Excerpt from Imagine Breaking Everything

Lina Munar Guevara
Translated by Ellen Jones

And for everyone who made it possible.

Friday

So what are you going to do?”

I sat still. Cold. Margarita, the admin woman, was looking at me. Even though she was smiling, the first thing I thought of was the faces the history teacher always pulled. After asking a question, the guy would grab his marker pen, start tapping it on the desk, and say, “It’s not calculus, ladies, there’s a finite number of answers.” “Answer me this, Granddad,” Zapata would murmur, with a hand gesture to go with it. She’d say it quietly so only I could hear. It made me laugh, but it also made me want to throw my rubber at her so she’d let me think. And the teacher kept banging on about how it wasn’t calculus or whatever else. That was his dumb way of saying, “It’s not that hard, Noriega, answer the fucking question.” The question asked by Margarita, the admin woman, wasn’t calculus either. There was no infinite number of answers. In fact, there was only one, and unlike with the Obandos’ war, this time I knew how to reply.

“Graduate.”

Margarita laughed softly and leaned back in her chair, as though I had just told a joke.

“I mean after that.”

I looked at her. Despite being relegated to the admin building and not spending time with the teachers or students, Margarita had the same air about her, the same tone. It felt different from my previous school, as if Margarita and the rest of them were made of the same stuff, of something I lacked and was incapable of learning. For her, and for everyone at that high school, graduating was no big deal. It wasn’t a deal at all, in fact it was the natural course of things. Inevitable. But at my previous school, the Corpus Christi District School, that wasn’t the case. Nobody graduated. Graduating didn’t figure in anyone’s plans, because at that age people had already started working or living with their boyfriends or had “got into trouble.” Sometimes all of the above (like Mum). It was harder to find reasons to stay at school when help was needed at home. But I was going to graduate. That’s what I told Aunt Anahí every time I handed her my report card. “I’m not top of the class,” I’d warn her, “but I’ll graduate all the same.” Though she nodded, I was convinced she wasn’t taking in what I said. That’s why I was surprised the day that she called me into her bedroom, where a handful of dresses were thrown over the chair in the corner. She asked what the parents of my year group would be wearing to the graduation. “How am I supposed to know,” I replied, but grinned like an idiot all the same. I didn’t give a toss if Margarita the admin woman said I was going to graduate—she didn’t know me—but if my aunt believed it, it might actually be true.

I had my doubts. Five years after leaving Corpus Christi, I was still scared of waking up back there. “You can take a girl out of the barrio,” Adela warned my mum when we left, “but you can’t take the barrio out of the girl, baby.” It’s true: you can recognize someone from Corpus Christi as far off as Korea—they’re the one who, when a car backfires, flings themselves to the ground with their hands over their head. I exaggerate, but not much.

Margarita, the admin woman, opened my folder.

She must be looking over my marks, checking those numbers that cost me sweat, blood, and tears; every mark out of ten I scraped together and that no longer meant anything. Just stains, no more important than a bit of coffee or lipstick on the page: once they’d stamped PASS on the report card, that’s all they became. There it was, in blue ink, the tops of the P and the A a bit faded but there all the same, and there was nothing the teachers could do about it; not the history teacher, not the calculus teacher, not the catechism teacher, none of them could change it. PASS, bitches. If they’d added things up wrong, if they’d failed to mark an absence, well, they were fucked, because I had passed every single subject and was going to graduate. Not top of the class, but I’ll graduate.

Then Margarita, the admin woman, made a face, and I knew. I knew before she opened her mouth: the printer.

“I’m sorry, love,” she sighed, looking at me as though she’d just run over my dog, “I can’t give you the green light.”

It all went to shit with that triplemotherfucking printer.

The worst thing about this story, the thing we need to remember, is that I had the money, the money to replace the printer. At some point in my life I had it, and I turned it into a tattoo, some earrings, and an avocado-shaped coin purse. You absolute mug—who the fuck even uses a coin purse? I’ve never used a coin purse in my life, why would I start now? If I was going to spend the money, I should at least have been able to spend it on something I’d use, something good. Anyway, the point is, I promised Margarita I’d pay her first thing on Monday morning.

“That’d be Tuesday, because we’re not in on Monday.”

