Chapter Two

 

Dr. Garza ignored his son and continued. “I spoke with your tía, and she’s agreed to look after you this summer while I get some professional help.”

Johnny Garza couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Aunt Andrea. In Monterrey. Mexico. For three long months.

Carol made a small, strangled sound. Johnny turned to look at her in surprise. For the first time since their mother’s disappearance, his twin sister had begun to cry.

“Way to go, Dad,” he snapped, lurching to his feet. “That’s some amazing parenting right there.”

He stomped off to his room, slamming the door and throwing himself on the bed. Anger and loss boiled inside him. He grabbed tablet and earphones, choosing the darkest dubstep songs he could find and blasting beats into his mind until exhaustion overwhelmed him and he slipped into sleep.

~~~

 

Johnny moved through a watery barrier and found himself in a dark place. From all around came the sound of dripping water. He felt a sense of dread, of something evil lurking in the dark. His eyes became adjusted to the dimness, and he made out a form. It was his mother, her arms outstretched, a look of desperation and pain on her face. “Johnny,” she moaned. “Johnny, come find me. Find me before he hurts me again.”

That was when he woke up, startled by the wrongness of the vision. His mother had never called him Johnny in his nearly thirteen years of life. For her, he was always Juan Ángel, and if she called out to him, it was in Spanish: ven, m’ijo; ven acá. Come, son. Come here.

But this was the third time he’d had such a dream since his father’s announcement: the darkness, his mother’s voice, the certainty that she was alive but in danger. It meant something. As crazy as it sounded, Johnny believed she was reaching out to him. He just had no idea how to even begin searching for her.

He revealed none of this, of course, to his handful of friends when he arrived at school. But as they sat together in the cafeteria that morning, he at last shared the bad news about his summer vacation

“Mexico?” exclaimed Jaime Villanueva, slurping down his orange juice. “You serious? We’ll be lucky to see you again next year with all the cartel violence and stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty lame, dude,” his best friend Robert Blanco muttered. “Was going to invite you to swim in our pool, but…yeah.”

 Cody Smith—son of the mayor and Johnny’s rival since kindergarten—took great pleasure in the news.

“Dude, you don’t even speak Spanish!”

“Yeah, I do, Cody. Just not around you poor monolinguals.”

“Whoa! Johnny Garza just used a big word…somebody mark it down on their calendar.”

“You’re an idiot, Cody.”

~~~

 

In a town like Donna, Texas, news gets around fast. The following day, he was bombarded by questions by people he didn’t even know. With every new question or probing remark, Johnny felt a strange pressure building inside him, like nausea or fear or anger. Everything—from Cody Smith’s smugness to the teachers’ sympathetic looks—began to rub him raw.

“Aren’t you worried about getting kidnapped?” a random cheerleader asked.

“No. Aren’t you worried about how tight your freaking ponytail is?” Johnny snapped in return.

“I hear the police have no leads yet,” some smug eighth-grader commented out of nowhere. “That must be tough.”

“Not as tough as walking around with a face as ugly as yours, you freak,” Johnny growled.

“My mom says your dad’s seeing Dr. Flores, the shrink. She’s a receptionist with the dentist next door to him.” This was from Lorenzo, a kid who was always asking to borrow money from everyone. “I see a shrink, too, you know.”

“Really? You don’t say. Wow. Never saw that one coming.”

After a few days of this, people stopped approaching him at all. He could see he was alienating his few true allies at Veterans Middle School, but a part of him just didn’t care anymore. All he could think of was his mother, alone in the dark, and how helpless he was to do anything about it.

~~~

 

He found himself in the dark again. He could sense his mother nearby, crouching and afraid. There was silence, thick and black, and then he heard a voice thrumming in the very rock around him: I will break her, boy, grind her into dust. Do you have the will to stop me, you mewling knave? I am waiting.

Leaping to wakefulness, Johnny tumbled from his bed, chest heaving, shirt soaked in sweat. Overcome with powerless rage, he slammed his fists against the floor. “What is happening to me?” he rasped into the deepness of the night. He could not get that horrible voice out of his mind. It seemed to rattle his very bones as he lay sleepless. It squeezed at his heart as he tried to scrub the dream away in the shower. It followed him all the way to school, mocking him.

I am waiting .

Later that morning, as he was slouching his dazed way down the hall, he accidentally bumped into Miguel ‘Mickey Mouse’ Maldonado, a thug who’d spent the last three years in eighth grade. Everyone knew that Mickey Mouse was brother to a member of a local gang that styled itself ‘Southside M13.’ Not the kind of guy to get physical with.

“Sorry, dude,” Johnny muttered.

“Sorry nothing, güey. ¿Qué te crees?”

“No me creo nada. I’m just a guy, walking down the hall. Was an accident.”

Maldonado stepped closer to Johnny. “Conque hablas español, bolillo.”

“I’m not white, man. Güero, sí . But not Anglo. Not all the way.”

“I’m asking you? No, ese. I already know who you are, anyways. You’re the vato who his mom like ran off with some sancho, and now your dad, se está volviendo loco.”

The pressure in Johnny’s chest threatened to explode at any second. “My dad,” he said between clenched teeth, “is not going crazy, imbécil.”

A girl with pencil-thin eyebrows and black lipstick shook her head. “Oh, man, you just screwed up.”

Mickey Mouse’s eyes had narrowed to slits. Somehow, Johnny sensed the movement before it even began: the right fist swinging up from below, faster than Johnny should have been able to avoid. But he did, moving his chin back so that Maldonado’s blow took the wannabe gangster off balance. Instinctively, Johnny’s own right hand shot out and grabbed the older boy by the throat. At the same time, he used his own weight to pin Maldonado against the lockers with a ringing thud.

“You want some of this, wankster?” Johnny growled, his vision going red with fury. It was as if someone else had taken over his mind and body. He couldn’t even think clearly about what he was doing. “I will take your flunky, useless carcass out and feed it to the coyotes if you EVER speak about my family again.”

Pushing himself violently away, Johnny left the older boy sputtering and rubbing his neck. The entire hallway had gone silent, and other students just stared at him with their mouths open as he headed to class. A security guard, who like always had just been standing by and watching, clapped him on the shoulder. “Way to go, Garza. But now you’d better watch your back. That guy’s an animal.”

Johnny didn’t reply. His breathing slowed, and he thrust his black bangs out of his face with a trembling hand. As he entered class, his mind slowly unfroze. An animal? Well, maybe I am one, too.

~~~

 

It turned out, however, that there was no need for Johnny to watch his back. 3:15pm he was called to the office and told to take his backpack with him. In the reception area sat his father, Carol standing in front of him with an angry look on her face. When he saw Johnny, Dr. Garza stood up and gestured.

“Come on, John: your cousin Stefani is waiting to accompany you two to Monterrey.” He set his hand on his shoulder and began guiding him toward the exit. “I know there’s a week of school left, but I went ahead and withdrew you. They didn’t want to, but I had them classify you as migrants.”

 “Migrants?” Part of Johnny didn’t even care anymore. Something had his mother. It was waiting. He wasn’t going to find it in school.

“Just a formality. You know, use the system to our advantage.”

“Ours or yours?” Carol’s eyes were blazing.

Their father said nothing more as they walked to their SUV and climbed inside. The afternoon May sun glowered with hostile heat; the air slowly baked the landscape, and the vinyl seats defied the power of the air-conditioning to quench their searing touch.

Okay. You’re waiting, whatever you are. Well, I’m coming. I don’t know how, I don’t know where. But I’m on my way, you monster. And I’m getting my mother back.