Signal to Noise(14)

“Professor...”

“No, you do,” he said. “I can help you if you need it. I tutor after school.”

“I’ve got a tutor,” she said, thinking of Sebastian. He knew books. He could help her.

“I think you could benefit from my...”

“Yeah, where’s the assignment?” she asked, pissed off and just wanting to get out of the classroom.

He handed her a piece of paper. Meche stuffed it in her sweater pocket and walked out. Daniela peeked her head inside and saw her heading towards the door. She smiled at the teacher then looked at Meche.

“What did he say?”





THE NEIGHBOURHOOD WHERE they lived was cut by a large avenue, dividing it into two starkly different halves. To the west, the buildings and houses became progressively nicer, the cars newer, the people better dressed. To the east there were no houses. Just numerous apartment buildings sandwiched together. These turned uglier, rattier and more dangerous the more you moved in that direction. In the east side people built tin-houses in the alleys and streets. Gang members could dismantle a car in five minutes flat and beat you for your lunch money.

Sebastian was the one who lived closest to the east, just a mere two blocks from the large avenue and the division between lower middle-class and outright poverty. Meche was situated three blocks further to the west. Although three blocks might not seem like much, it gave her a surer social footing at school.

Daniela lived closest to the west, not in an apartment, but in a house with a high wall covered with a purple bougainvillea. Her father was an accountant for a furniture chain and his wealth manifested conspicuously—without taste—all through this house in the form of Tiffany lamps, shiny tables and a plaster replica of the Venus de Milo greeting you when you entered the home. Daniela’s house, like her father, was big and ostentatious. The jolly, obese man had a wife as round as he was and three daughters, all quiet and polite, educated in archaic manners and ways right out of the 1940s. Daniela’s father believed in the sanctity of virginity and the role of the woman as wife and mother. He thought men who wore earrings were fags and those with long hair hippies or anarchists. He was, however, unable to manifest any ill-will towards them, or towards almost anyone, convinced that God would sort them out in his due time.

He was a harmless, dull fellow of few ideas and few complaints, who liked nothing more than to drink a few beers, eat large portions of spicy birria and coddle his daughters. None of the three was more coddled than Daniela, the youngest daughter and also the one with lupus—twin conditions which ensured she was guarded as carefully as a princess in a fairy tale.

Daniela was picked up and dropped off at school even though she was located closer to the Queen Victoria than her two friends. She was not to play sports of any kind for if she suffered the most minor bruise, her skin would turn an ugly shade of purple and there was always the danger of a scrape turning into a mountain of turmoil. She was not permitted any boyfriends, though this was not an issue because in addition to her childish ways—no doubt rooted in the babying imposed on her by her parents—Daniela was a moon-faced, limpid girl. Her greatest assets were her breasts which had started swelling at the tender age of eleven, turning into two rather large embarrassments, causing Daniela to walk everywhere looking a little hunched.

In fact, Daniela and Meche made quite a pair when they were side by side. Meche, thin and flat as a board, pimpled, dark of complexion and intentions, standing always very straight. Daniela, dwarfing Meche with her greater height, chubby and pale, shy and slumped, with short frizzy hair of a vaguely reddish hue which she had inherited from a Scottish ancestor who had stumbled into Mexico some eighty years before.

Daniela liked watching soap operas and reading romance novels. She painted her room pink and kept all her Barbies on shelves. She was, in short, the polar opposite of Meche and loved her friend precisely because of this.

Sometimes, though, Daniela had to admit Meche scared her. Early on in their friendship she had been warned by some of the other girls at school that Meche was odd, different, perhaps slightly crazy. However, beggars can’t be choosers and Daniela did not have many friends. Plus, Meche’s energy attracted Daniela, even if this same intensity made her step quietly back at times.

Meche had a way of roping you in with her words, of convincing you to do the unthinkable. One minute you were firmly telling yourself that you would never play with a Ouija board, the next you were gathered in the bathroom, the board sitting on top of the toilet lid, while Meche urged you on before the principal came and busted you all.

Daniela, never one to put up much resistance, constantly fell under the sway of Meche’s stronger personality, always the handmaiden to the queen.

Like that day.

She had told Meche there would be no spell casting in her home, but Meche informed Daniela that they couldn’t do it in her apartment because her mother was around and they couldn’t do it in Sebastian’s apartment because he shared a room with his brother, and Daniela was the one who had an empty house on Thursdays because her mother and her sisters went grocery shopping that day during the afternoon. It all made perfect sense, see? Before Daniela knew it she had said “yes.”

Meche arrived with Sebastian, placed the portable record player on the floor, flipped the case open, and was riffling through the records she had brought inside a tattered, nylon market bag.