“Even better.”

“No, no, love. You’re not listening,” she said with the same smile. “It’s not possible.”

“Please …”

“The thing is, love, today’s the last day of the accounting period,” she said, and I nodded, serious, as though I understood the implications of a fucking accounting period.

I told her I’d bring it on Tuesday without fail, that I already had the money (not true), that please would she let me bring it because I had to graduate, please, that my mum was coming all the way from Bucaramanga just for my graduation (not true either, as far as I knew). She looked at me for a moment and I looked at her back. Margarita, the admin woman, had blonde hair with highlights in it, square, blue-rimmed glasses that matched the button-up jacket she was wearing. I wondered if she had glasses in every colour and changed them each day depending on the jacket she was going to wear. She had coin purse written all over her, and I thought of offering her an avocado-shaped bribe. But no, because people who look like they use a coin purse rarely turn out to be bribable.

“I have to graduate,” I said instead. “Please, I’ll pay on Tuesday.”

“I can’t …”

“Tuesday without fail.”

“I just can’t, darling. If I made an exception for you, I’d have to do it for everyone.”

But no one else in the school needs an exception, do they, Margarita? Nobody else has this problem, nobody else is being hounded by a printer. Only me.

“I’m begging you. Please, after everything that’s … I have to graduate, please.”

“I …”

“I’ve done everything, everything they asked of me, the lessons, the tests, the final exams, the social work, everything, I’ve done everything. It’s not fair to not let me graduate because of something that’s got nothing to do with, because of something that … because of a … an accident. Please. I’ll bring the money on Tuesday. I swear.”

She sighed, defeated.

“First thing on Tuesday.”

And I jumped up out of the seat with a smile and then remembered that I didn’t have the money. It’s fine, Melissa, this is why you have a job. I went from school straight to Señor Héctor’s shop. It was two blocks (which felt like three when it was raining) from Aunt Anahí’s house, in the La Alborada neighborhood. I was proud to have spent two weekends a month in that little shop, organizing the shelves, cleaning the floor and the toilets. They rarely trusted me to cash up because the till never worked properly and math wasn’t my thing—infinite answers and all that. I liked mopping the corridors, because you could do it along to Sergio Vargas’s songs, which Señor Héctor loved, and it was nothing but back and forth, like painting a house. Or what I imagined painting a house would be like, because I had never painted one. Corpus Christi had been constantly under construction but hardly anyone ever bothered with a final paint job. Most houses remained a color somewhere between earth and mustard yellow, with cement columns, and the ones that were painted generally had balconies and extra floors gradually added on that were painted in different shades or with patches to cover up the graffiti. That was one thing the walls were good for, that’s for sure. The whole neighborhood was one giant canvas.

In La Alborada, on the other hand, graffiti never lasted long at all. Señor Héctor once made me clean the façade of the shop where a tag had been sprayed. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to clean a piece of graffiti, but because it wasn’t mine this time, it felt like it took forever, and my wrist was sore by the time I was done. People usually left the shop alone, because Señor Héctor didn’t mind selling stuff on credit, plus he’d put up those lights that come on by themselves when someone walks by. The idea of standing, can in hand, under those lights, in full view of the world, was enough to discourage most people. Unlike in Corpus Christi, in La Alborada appearances mattered. Señor Héctor got his share of tags even so, but the lights weren’t a total waste because when people sat outside boozing, I’d sometimes wait for the drunks to fall asleep before going past and triggering them to come on. They’d get such a fright they’d fall out of their chairs and give me a good laugh.

Because it was still light when I got there, the outdoor spotlights still off. Inside, merengue was playing and Señor Héctor was arranging tins of tomato sauce. “Tomato purée,” Aunt Anahí would correct me. I approached Señor Héctor with my head bowed, like when Katya creeps over with her tail between her legs because she’s pissed on the carpet. And he must have realized I’d come to ask for an advance because he didn’t even look at me before saying:

“There’s no cash, Meli.”

That’s what happens when you trust any old stranger to pay you back, Señor Héctor.

“Please, Don Héctor. I’ll work the whole month, two months, however long you need, but I need some money super super urgently.”

