My reading tastes evolved in middle school. I selected romance novels from the Price Club book section because their covers featured beautiful women who looked like real-life princesses surrounded by darkness and fog. They often featured soft-core porn, but they didn’t corrupt me; my mother translated the difficult English words for me—a man’s bulge referred to his elbow, and nipples were a sort of beauty mark. I also read Goosebumps, whose ghoulish creatures I thought lurked in our garage.
It dawned on me that every story revolved around a conflict. No fairy tale or book was any good without toil and trouble. The absence of a father meant I was interesting. Every conflict in my life, I concluded, was a blessing. Suffering fertilized me like a storm nourishes flowers. It was better to be interesting than to be happy. Please let me have a life of calamity, full of villains, pining, betrayals, damsels in distress, beasts, curses, near-death experiences and apocalypses, I beseeched God, repeating my wish a hundred times every night. I was sure that if I prayed longer than anyone, He would hear my voice. But I punctuated each prayer with a supplication: However, please, please let my mother pass her test and please help her live happily ever after. For as long as I could remember, my mother had been studying for the internal-medicine certification exam, failing to pass each year despite hundreds of hours highlighting passages in tomes, downing coffee after coffee, never taking time off. Every gift I gave my mother as a child had a de-stressing theme (a mug urging her to stress less, a self-help book on managing stress, a mouse pad with a quote about relaxation). No matter how much I prayed, she failed the exam by several points each year. Eventually, I grew so frustrated with God that I ceased praying. That same year, my mother passed. But that would not happen until 2002.
Our iguanas, which had survived the die-off during our father’s deterioration, vanished from the cage Papi had built for them. My sister and I were accustomed to loss and barely noticed. Our neighbor Jenny spotted one of the reptiles, enlarged to twice its original size, basking on a tree branch in her backyard. Jenny called our mother. She was busy with patients. My mother called Papi. Our father arrived with a plan. I couldn’t remember the last time he had stepped into our house. I watched his every movement, transfixed. Papi pushed a wire through a long plastic tube and created a loop at one end with the wire. He slipped the noose around the iguana’s neck, tightened it, and yanked the lassoed reptile from the tree. My sister and I squealed and applauded, so proud of our father the superman. He left as quickly as he had come.
Sometime later, Papi brought over two long ropes and plastic black hoops. He tied the ropes to a tree branch and knotted the black plastic loops at their ends. Use them, he said, then departed. Michelle tiptoed and grabbed both strings with her hands. No, not like that, I said. I stuck my arms entirely through the plastic loops, up to my armpits, lifted my legs behind me, and kicked off. They’re for flying! I cried, and pretended to soar, ignoring the strain of suspending my legs parallel to the earth. Michelle and I took turns, giggling with glee. The trees watched us with their large eyes. Their smiles seemed to stretch. Their twigs trembled, raining leaves down all around us. We flew. We flew for so long, with such abandon, that I ceased to feel the plastic loops under my arms—I felt I was literally soaring over the land. When my sister told me she wanted to stop, I ignored her; I pushed her higher and higher. Finally, I noticed the blood soaking through our shirts. We had rubbed our armpits raw. “Look at me,” I said, grabbing my sobbing sister by the shoulders, my heart pounding. “We can’t tell Mami.”
I was afraid of myself, afraid of what the incident revealed. I hid the balled-up bloody shirts in a corner of our closet. My mother found them anyway. I walked into the bedroom as if on cue. She turned toward me. In her eyes, there was fear—fear of me.
My mother stopped taking us to Saguaro’s. She drove us to a nearby McDonald’s instead, arguing that North Park was too far away, that she was too busy to drive us to our father’s restaurant. If Papi wanted to see us, she said, he would come to us.
