Hold up. I take things too personally? Is there a way to turn off your heart? Teach me then, Mr. Hayes. Tell me, did anyone tell that girl to turn off her heart? Did you? I didn’t think so.
What? Yes, I know the monarch eats milkweed. My mom puts some out for the butterflies in our garden. Did you know that milkweed is poisonous to people, but not to the monarca? It’s true. You can look it up.
Use it as fuel? Like, take the words Laura thought would hurt me and instead use them to fuel me and become the monarca? I see what you’re saying, I do. But can I ask you something? I’m not trying to get all deep or argumentative, but why do Mexican American girls like me have to eat this poison at all? Is this the only way to become a glorious monarch? That seems unfair. Really messed up.
How much will I have to take in? What poison do white girls have to drink to become better people? Or are they just born to become butterflies? Must be nice.
Do you believe I’m a monarca, Mr. Hayes?
You do? Thanks. You’re not so bad after all. Pilar always said that you’re reasonable.
I think this talk has helped. I’m not going to forget where I come from and where I can go. I won’t be the poison. I choose to be the monarca.
Just one more thing, Mr. Hayes. Do you really have to suspend me?
WARNING BELLS
by ANNA MERIANO
Five minutes after she finishes yelling, Mom comes back into the kitchen. “Well,” she huffs, “what are you pouting about?”
I guess that’s what breaks the numb feeling in my legs and sends me stumbling to my room, where I can curl up on the floor and finally cry. I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep. My thoughts don’t fit in my head, and my breaths don’t fit in my chest. I don’t know how long I lie there, clutching my hands together, before I give up and let them go.
It’s just scratches, I tell myself, watching the faint white lines turn red on the pinkie side of my curled fist. It’s not like I have to call any hotlines or anything. The pain is already dulling, and I dig the fingernail of my left thumb into the largest scratch until it throbs again. It’s nothing, really.
I know better than to trust myself, though.
It was never a question of who I would live with. I’ve spent a few nights at my dad’s new apartment, but it smells like dust and disinfectant and hallway cigarettes, and I can never sleep there. Besides, Dad is an extrovert. He comes from a huge family; he likes his hunting trips and summer adult soccer league and the army of tiny middle school jocks he coaches after school. He never knew what to do with his one quiet daughter except play with me when I was fun and hand me off to Mom when I wasn’t.
Mom was yelling about my grades, but it isn’t really about grades. It’s about proving that I’m her daughter, that I’m doing everything her way, that I’m following her values. Like everything else, it’s really about Dad.
My grades aren’t even bad. I’m passing everything. Ms. Delgado just got pissy when I stopped turning in my essays. And I guess I used to be a try-hard, turning everything in a week early and a page longer than it was supposed to be, so now she’s trying to “remotivate” me. You’d think an English teacher would know that’s not a real word.
I’m so tired of Ms. Delgado thinking she’s changing the lives of all the Latinas in her class just because she assigns Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison instead of Jane Austen—like we’re not all skimming the SparkNotes either way. She talks about her “abuela the immigrant” to try to connect with us, but my grandparents are from Texas and California, and anyway, it’s all just a scam to get us to write our essays.
I stopped writing essays because I was tired of the way she smiled at me when she handed them back, and the scribbled purple-pen comments saying that the world Needs My Voice in these trying political times. Because that’s what’s been missing from the world—a ninth grader from Houston telling people that using hate crimes as a basis for your government and ignoring the rising sea level is bad, actually.
I’m so tired of these trying political times, and I’m tired of trying to care about the newest protests and the hashtags and the kids who die or almost die and get fifteen minutes of fame from the adults who have all the money and the clout and the thoughts and prayers but don’t actually do anything.
You would think Mom and Dad could have a least agreed on the idea of protests, since they’re both decent humans and Latinos, and they care about the environment and don’t like hate crimes—but they still couldn’t. Mom said Dad’s idealism was shooting itself in the foot, and Dad said Mom was a centrist coward.
