Signal to Noise (6 page)

Sebastian sipped the juice, his eyes fixed on Isadora again. Isadora, probably feeling the weight of his gaze, turned her head and looked in their direction.

Sebastian immediately dropped his head, staring at the juice box between his hands. Meche smirked and jabbed him on the ribs.

L
ITERATURE WAS LIKE
having needles pushed under her eyelids. Meche could not understand or even remotely pay attention to what was happening on the blackboard; she rested her head against the desk and tried to add numbers in her head, repeat lyrics of songs. She wondered what she would eat that afternoon.

Daniela, however, was in love with the teacher and she sat all perky and straight next to Meche, with a docile smile on her face, nodding periodically while Rodriguez—the youngest of the faculty, but no prize pie in the looks department—strolled by, babbling on about Cervantes. Windmills. Some Spanish asshole who was nuts and a fat guy on a donkey.

“What are we going to wish for?” Sebastian asked.

He wasn’t taking notes either, but he didn’t have to take notes. Sebastian knew all this stuff. He liked it. Hell, he had read
Moby Dick
which was as thick as a damned brick. You could maim someone with that book.

“I’m not sure,” Meche said. “Something big. What do you want to wish for?”

“I’m making a list.”

“God, won’t he shut up,” Meche whispered.

“Then he couldn’t listen to himself.”

Meche smirked.

“What is amusing you today, Mercedes?”

She hated it when people called her by her full name. She’d told Rodriguez this, but he refused to ever use her nickname. Meche did not reply, staring down at her book and pretending she was reading.

“No, really. I’m interested. Because you two lovebirds have been whispering for about half an hour.”

The class erupted into laughter at the word ‘lovebirds,’ making Meche blush with mortification.

“Maybe Sebastian Soto is not such a fag,” someone yelled from the back of the room.

Rodriguez let them chuckle, then gave her a twisted smile. “Extra homework for you. Stay at the end of class.”

“Can hardly wait,” she whispered.

M
ECHE GRABBED HER
backpack and shuffled to the front of the class, stopping before Rodriguez’s desk. She could see Daniela standing outside the door, waiting for her.

The teacher raised his eyes and nodded at her.

“You were disruptive today. Again.”

“Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez.”

“You know, I can’t really tell if you do it on purpose, Mercedes,” he said, lacing his hands together, trying to look stern although his incipient moustache made him more comical than scary. “Is it just the sugar from all those cereals coursing through your body?”

“My brain is stuck from shooting glue,” she said.

Rodriguez did not get the Ramones reference. He just raised an eyebrow at her.

“It’s a song,” she explained, fearing he’d take it seriously and call the principal.

“That’s your problem, Mercedes. Your head is filled with songs. If you spent less time watching music videos and more time doing your readings, you wouldn’t be failing my class.”

He shuffled a stack of papers and put them in a folder.

“You need to do some extra work.”

“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?”

T
HE 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.

Daniela wrung her hands, hoping her mother and siblings would not burst in any time soon and that this whole witchcraft thing did not involve anything gross. Once, when she was little, Daniela’s mother had taken her to an old healer for a
limpia
. The woman had rubbed an egg and a lemon all over her body, then made her drink this bitter brew, telling her it would heal her. It hadn’t. Daniela still had lupus and her mother still would not let her play sports for fear of lacerations.

“What are you doing?” Daniela asked eventually, because standing there and staring at her two friends was starting to bore her.

“We are picking spell music,” Meche said.

“What spell are we doing?”

“Something about success.”

“Okay, why don’t we use the Iggy Pop song?” Sebastian asked, holding up a record.

“Too obvious,” Meche said.

“What? We get points for being cryptic?” Sebastian said.

“You don’t just go out there and blurt it out,” Meche replied.

“Why not?”

“Because it would be too easy.”

“Easy is good.”

“My mother will be back soon,” Daniela muttered.

Sebastian and Meche turned towards her, eyebrows arched, with that look that meant,
Daniela, you don’t get it
. It was a very common look.

“Fine,” Sebastian said. “David Bowie. We play Fame and call it even.”

“That’s about two degrees less lame,” Meche said.

“David Bowie is lame?”

“No, using that song is lame. There’s like zero effort.”

“Oh, okay. So let’s go with this guy we’ve never heard of,” Sebastian said, holding up another record, “because that’s not lame.”

“Without Robert Johnson you wouldn’t have Elvis, no Beatles, no...”

“The lyrics you showed me don’t say a single thing about success.”

“They don’t have to. He’s standing at the crossroads because he’s about to sell his soul to the devil.”

“I don’t want to do any devil songs,” Daniela said. “I don’t want to give birth to a baby with hooves who throws his mom down a staircase.”

“That’s like a fucked up version of
Rosemary’s Baby
crossed with
The Omen
,” Meche said.

“No devil songs.”

“Daniela, wouldn’t you prefer to play a David Bowie song?” Sebastian asked.

Meche’s eyes said ‘absolutely not,’ but Daniela could not side with her this time. She bobbed her head timidly.

“Yes,” she said.

“That is not fair,” Meche said.

“There’s three of us and we just out-voted you,” Sebastian said, smugly sliding the record from its sleeve.

He lifted the needle. There was the faint scratch against the vinyl and then the song began to play.

“Okay, now we hold hands and dance around it,” Meche said.

“Really,” Sebastian replied dryly.

“Yes. That’s what witches do. They dance around the fire. Only we don’t have a fire, so we’ll dance around the record player.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes. Meche pinched his arm. They joined hands, clumsily turning around, like children playing Doña Blanca, only they weren’t little kids and this was not a game at recess.

“Ugh, your palms are sweaty,” Sebastian said, drawing away from Daniela.

“Don’t break the circle,” Meche told him.

“How about I spin in my place?” he asked, wiping his hands against his trousers.

“Seriously,” Meche muttered, but she didn’t ask them to hold hands again.

They did spin. They whirled. At first, it seemed silly and Daniela thought she was going to get dizzy and throw up. But the more they did it, the longer the seconds stretched, the more it seemed to make sense. Daniela felt very warm, like there was fire blooming from the pit of her stomach, stretching up her chest and stinging her mouth. Their fingers brushed as they turned.

She watched as Meche spun. Her friend’s gaze was fixed on a distant point, her body turning but her eyes always returning to that distant something. Sebastian, similarly, seemed to have locked his eyes on something. Daniela closed her eyes and licked her lips; her cheeks burned.

She didn’t feel dizzy from the movement. Not really. But there was something dizzying, hypnotic about the music, and she was reminded of a documentary they’d shown at school in which some monks were dancing, their skirts flaring around them.

Fame, fame, fame.

Daniela’s head lolled to the side and she snapped her eyes open. Something seemed to lift from them, quickly leaving the room, cooling her skin. She blinked. She shivered, suddenly afraid because she had almost touched
something
that didn’t seem like another of Meche’s games.

Meche lifted the needle and they stood around the player in silence, nobody daring to be the first one to speak.

Finally, Sebastian found his voice.

“Did it work?” he asked. “Do you feel different?”

Daniela flexed her hands. Meche moved towards the white, wooden vanity with the pink necklaces strewn around its surface. She leaned forward, a hand against the mirror.

“Not really,” she said.

“Me neither,” Daniela added.

“But something happened,” Meche said.

Neither Sebastian nor Daniela answered her. Daniela stared at her hands, at the ugly, bitten nails. She could not stop chewing them. Sometimes she even hurt herself and this alarmed her mother greatly because every little scrape could become a life or death matter.