had been marked with UGLY WHORE. Someone stole her sweater and dumped it in a puddle. She earned herself a new nickname: Unibrow. Meche had no proof this was the work of Teofilo, but she knew. The evidence was in his smug grin.

She knew perfectly well that Teofilo had done this on purpose and she knew perfectly well there was nothing she could do to get back at him.

“Are you alright?” Daniela asked.

Meche nodded. “Yeah.”

Meche wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She tasted copper and rage.

M
ECHE SLAMMED THE
door to her room and fell back on the bed, the cool compress pressed against her face. She tried for serenity because there was no benefit in reliving the whole episode. But her stomach was an ugly black pit which had to be filled with something.

She filled it with music.

Meche put her dad’s copy of The Doors’ debut album on the portable record player. The cymbals clanged and Break on Through bounced against the walls as she stared at the ceiling thinking about Teofilo. Thinking how much she hated him. Thinking how much she wished she could hurt him.

But really, what could she do?

Meche could not appeal to a higher power. She could not seek assistance from the teachers or her parents or the other kids.

Meche didn’t have anything except the record sleeves strewn around her bed as she pictured that big bully.

Teofilo had to be stopped.

In a corner of her room, the thumb-tacked poster of Jim Morrison agreed.

So she played the record and she tried to believe. Tried to hold on to that slim thread of hope that something was going to happen soon. Something good. Because, damn it, something
had
to happen.

Jim Morrison yelled “break on through” and she pictured Teofilo breaking, shattering like a piece of glass. She imagined her foot slamming on his arm and the arm crumbling like a sugar cookie.

When the song finished playing she got up, moved the tone-arm and began playing it again. She turned the volume up and the room vibrated. She felt very tired all of a sudden, as though this great weight had descended upon her, crushing her chest. Meche closed her eyes.

M
ONDAY.
H
OMEWORK DONE.
Heavy textbooks stuffed inside the backpack. White socks—which looked yellow—on. Meche kissed her grandma goodbye—her mother had already left for the pharmacy, her dad was sleeping after a late night of drinking—and headed to school.

She took a short cut instead of her usual route because she did not feel like talking to Sebastian. She did not feel like talking to anyone. There was still a bitterness in her stomach and she felt like nursing her wounds alone, to the tune of her cassettes. She was tired and irritated, dark circles around her eyes a quiet testimony to her unpleasant weekend.

So she walked to school by herself, feet shuffling slowly towards their destination.

Around eleven, she encountered Teofilo on the school’s main staircase. She was coming down and he was going up.

He didn’t see her. He was busy chatting with his friends. Meche felt like slamming his head against the wall and beating him senseless. She gripped her Walkman and flipped the cassette.

And then, just then, Teofilo slipped. There was no reason why he should slip: no obstacle, nothing at all. But his feet stumbled, as if hitting an invisible barrier. It was just as she had been picturing it all weekend: he simply tumbled down the stairs. Bam! Slipped, fell at a weird angle and suddenly he was splayed on the floor, whining like a baby. A big asshole like that, just bawling his eyes out.

She watched him, crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, his notebooks lying all around him on the floor, and realized he had broken his arm.

His friends tried to help him up.

Meche stomped over one of the open notebooks, leaving her footprint upon Teofilo’s homework.

She chuckled. A few minutes later as she was walking to Arts and Crafts, she realized it had not been a coincidence. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

It was the record’s fault.

M
ECHE RUSHED DOWN
the hallway, her notebook pressed against her chest. She went into the bathroom and leaned close to a mirror, staring at her reflection, trying to see if there was a visible change. Did magic change you?

The mirror was old and had a thin crack near the bottom. It reflected the pea-green sink which matched the tiles. It revealed a teenager, long hair neatly pulled back in a ponytail and smeared in place with a generous amount of lemon juice and hair gel. It showed her slightly rumpled navy school uniform with the gold buttons. It did not, however, provide proof of any great psychic or magical powers.

She had not sprouted an extra finger or changed her eye colour. She was Meche. The same Meche who had walked the one dozen blocks between home and school that morning, plaid skirt hitting her below the knee, an egg
torta
tucked in her knapsack for lunch, three yellow pencils and a blue pen tucked in a pencil case.

Meche stared at her reflection for a long time, ignoring the bell which indicated a change of classes.