Mami’s name changed—she became Mommy. Our father remained Papi. The word “dad” or “daddy” still feels foreign on my tongue if I try to use it to address him. Papi was stuck in time. Our mother was evolving. She no longer wore the colorful, flower-print dresses that had characterized Mami’s wardrobe. The primary color of Mommy’s clothes was black. In 1998, Mommy decided it was time for us to leave Paradise Hills. She wanted us to live in a more prosperous neighborhood. She scrubbed the faces from our trees, gave away our remaining pets and made us pack up our toys. Michelle and I became despondent. Our Paradise Hills house was pregnant with secrets I had not deciphered. I tried to run my hands over every inch, to memorize it. I imagined I could feel the years through the fabric of space-time, as if it were a malleable substance like gauze. I put my cheeks to the floor and heard my mother’s laughter. I pressed my bare toes on the blue leather couch and felt my father’s hands in my hair. Leaving that house was heartbreaking.
We rented a one-bedroom apartment, where we stayed for six months as Mommy sought the perfect house. In a Lisa Frank diary, I wrote: Dear rainbow chaser, It’s crowded and lonely here…The only thing I like about this apartment is the bath…as they always say, be happy with what you have. I have no friends at school, please help!
My hair was darkening, my nose was lengthening, my teachers grew disenchanted and disenchanting. Our lessons incorporated rote memorization. When I asked why questions, my teachers treated me like I was stupid, like I was failing to understand something obvious, and they refused to clarify. My science classes were particularly depressing. But why does the cell divide inside the womb? I asked. The teacher sighed: I’ve explained it a million times. Read the textbook. Some became angry: Are you testing me? Don’t question my authority! I learned to stop asking why questions—only how was acceptable. I had to get straight A’s to please my mother—even A-minuses made my heart plunge. I was increasingly aware that my sister and I were a burden on our mother. An alternating cast of characters picked me and Michelle up from school: Mommy’s patients, a nurse friend, the nurse friend’s parents.
While browsing the shelves at the local library, I discovered a science fiction book series called Animorphs, about five children trying to rescue humanity from an invasion by a slug-like alien species called the Yeerks. The Yeerks crawl into human ears to take over their brains. The Animorphs battle them by “acquiring” the DNA of animals through touch, then morphing into them. They confront moral dilemmas. They sacrifice youthful pastimes for a greater cause. On the back cover of each book is a message: “We can’t tell you who we are. Or where we live. It’s too risky, we’ve got to be careful….The thing you should know is that everyone is in really big trouble. Yeah. Even you.” I became convinced that the Animorphs would come find me, to incorporate me into their meaningful group. I told them in thought-speak that I was super willing and ready to help battle Yeerks. I started dressing like the kids on the covers of the books and drinking Mountain Dew soda, their favorite, although I didn’t like the taste. I scanned crowds for the faces of the Animorphs. I wore Animorphs paraphernalia, including a necklace I never took off. In my Lisa Frank diary, I wrote that one of the characters had visited me: I met Tobias with a hologram over him to make him look like air. He told me none of the Animorphs can show themselves to me…without a hologram.
It was an efficient coping mechanism. I became bubbly again. I maintained my grades, even though I didn’t like my teachers anymore. I saw them with new, pitying eyes: they were Controllers, victims of Yeerk mind control. I wondered if my father was a Controller—perhaps that was why he had become so indifferent to us. Someday, I thought, I would rescue him, and my parents would live happily ever after.
My sister, meanwhile, struggled in school. Blocks of text and strings of numbers were uninspiring to her visual and visceral intelligence. My mother asked me to tutor her, but I was too wrapped up in Animorphs. At our old house, Michelle had sketched the insects in our backyard: ants, butterflies, worms, beetles. In the cramped apartment, she lacked inspiration. She lost faith in her talent. She had no art teachers who could tell her if she was any good. She was having a recurring nightmare since our father left: She and I are the only passengers on a bus when the driver disappears. We take over the wheel, but we don’t know how to drive. We nearly crash. Somehow, we maneuver the bus back to our Paradise Hills home. But the house is gone. A melting blackness has taken its place, boring through the backyard to an imperceptible beyond. The sight is terrifying and impossible. Michelle had a deep desire to draw this vision, to purge it from herself onto a canvas. But it was too complex; there was no point in trying.
My mother found a two-story McMansion with a swimming pool and a hill of trees behind a fence in a suburb called Eastlake, in the city of Chula Vista, where our Abuela Carolina lived. Mommy, with tears in her eyes, showed us the house. She didn’t want to disappoint us. It’s for you, she said. We ran into her arms.
