Signal to Noise(3)

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





MECHE 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.





MECHE 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.





MONDAY. HOMEWORK 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.