He went over to the till. I followed him, biting off a bit of cuticle with my teeth. Mum had always told me off for biting my nails, so, instead, I worried at my cuticles until I yanked them off. Héctor gave me twenty thousand pesos—not even a tenth of what I needed—and dumped me with a bag of prawns that were about to go off.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with a bag of prawns?

“I’ll fry them with garlic and olive oil,” Aunt Anahí said, inspecting the bag. “We’ll have to peel and de-vein them, but they’re still good.”

“De-vein” was a nice way of saying we had to pull out the shit.

“The digestive tract,” she corrected me.

“Which is full of shit,” I insisted, leaning on the counter.

I crossed my arms and sighed.

“Just some of it,” I asked her. “Just a little bit, please. It would be a loan. I swear I’ll pay you back every peso.”

“Get the spaghetti out, and some parsley from the fridge,” she said, opening the bag of prawns. “Remember what I said when you broke the printer? Oh, and a lemon.”

“Yeah, I know, but I’m desperate. Please, I swear I’ll pay. How much shall I get? Like this? I’ll pay you back double, triple if you want, even though that’d be usury, but of course you know more about that than I do.”

I loved teasing her because she worked at the bank, saying that bankers were a bad lot, terrible, and that (unlike Señor Héctor) they never trusted anyone.

“My my, aren’t you the funny one. Put some water on to boil. I’m sorry, Meli, but I did warn you.”

I sighed loudly, so she would hear my sigh and know I was fed up.

“Slice the garlic nice and thin.”

“I’ll pay you quadruple if you want.”

“It’s not about the money, Meli. Every action …”

“Has consequences, yeah yeah, but Auuunnntie.”

“But nothing. Now watch this, kid, this’ll come in handy.”

“I doubt it, unless it’s money,” I said through clenched teeth.

Still, I watched as she slid the knife along the prawn’s flank (its flank?) and, using the tip, pulled out the brown thread in a single movement. Aunt Anahí made cooking pretty. She was a pleasure to watch. And her food always turned out delicious.

She looked lovely when she cooked, too, because she enjoyed it. She had an old-school glamour, sort of faded, like those black and white photographs of actresses. She gave off the impression of being from a previous century, though she was barely forty. She had a pianist’s hands. I didn’t say so because I knew she didn’t like her hands, long and thin, perfect for handling the frying pan without a second thought. Yes, they were pianist’s hands, though she hardly ever played anymore, and the keyboard in the study served more as a desk, covered in notebooks, invoices, and a dusty-leafed succulent. The story goes that my aunt used to play all kinds of things on that keyboard, from Beethoven to Flans, and of course Alejandro Sanz. Aunt Anahí loved Alejandro Sanz, and she also liked some of his songs. I bet her hands looked great when they were playing, especially when she painted her nails in bright colors. She had them in a salmon color now, which was pretty, but I didn’t tell her that either because it was boring and I didn’t want her to stop wearing the golds and blues and occasional greens that suited her so well. She’d dyed her hair a reddish brown that suited her too because she was all pale. I, on the other hand, could only ever have black hair because my skin was dark. Aunt Anahí had the same brown eyes as Aunt Magdalena, and I had my mum’s honey-colored ones. A shame, because my dad had green eyes. You’d think he could at least have given me those.

When the olive oil was hot, my aunt put the prawns on to fry. I wasn’t sure whether I liked prawns. The only time I remembered having eaten them was at Aunt Magdalena’s, during a novena, back when she still invited us over. It must have been a long time ago, when Mum and I still lived in Corpus Christi, and Aunt Anahí was still Uncle Roberto. Aunt Magdalena served them in a glass bowl soaked in a slurry of pink salsa with slices of sausage, adorned with bits of lettuce. I remember the first one I tried made me want to throw up, but, since I still liked Aunt Magdalena back then, I made an effort to get it down with a gulp of Coca-Cola. I bet she didn’t de-vein them.

When I put the garlic in to fry, I suspected I was going to like these prawns. The smell wafted through the kitchen. Garlic is super important because it goes with everything, like onion, but, unless you’re making something al ajillo, it shouldn’t actually taste of garlic. You need just the right amount so that it’s overshadowed by the other ingredients. Aunt Anahí explained this to me while she was stirring the pot of pasta. My job was the parsley. She showed me this cool way to chop it, swinging the knife quickly from side to side, like one of those guillotines they use in stationery shops, zip, zip, zip. I enjoyed that, moving the knife in one direction and then the other, feeling the little bits come off on the chopping board. It was a good way of clearing my head, like mopping or painting a house.