Still, that didn’t stop me from going to a protest a few years ago, where a mother cried into a microphone and begged for a world where war didn’t come to classrooms. But it didn’t fix anything.
“It’s Texas,” Mom said when the protests lost steam and the laws didn’t change. “What did you expect?”
Dad said it was a terrible thing to say, but he couldn’t really deny that she was right.
I wanted to believe in the protests, but they never fixed anything. I wanted to believe in my parents, but they only know how to make things break.
Neither of their voices ever changed the world for the better.
* * *
~
It’s midnight.
In the kitchen, the cheap plastic radio crackles to life with the wailing notes of a country song. Dad bought that radio years ago—a bright purple alarm clock that doesn’t even run on batteries—thinking he was prepping the house for an emergency. Mom looked at it with such contempt, but she didn’t say anything. Now it haunts us by turning itself on, trying to wake the house up at midnight every night since last month’s power outage, and Mom still doesn’t say anything, and I don’t know how to reset it, so it never gets fixed. Every night I’m the only one awake to hit the button that turns the alarm off until the next night when it happens again, and I’m so, so tired of it.
I shuffle to the kitchen, holding my hand in a fist so the scratches pull and strain. The country song buzzes with static and sickly sweet nostalgia, but when I turn it off, the kitchen falls still and silent and that’s worse. I reach into my pocket for my phone, but I left it upstairs on the floor of my room. I sigh, turn to leave the creepy kitchen, and that’s when something whispers my name.
Daniela.
The hair on my arms lifts, but my feet weigh heavy on the floor like they’re made of carved stone. The clouds shift, sending a beam of moonlight shining through the window, and my ears are ringing like bells and my temples pound like I’m on an airplane and I feel like I might throw up. My knees buckle and I fall in slow motion and find my cheek pressed to the ground for the second time tonight.
When my body stops its sudden mutiny, I push myself up onto my elbows. The kitchen isn’t empty anymore. A tall, wide figure blocks the window, silver moonlight outlining its edges and cutting sharp lines of shadow across its form.
I should stand, or run, or scream.
“Daniela.”
The voice is calm and stern, and I get strong middle school assistant principal vibes. I sit up straighter while the figure steps toward me, catching the light of the purple radio clock face. She kind of looks like a middle school assistant principal, in spite of the metal bells hanging off her cheeks, the gauzy rainbow of woven cloth making up her dress, and the crown of feathers circling her head. Like a middle school assistant principal who runs one of the Aztec dance groups that perform downtown on Cinco de Mayo and el 16 de Septiembre. Mom and Dad used to love taking me to all the Mexican and Chicanx pride events, and I used to like it too until I got older and couldn’t wrap my head around how it’s possible to dance with such fierce colorful joy while shouldering a legacy of so much pain.
This mystery apparition doesn’t look like she came here to dance, though. Something in her expression says, I don’t have a single ounce of patience left, which is probab
ly why she reminds me of someone who spends their days corralling preteen punks.
I’m either about to be murdered by the weirdest home invader ever, or I should have called one of those hotlines earlier because I am not okay.
“What?” I ask. Mom would scold me if I gave her that attitude. “What do you want? What are you?”
“ ‘What’?” the figure asks, head swiveling as she inspects the kitchen. “Not ‘who’?”
“The what is a more immediate concern.” This stranger doesn’t seem to belong in the realm of reality, and I don’t know if I’m facing a ghost or a dream or a LARPer or a serious mental health issue, and until I figure that out, I can’t do anything about it.
The figure nods. “I thought you might know me.” She sounds disappointed, and that, at least, gives me something familiar to latch on to. Another adult disappointed that I didn’t perform for them. I get to my feet even though I barely come up to the chest of my potential murderer.
“Sorry, I must’ve missed your viral video. Are you going to fill me in?”
She smiles and looks down her nose at me in a way that makes me feel a lot less clever than I did a second ago.
