Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Read Free Book Online Page A

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