“Smaller,” she said, and took the knife off me to do it herself.

As she went on cooking, I crouched down to stroke Katya, who had got up to stretch at the smell of the prawns in the pan. She was a caramel cocker spaniel with brown eyes and a few gray hairs on her nose. She yawned and stuck out her pink tongue before resting her head on my knees, as she did whenever she wanted me to stroke her neck. I obeyed, and she lay back bit by bit until she was belly up on the tiles.

“Is that nice?” I asked her, patting her stomach, where she had several little whirlpools of fur. “I’m going to sell Katya. How much do you think I’ll get for her?”

“She’s so badly behaved you’ll have to pay someone to take her off you.”

Katya was my first pet. Well, she was Aunt Anahí’s, but now that we’d lived together for five years in her flat in La Alborada, she was mine too, really. In Corpus Christi I never had pets because, a) Mum and I were never there, and b) I wasn’t great with animals. Back then I wasn’t great with people, either. “She was no angel,” Aunt Anahí would say, which was a nice way of saying I was a real piece of shit. I scratched Katya’s belly so she’d start swiping her paw, while Aunt Anahí mixed the pasta with the prawns.

“Squeeze the lemon on,” she said as she tipped some pasta water into the pan.

I pinched a bit of washing-up powder and washed my hands thoroughly before grabbing the lemon. It was already sliced, so I squeezed one of the halves against the edge of the pan. The juice ran through my fingers and made the little triangles of raw flesh sting where I’d tugged at the cuticles. I ignored the pain and squeezed out a bit more. It had never occurred to me before to put lemon in pasta, but I’d learned that lemon is a bit like salt. It sort of fixes the flavor. Cooking is full of contradictions, like the one about putting salt in cake mixes. That’s why it’s so interesting. It’s not like solving an equation, following a series of rules step by step until you get to x, boring old x that can never be anything other than itself, x. When you cook, you never know what you’re going to end up with. Even if it doesn’t look like it does in the book, even if it doesn’t taste like it’s supposed to, every dish is worth the effort because you can never make it twice, not really. See, cooking is like magic, transforming ingredients, making them disappear and reappear. If you end up with the same as what you started with, you haven’t cooked, full stop. I wanted to have my own restaurant; I probably wouldn’t cook there, but I’d spend hours watching the chef.

That’s why I’d gone to register my interest in Business Administration. That was the answer Margarita the admin woman was looking for. I hadn’t told anyone, that would have jinxed it. Well, almost anyone, because Aunt Anahí knew, and I’d also told Santiago. I’d even told him the bit about the restaurant, but not the whole idea because I was embarrassed about it, and was embarrassed that I was embarrassed about it. I did tell Zapata because I was never embarrassed about anything with her: she understood. I told her I wanted to have a restaurant that would be like an ordinary house or flat, where people (it had to be a small group) would come and leave their things in the dining room or living room. We’d give them a glass of wine and they’d go into the kitchen, where they’d agree on a menu. Then the chef would tell each of them what to do and they’d help him out with the cooking. He’d give them easy jobs, of course, so they can’t ruin the dinner, but the trick is to make them believe they might ruin it if they do things badly. They’ll eat the starter right there in the kitchen while the main course is cooking and then they’ll sit in the dining room, and even though the food might not be as good as if the chef had done everything himself, it’ll taste even better to them. And after that they’ll have dessert, which really was made by just the chef, because everyone else is tired by now.

“But you have to open a bunch of restaurants first, Norieguis, to be able to finance it,” Zapata told me.

And I said yes, that all I needed was one successful Italian restaurant, and that would cover it. That’s why I liked talking to her, because we understood each other. It’s why she always played me her music, too. Zapata was a bit alternative. She liked a lot of weird music, some of it cool, some of it properly weird, and she always played it to me, explained why the singer was doing X or Y, or who it had been inspired by, or why that album had been the high or low point of their career.