“But you do know me,” she says. “You’ve seen my likeness before, and heard my story.”
Why is this giant feather-wearing bell-jingling person acting like one of the old people at Dad’s parties who always come up to me and tell me how much I’ve grown since the last time they saw me? I stare up at the hard planes of her face, unfamiliar and unimpressed. She sighs heavily and then looks down to meet my eyes.
I definitely don’t know her, because I would remember eyes like hers. I’ve never met anyone who looked so frustrated, so tired—not even an assistant principal, not even the speaker at the protest I went to. For a second my fingers forget that I gave up drawing before I gave up writing essays, and they twitch to shape the depths of those eyes in a sketchbook.
The last time I carried a sketchbook around—the memory hits me violently, swallows me up in a wave of sensations—was the summer after sixth grade during the trip to Mexico City with Dad’s family (Mom hated group vacations and mostly stayed in the hotel). My bangs were growing out, and my braces were orange. We were visiting museums when I wanted to get ice cream. My cool older prima Melody, who had been to the city a million times to visit the other side of her family, was enjoying playing tour guide for her more gringified relatives. She was telling me and our littlest prima Ellery a story—she told us so many stories that day, but right now I’m only reliving one, only feeling the tickle of hair on my cheek as I stare up at the huge stone disc that Melody says is a dismembered goddess—an attempted murderer who became the moon. Preteen me flips open her sketchbook and draws Coyolxauhqui, starting with her eyes.
The memory fades, and I drop the hand that was about to brush imaginary hair out of my face. The figure’s face is turned up again, but her mouth has settled into a more satisfied line.
This can’t be real, and I refuse to say it.
“Are you freaking Coyolxauhqui?” I blurt in spite of my best intentions.
She doesn’t answer.
“That’s impossible. That doesn’t even make sense. You’re . . . mythical. And dead.”
In the story, Coyolxauhqui and her younger siblings wanted to kill their suspiciously pregnant mom, but the joke was really on them when the baby was born fully grown and armed, and he hacked them to pieces. He was the god of war or something, and threw all his murderous siblings down the mountain, chunk by bloody chunk, and I guess the dismembered body parts caught enough bouncing or rolling momentum to pop straight up into the sky, and that’s how we got the moon and the stars.
Which is all kind of metal, but extremely doesn’t answer the question of whether or not I’m about to be murdered.
“ ‘Dead’ is imprecise at best,” Coyolxauhqui says. “I am the enemy and opposite of my brother Huitzilopochtli, and how can he exist without his opposite? He watches what is harsh and bright in the world, and I watch what is dark.”
She gives me a look when she says that, and I clap my left hand over the scratches on the right. Oh no. I know that careful, concerned look, the look that says, I’m not mad, I just want you to talk to me. Oh no.
“Are you here to Teach Me a Lesson? Did Ms. Delgado put you up to this?”
I know it’s sort of a nonsense thing to ask the pre-Columbian goddess in your kitchen, but it’s sort of nonsense to have a pre-Columbian goddess in your kitchen, and I’m getting the sneaking suspicion that this one is trying to “remotivate” me into caring about something. Anything.
“Whatever you think you’re doing here, I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative. I don’t need you.”
“Of course.” Coyolxauhqui frowns. “You don’t need anyone. You already exist as your own opposite, enough darkness to overwhelm your bright light.”
I knew it. I knew she was gearing up to Help the Troubled Teen. “Just tell me what you want or leave me alone.”
“You’d rather I speak plainly? I’m here because you are infuriating.”
Okay. I wasn’t expecting that. But it hardly seems fair; I haven’t done anything to anyone.
“Me?”
Coyolxauhqui raises an eyebrow like, Did I stutter, bitch? and I suddenly remember that this moon lady was fully ready to murder her mom just because she got pregnant from some floating ball of feathers that wasn’t her husband.
“I didn’t do anything to you. Sounds like you have anger issues.”