She bought a blue-green iMac G3. As I explored the computer, a buried memory flickered and emerged: After my father’s departure from our first house, I had scoured his computer for clues about him. Most of the text files seemed school-related, real estate and photography notes that didn’t interest me. I sought to find his thoughts. I searched folders, folders within folders. A single text file caught my attention. I can’t recall the title or the content, only that when I opened it I saw a short string of sentences on a largely blank page. They were florid lines in English that seemed to have been taken from a novel or a philosophical text. I understood the individual words, but I didn’t understand their combined meaning; it was too complex or too abstract. I asked my sister to read it, but she didn’t understand, either. We felt we could not ask our mother. The words had something to do with evil. When I try to remember them today, the words smear in my memory. I think I see one word, but I can’t be sure: “carnal.” Perhaps “carnality.”
My mother had taken Papi’s computer to the condominium shortly after his departure. She had heard that the Internet was a portal to a dangerous universe of kidnappers and serial killers, and didn’t want us playing with it. But as our teachers began to demand typed papers and online research, she gave in, ordering us never to speak to strangers on the contraption. I opened up the new iMac G3’s Word program and typed. The words flowed easily; I soon found I could write more than a hundred a minute. As I typed, I felt relief from an interior pressure. The pace of typing matched the pace of my thoughts. I typed and typed until I had composed a 137-page novel about a humanoid alien with long eyelashes who saves the world. I flew over pink oceans in her body, gazed at her multicolored sky, felt her thrill at ending the apocalypse. My sister read my novels and claimed to love them, although in general she hated reading. This induced in me the delusion that I was a better writer than the professionals who authored her assigned books. I started devoting all of my free time to writing on the computer.
I discovered Google: a portal to a vast universe of answers to existential questions. I typed my queries about death and the meaning of life and, to my astonishment, received endless responses about ghosts and gods with different names. But the information was confusing and contradictory. I researched fairies and unicorns, desperate to learn where in the natural world I might glimpse them. As I searched in vain for coherent information, I began to wonder if fairy-tale creatures even existed. I found forums full of strangers who explored the same questions as me—Where are all the mermaids? Is Heaven a real place?—but their conclusions were convoluted and incomplete.
I watched the movie Harriet the Spy, about a girl who spies on people like a detective, narrating their actions in her notebook. The dividing line between truth and tales, I was starting to realize, had to do with where events originated: in a person’s head versus outside a person’s head. It felt like a distinction without a difference—the world outside my head was still in my head—but I was learning that it was important to grown-ups and that I had to start paying attention. I felt inspired to try journalism. I asked Google about the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, having read the Melinda Metz series Roswell High, about alien teenagers, and watched the corresponding TV series. I copied and pasted quotes from people on forums who claimed they had seen alien bodies and encountered pieces of indestructible metal strewn around their homes.
As I created my first nonfiction narrative, Michelle asked me to play Barbies or pretend with her. I declined. I was no longer interested in make-believe. She decided to befriend her reflection. She spent hours talking to her imaginary friend. When I wasn’t monopolizing the computer, she used it to converse with SmarterChild, a prim online robot.
One day, I found a vintage bikini in my mother’s drawers. It was made of a delicate, towel-like fabric, with lime-green and tangerine stripes. I found it beautiful in its antiquity; the degrading cloth seemed to radiate my mother’s past. I asked Mommy for permission to wear it in the pool. She agreed with reluctance; it was a gift from a cherished, now deceased aunt. She told me to be careful. I swam some laps. Afterward, I stripped to take a shower. I discovered with horror that the bottoms of the bikini were marred by a dark brown stain. It had leaked out of me. I tried to wash it out with hot water. It remained. I had ruined my mother’s bikini. I brought it to her, full of shame. She frowned, then said with a sad smile: You’ve started your period. It’s not a bad thing.