Her music made me feel something, even the songs I didn’t like. And when I did like them, oof, my god, those songs went round and round my head for days, I couldn’t stop listening to them. It happened with “Running Up That Hill (Deal with God).” When I heard it, I felt like I was in a huge country house—a rustic one, not an elegant one. We were having dinner at a thick wooden table with candles because there was a blackout and I suddenly had to leave. When I came out of the house it was daytime, though inside it had been night, and I ran up a dirt path lined with trees that had leaves like curtains. That was the drums, my footsteps through the fields of tall grass and twisted wire fences leading up to a green green hill, not very high, but when I got up there you couldn’t see anything but the blue sky, and from there I spoke to God, not my granddad’s God, but everyone’s God, and made a deal: that I would change places with someone I loved very much who had died, so that person could come back and I would go to heaven. I never knew who that person was. Sometimes it was me. That’s why the song sped up, for the trip back downhill, not too fast, just enough to let the slope do its thing. And I felt so calm and happy because I knew I’d managed to get back thanks to the sacrifice I’d made. I told Zapata this, that that’s what the song had made me feel, and she said it was a lovely song, wearing a smile like she was saying she’d hoped it would make me feel that way ever since she played it to me.

While Aunt Anahí served the pasta, I laid two places at the table. I checked the big chocolate pot sitting in the corner underneath the leak. The damp must have got worse because the pot didn’t used to fill up in just one day. I grabbed it and emptied it into the sink in the kitchen before putting it back. There was a darker patch on the ceiling and the paint had cracked. Aunt Anahí came out of the kitchen with the food and Katya followed her, wagging her tail. My aunt put the plates on the table and spilled into the chair.

I took a huge forkful of pasta and didn’t care that it burned the roof of my mouth, because it was delicious. The garlic was golden so you could eat the little slices tucked among the spaghetti, no problem. The prawns: so so good, especially if you covered them in the olive oil. I told my aunt how good it was, and she said I needed to have faith in her recipes. Then I begged her again to help me with the money for the printer, but she wasn’t budging. So, as a sign of protest, I decided to answer my phone. An unknown number had been calling me over and over.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Melissa?”

I felt a thrill go down my spine because I hadn’t heard her voice since my birthday, about seven months ago.

“Meli, are you there? Can you hear me?”

“Mum …? You got a new number.”

“Yes,” she laughed. “Oh it’s so nice to hear your voice, love.”

She said she was going to be in Bogotá on the weekend. I almost dropped the phone. Were my hands sweating?

“I’d love to see you,” she said. “We could spend the weekend together.”

The weekend. The weekend together. The whole weekend together. I was so surprised that I only realized I hadn’t said anything when she asked, worried:

“Have you already got plans?”

“What? No, of course not. I want to see you.”

“Then I’ll come and pick you up tomorrow, darling.”

Saturday

One of my first memories of the apartment in Corpus Christi is of kneeling on the sofa with my hands and forehead pressed against the window. I was trying to check if the hopscotch I’d chalked on the pavement the day before was still there, but I couldn’t quite see from the living room. The radio was on in the kitchen and the apartment was tiny, so you could listen to Joe wherever you went. It started to smell like burnt plastic and gas, that’s how I knew Mum had turned the oven on. I ran to the kitchen barefoot and Mum told me off because I might get spattered with hot oil or step on something. I ignored her, running over and asking what she was making.

Chocolate cake, one from a box. We were going to take it to Auntie Magdalena, who was organizing a piñata that day. Mum turned the box over and read the instructions out loud. I remember how the yellow cardboard looked against her painted nails, their purple and black stripes. How old would she have been? I was about four, so Mum must have been about twenty.

“Want to help?” she asked.

I nodded and she lifted me up onto the counter. She touched my nose and told me to hold the plastic bowl while she poured in the instant mix. A cloud of brown powder rose up. The kitchen filled with the smell of chocolate. Mum turned up the radio and started dancing as she opened the drawer to get out the utensils. She’s always been a good salsa dancer and, like everyone who’s good at salsa, it was obvious even when she wasn’t dancing, even when she was doing something as simple as opening the oven door. I wanted to ask her about Dad, but didn’t, maybe because it was a nice day and soon there would be chocolate cake.