“Anger issues,” Coyolxauhqui repeats with a super unsettling hint of a smile. “Yes, I definitely had anger issues. Who could blame me? I cared about honor. I felt the betrayal of my mother so deeply in my bones that I turned against my own family, my flesh . . . I wanted to kill her.”
I drop my eyes to the floor even though I already know the story. I don’t like the rage burning in Coyolxauhqui’s eyes. I don’t want to recognize it.
But the moon lady isn’t giving me an easy out. “You feel betrayed,” she says, “just like I did.”
“Well, I never planned to murder anybody over it, so I guess I’m not violent like you. And your mom didn’t actually cheat. Mine did.” With a grad student at her college—not her department, so at least it wasn’t quite as immoral as it could have been. A white philosophy PhD candidate with a wispy mustache who is proudly apolitical and aggressively inoffensive. That’s the featherweight straw that broke my parents’ marriage.
My nails dig into my palms. Coyolxauhqui moves quick, snatching my wrists and forcing my hands open with surprising strength for someone who must be a figment of my imagination.
“What do you call this, if not violence?”
I pull my hands away and stuff them into the front pocket of my hoodie. “I call it not plotting to murder an infant, so I’m still coming out ahead in this comparison.”
The moon lady gives me that patronizing expression I hate, the face adults make when they think it’s just too funny how wrong you are.
“You remember that fact so well, but there are many ways to read my story.”
“Aren’t there always?” Maybe Ms. Delgado did send this vision. She seems like the type who would dabble with crystals and velas and summoning annoying spirits of indigenous gods on the weekends.
“Scholars have seen it as a metaphor for the day overtaking the night, the wartime triumph of one people over another. It is a history, a metaphor, and a moral all in one.”
“You really need to meet my English teacher. Also, convenient that turning it into a metaphor glosses over the whole murdering-a-baby thing and makes you seem like the victim.”
“I was ripped limb from limb for my mistakes.”
“Mistakes?” That word and her tone and her infuriating half smile make me see red. “A typo is a mistake! You deliberately plotted matricide!” She can�
��t smile calmly and pretend there’s no villain here. She can’t just erase what she did.
“My mistakes . . .” Coyolxauhqui starts to speak, but I refuse to hear another cowardly confession.
“Let me guess, you had a reason! You had no choice! ‘Oh, I’m not perfect, I’m doing my best!’ ” I echo Mom’s words, the ones she threw out the only time we ever talked about why Dad left. “It’s such bullshit. Maybe stop making mistakes if you can’t handle the consequences. And don’t expect me to say it’s all okay!”
Coyolxauhqui doesn’t look away the whole time I talk, even when I realize I’m shouting. She stays quiet for so long after I stop that I clench my fists and shut my eyes. My words feel like they’re boomeranging back at me, like they always do when it gets quiet, telling me that I’m the one making mistakes that no one can forgive.
But under Coyolxauhqui’s steady gaze, they also sound wrong.
“You hold on to your sharpness so tightly, little warrior. It’s no wonder you cut yourself.”
“I’m tired,” I say, and I don’t even know if I’m answering her or changing the subject. “Can you please talk like a normal person?”
Coyolxauhqui tilts her head to one side. “You are angry. You are hurt. You feel the pain of the world and the pain of your family and the pain of being alive.”
I want to tell her to shut up, but my throat isn’t working. She reaches for my wrists and pulls my hands close to her face, and my scratches burn when she looks at them.
“You know that healing is change and change means sacrifice. But this is wrong. This is not healing.”
I try to pull my hands away, but I can’t. The lines on the side of my hand and the crescent-shaped trenches in my palms are glowing silver and hot, and I see matching lines glowing across Coyolxauhqui’s body, wounds that are both scarred and fresh, bleeding light and breaking her body apart.
“The people who think they own all the power and light of this world, you already know what they are capable of. War and judgment and disintegrating flame. They will try to rip you to pieces. They don’t want you whole.”
Living Beyond Borders Page 3