But it was a bad thing. It was the worst thing that could have happened to a girl convinced she was the most beautiful person in existence. Pus-filled pimples erupted on my face, my nose widened, my hair frizzed and turned the gray color of dirty rats. It was a case of an ugly duckling in reverse. Thick brown hairs sprouted on my legs. My mother forbade me from shaving them, even after all the other girls started doing so. Suddenly, the fact that I was a bookworm with straight A’s made me freakish. I became Loser, Nerd, Dork, the target of spitballs and chewed gum. My poor sister gained weight and became the Whale. My mother decided to put braces on us, turning us into Metal Mouths. I mistakenly believed choosing bright colors for the rubber bands—neon green, mustard yellow—would offset some hideousness. I befriended the only other person as nerdy as me, Victoria, a pale-skinned fellow Animorphs fan who believed saying “Oh my God” was a sin and strove always to defend his name. Her hair was set afire by a popular boy serving as an acolyte during school chapel. Occasionally, we ate lunch with Christopher Wiener, a boy in my sister’s grade who was relentlessly ridiculed because of his large head, his last name and the fact that his parents ran a profitable pornography chain.
A new social order emerged: the Mexicans were the popular and privileged majority; the gringos were the despised and oppressed minority. The Mexicans bullied the Americans into handing over their most precious commodities: the answers to tests, their homework assignments, their lunch. I was considered gringa because of my once-blonde hair and my academic anxiety. The Mexicans were the carefree children of successful immigrants who ordered that failing grades be changed, that detentions be revoked, that punishments be replaced with motivational tutoring. Many of my classmates carpooled from wealthy neighborhoods of Tijuana. One boy arrived in a black SUV, escorted to class by two bodyguards. In contrast, the gringos were the nervous offspring of middle-class parents who could not afford to live north of Chula Vista, yet were willing to sacrifice everything to give their children a private-school education. Some took the bus. It was an ironic reversal of the world outside the classroom.
Because the Mexicans had money, they were stylish and beautiful, with slicked-back hair shining with the best products, wrists and necklaces jingling with 24-karat gold. The gringos had tangled hair, mismatched socks and circles under their eyes. When the Mexicans learned of my Animorphs delusions, they tormented me. Even if the Animorphs were real, why would they come for you, of all people? You’re a freak. Estás bien fea. They insulted me in Spanish, thinking I couldn’t understand. The teachers encouraged this division across racial lines, allowing the Mexican girls to wear makeup—thick mascara, glittery lip gloss, sultry eye shadow—but ordering the white girls to wash off the slightest trace of powder. The teachers curved each test, and my top scores made me Enemy No. 1. Being unpopular was unbearable. I had long felt so superior. My fantasies were my only consolation. What if what my classmates said was true? What if the Animorphs were just characters in a story?
I hadn’t asked myself about nothingness since leaving Paradise Hills. I had stopped the ritual because I lacked privacy in the apartment. In my new bedroom, I asked myself, What is nothingness? I chanted and chanted and chanted. Nothing happened. No matter how many times I repeated the question, I remained a prisoner of my mortal flesh. The hormonal changes that had made me hideous had obliterated my capacity to have climactic experiences through contemplation. It occurred to me that the whole thing might have been a hallucination, a trick of my young brain, like the memory of touching a cloud on a plane. Perhaps the world was this: just this.
I became convinced of it. Life is an accident. Any encounter with meaning is a delusion. I stared at my hands: frog-like, juice-filled appendages. I was a nasty creature, an insignificant malodorous animal with frizz that had spent its whole life under the illusion that it was a powerful princess. Papi had seen my triviality. He wanted nothing to do with me because of it. I was disgusting, worthless, doomed to die. For hours I stood paralyzed, afraid that if I moved I would crumble.
I looked up at my shelf of books. When my mind felt like it was spiraling out of control, I slid into the curves of printed letters, allowing the text to rein in my mind like ropes, anchoring me to the page, to a concrete—though fictional—reality. It didn’t matter that the stories weren’t true. They were sanctuaries from the senseless universe. I buried my head inside the pages, pushing the covers against the sides of my skull, containing the hurricane I felt roiling within. I decided that even if there was no purpose to life, I would create one for myself: to write a book, a medicine, a weapon like these.