My dad was a black hole that killed conversations. If you got too close, bam! He sucked out all the air. That hasn’t changed. And it wasn’t fair because, back then, I always wanted to talk about him. Not to him, never to him, just about him. Even much later, when he left, when he really left, you could feel him in the apartment, like a kind of ghost, hiding in the most unexpected places. Sometimes he showed up in a dirty sock he’d left behind that had got mixed up with all the others. Sometimes he was the way Mum smelled when she came home at dawn, or the sound of one of his friends from the neighborhood laughing, or my wanting to cry—“to whine,” as he’d put it. Sometimes he was silence itself, inside the apartment. The silence that, back when he was around, Dad would use to frighten Mum. Out of nowhere he’d sing out into the silence—not properly, he’d let out an off-key screech or two before falling quiet again as though nothing had happened. It still makes me laugh. Not just because of that voice he’d use, but because of Mum’s reaction, too. He only ever did it when she was there. “Ay, Andrés,” she’d scold him, slapping him on the arm as he laughed. That’s why he did it, so she’d tell him off, to annoy her, but it didn’t have the cruelty he did everything else with, he was only playing. Sometimes, when the apartment was silent, I still expected to hear him sing. People say I’ve got a half-sibling somewhere in town. For all I know there’s a whole handful of them.

I could have asked Mum, but it was a nice day and we were listening to salsa in the car. We were in a silver Chevrolet with Bogotá license plates. It was Adela’s, Mum explained. We were going to hers for the weekend, she said. Outside, people were walking, shops were open, a taxi driver went by with his arm hanging out the window so close I thought it was going to get caught on our wing mirror. All completely normal, except none of it was normal, because Mum was there, sitting next to me, and we were going to spend the weekend together.

“I’ve missed Bogotá,” she said, “the movement, the chaos.”

She looked different. She’d dyed her hair light brown and cut it short. Her eyes looked smaller because she wasn’t wearing any eyeliner, and she was dressed like the mums in those ketchup adverts: carefully ironed lilac blouse, white jacket tied around her shoulders, and black trousers that weren’t baggy but weren’t tight-fitting either. The only thing that was the same was her nose, twisted slightly to the left and with the same pink mark where she’d once had a piercing.

“Even the traffic jams?” I asked her, smiling.

Even me? Did you miss me? Do I look different to you? I hope so, I hope that just by looking at me she can tell how much I’ve changed.

“No no,” she laughed, “I haven’t missed the traffic jams one bit. But tell me about you, love … How’s school?”

“I’m still on the basketball team, but we’ve had a shit season.”

I realized I’d said “shit” and glanced at Mum to see if that was something that annoyed her these days. I wasn’t sure, but figured best not to say it just in case.

“I’m sure next season will be better.”

“This was the last one, I’m about to graduate.”

“Graduating already! When did that happen …?”

“No idea.”

“What about your boyfriend?” she asked with a complicit smile.

“We broke up last month.”

“Oh no,” she said, before taking my hand and linking her fingers through mine.

She used to do this whenever Dad was giving us grief. Not when he got aggressive, then she’d send me to my room, but when he started raising his voice. Mum would take my hand like that, silently, as though to say, “It’s nothing, forget about it.” And I’d look at her and she’d smile at me, wrinkling her nose, and I’d think, It’s nothing. I liked the gesture so much I didn’t want to tell her I wasn’t sad about having broken up with Santiago, that I was sick of him anyway.

“Was he the one I met?” she asked. “Kind of skinny, glasses …”

“Alex? Ah no, no, this was another guy.”

She was, like, two boyfriends behind, but I didn’t think this was worth pointing out.

“There’ll be better ones to come. How’s your aunt? I’d have liked to come up, even if just to say hello.”

I’d told her Aunt Anahi had gone out early to run some errands, but it was a lie. The truth was, we’d had a fight. When I told her I was going away with Mum, she said she didn’t think it was a good idea. Defiant, I asked why not. And she started on about Mum just turning up with no warning, how it wasn’t fair, not a word from her all this time, then out of the blue she shows up, etc., etc. What pissed me off was that my aunt thought she knew more than I did about my relationship with Mum. She always thought she was an expert in everything, even this.