Three girls walked into the bathroom, chatting and giggling together. Isadora Galván and her two hierophants. They gave her a weird look, like it was some bizarre occurrence to run into her even though they were all in the same grade. School girls went to the bathroom in packs. Meche only had Daniela and Sebastian, and she couldn’t giggle outside the stalls while Sebastian peed, so her pack was immediately nonexistent.

Which reminded her that she needed to find Daniela.

She walked out and headed to the second floor, trying to poke her head through the window and see if Daniela was in Typing.

Daniela was sitting at the other end of the room. The machines went ding-ding clang-clang as the girls bent over the keys. Old Miss Viridiana sat half-asleep behind her desk, her hands folded over her tummy.

Meche waved to her. Daniela did not see her.

“Dani. Psst.”

Daniela was busy looking at what she was typing.

Meche ripped a piece of paper from her notebook, balled it up and tossed it at Daniela. It hit her on the head. Daniela turned around.

“Hey,” Meche said.

Daniela moved towards the window, glancing at Miss Viridiana to make sure she was still half-asleep.

“Why aren’t you in class?” she asked.

“Teofilo just broke his arm.”

“How?”

“He fell down the stairs.”

“Is he with the nurse? Is he alright?”

“Who cares?” Meche said. “I think I just discovered something cool.”

“What?”

“Magic.”

Real magic, the kind grandmother talked about. Her father did not believe grandma’s wild tales of shape-changing witches and amulets which could heal the sick. Meche, however, was fascinated by this stuff.

“Are you and Sebastian talking about weird stuff again?” Daniela asked, wrinkling her nose.

“No. This doesn’t have anything to do with that.”

“I don’t like it when you talk about that devil-worshipper.”

“Oh, my god, Aleister Crowley was not a devil-worshipper.”

“Mercedes Vega.”

Shit. Meche turned, trying to don her most innocent expression.

Principal Estrada was a thin, unpleasant woman. She dyed her hair blonde and wore a grey, buttoned up sweater every day of the week. She enjoyed patrolling the hallways, ordering the girls who had folded their skirt in order to show more leg to pull the skirts down, ordering others to wipe the lipstick from their faces, telling the boys to tuck their shirts and cut their hair. When she couldn’t catch you committing an infraction, she’d make one up. Like, “Don’t stare at me so oddly, Vega,” or, “Why are you walking funny, Vega?”

Sebastian called her Frankenstrada behind her back and she did kind of have a resemblance to Boris Karloff, what with the square-shaped head and the general stiffness.

Estrada glared at Meche, her thin eyebrows arched with contempt.

“What class are you supposed to be in?”

“Arts and Crafts.”

“And why aren’t you in Arts and Crafts?”

“I had to pee.”

“What, do you have the bladder of a two-year-old? You were hanging out by the bathrooms an hour ago.”

Meche did not understand how Estrada knew the comings and goings of all students but she did. And, indeed, Meche had been hanging out by the bathrooms just an hour ago.

“Get yourself to your classroom this instant.”

“Yes, Miss Estrada,” she muttered.

It was not like anything exciting was going to happen in Arts and Crafts. They were supposedly making papier-mâché sculptures that week—
alebrijes
, bizarre creatures from Mexican folklore, part bird, part lizard and part whatever you wanted—but Professor Ortega liked to drone on about Art and quickly lost his train of thought, which meant they did precious few crafts. At least it wasn’t Home Economy.

Meche went down the stairs, crossing the patio. Like any decent Mexican school, Queen Victoria had an interior square where the students could gather for recess. Most of the classrooms were located on the north side of this square in a structure that resembled a big box of Kleenex with holes, which some idiot with a desire to create prisons had built in the 70s. To the east there were the great metal double-doors which allowed access to the school and Don Fermin—the school guard who made sure nobody left the premises—sleeping on his stool. There was really very little need for Fermin. If any students wanted to escape the school they could follow the wall towards the west side and climb it at an angle hidden by a clump of trees, which passed as their version of nature among the cement.

Also to the west was another, smaller gate which connected the junior high and high school to the primary school.

To the south was what had once been the original Queen Victoria in the 1940s: a great, old Mexican house, three stories high. It had housed an all-girls contingent before mixed education became fashionable among the middle class. Now it was where the school’s offices sat. This was also where the Arts and English classes took place.

Meche trotted up the stairs and slipped in the back, sitting next to Sebastian. He was drawing a skull on his desk, carefully decorating the teeth with his black marker. The teacher had begun to talk about form and meaning, which meant they could whisper in peace for at least another fifteen minutes.

“I thought you weren’t coming.”