My aunt and I hadn’t spoken that morning (only a brief “see ya”), but I wasn’t worried. I knew it was only a little fight, nothing compared with the ones we used to have when I first moved into her flat in La Alborada. No, this was nothing like that. Those were real fights, big girl fights. The worst ones started after Mum moved out, when my aunt and I had to learn how to put up with one another. Well, mainly her learn to put up with me (I mean, let’s be fair).

I used to want to break everything. I’d shout at her, slam the door in her face, call her “Roberto” and other things I’d rather forget. One day I grabbed a ceramic Japanese cat from the living room and flung it against the wall. It smashed. I hadn’t wanted to break it. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen when I threw it, but when I heard it break, it was like I suddenly woke up. I was on my way to pick up the pieces when I heard my aunt’s footsteps coming down the corridor. I ran out of the flat. I spent the rest of the day outside, even thought about never going back, about getting on a bus to Bucaramanga to look for Mum, or even just going round and round the block forever. I abandoned the idea as soon as it started getting dark. It’s easy to be all brave and everything while the sun’s shining, but at night—night is something else. At night the city transforms. Facing Aunt Anahí’s fury seemed easy next to staying out in the streets by myself or ending up sleeping at Social Services. I rang her doorbell, knowing that as soon as it opened she’d scream at me, call me all kinds of names, even tell me to turn right around and never come back. I was ready for that, but the sneaky cow just took one look at me and gave me a hug.

She hugged me and I just stood there uncomfortably, caught off guard by the gesture. She told me to sit down in the living room and then warned me that the cat statue had been the last ugly thing in that flat. This was debatable (my aunt had questionable taste) but I wasn’t going to say so just then.

“I mean,” she went on, “you can’t break any more of my stuff. Next time—look at me—next time, you’re going to breathe, in, out, then count to at least seven.”

“Why seven?” I ventured quietly.

“I’ll bet you can’t even get to four without getting distracted. And if that doesn’t work, you’re going to imagine breaking things, but won’t actually do it, you hear me? You’re going to imagine breaking the paintings and the table and the lamp and the curtains until you calm down. And if that still doesn’t work, well, then you’ll try again.”

The worst part was that I actually thought the cat statue was kind of cool (questionable taste runs in the family), and I was sorry it couldn’t be fixed. However, breathing, counting, and imagining I was destroying things actually worked—the more details I imagined the better. Though it took me a few weeks before I could bring myself to ask something that had been bothering me ever since.

“Why didn’t you yell at me?”

“Did you want me to?” she asked, laughing. When she saw I was still waiting for an answer she added: “Oh kid, people have been insulting me since long before you were born. After all this time I’ve realized that it’s hardly ever me that’s the problem.”

“My aunt’s fine,” I told Mum in the car. “Kind of tired, but fine.”

There was a pause. I didn’t like those silences because they felt like opportunities for questions nobody wanted to ask or answer. Questions that all boiled down to just one: are you alright without me? The question scared me because I wouldn’t have known how to say yes without her thinking I didn’t still miss her. And I was more scared of the answer she might give me. Neither of us asked. I thought about mentioning the money for the printer and asking if she could maybe help me out, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I looked out the window and asked if Adela still lived in Corpus Christi. She said she did.

Going back to our old neighborhood made me think of the time I went clubbing with Zapata and the other girls, when some time about two in the morning (when they start playing old school music), a Tito el Bambino song came on I hadn’t heard for ages. As soon as it started, I realized I still knew the words. It struck me as odd that I hadn’t forgotten them, I’d just forgotten I knew them. So I sang along happily because it was like finding a bit of me that I’d lost. Going back to Corpus Christi felt the same, but without the happiness, because the bit of me I’d lost there was a piece of shit.

Everything looked familiar, even the few things that were new. Everywhere I looked, houses that were concrete and iron skeletons, shops with plastic baskets full of mangos and avocados, the butchers with their red flags—everything just as I’d left it. All exactly the same, but I was completely different. Yeah, I was a different person, I was just scared of forgetting. I was scared that when I got out of the car and set foot in the neighborhood (even just one foot), the neighborhood would swallow me up completely and spit out the old Melissa.