Luckily, we met Roxana, the new girl on our street. She was eighteen and lived alone. Her place was at the end of an alley, and we were so skinny we could fit through the bars of the gate if it was locked. Roxana never had food in the house; her empty cupboards were crisscrossed by bugs dying of hunger as they searched for nonexistent crumbs, and her fridge kept one Coca-Cola and some eggs cold. The lack of food was good; we had promised each other to eat as little as possible. We wanted to be light and pale like dead girls. “We don’t want to leave footprints in the snow,” we’d say, even though in our town it never snowed.
One time we went into Roxana’s house and saw, on the kitchen table and next to the thermos—she always had yerba mate—what looked to us like an enormous white orb, the kind a fortune-teller would use, a crystal ball, a mirror of the future. But no: it was cocaine. It belonged to one of her friends. She wanted to do a little before she sold the rest; she thought the buyers wouldn’t notice what was missing.
She let us scrape the magic ball with a razor and taught us to snort it off of a ceramic plate, heated with a lighter. That way it wouldn’t get damp from the humidity, she explained; it wouldn’t stick and went down great. It was great and we were great with the white light in our heads and our tongues numb. We did it at the table and also off the mirror in Roxana’s bedroom; she placed it right in the middle and we all sat around it, as if the mirror were a lake where we lowered our heads to drink, and the stained walls with their peeling paint were our forest. We took some with us when we went out, storing the cocaine in the silvered paper of cigarette packs, and sometimes in little plastic bags. I used pens, Paula had her own metal straw, and Andrea preferred to smoke pot because she couldn’t stand the racing of her heart; Roxana used rolled-up bills and told lies. She said her cousin had disappeared while exploring the Nazca Lines in Mexico. None of us told her that the Lines were in Peru. She said she had been in an amusement park where every door led to a different room, room after room until you found the right one. There could have been hundreds of rooms—the game took up acres. We didn’t tell her we’d read something like that in a kids’ book called The Museum of Dreams. She said that witches gathered in Parque Pereyra, that they held ceremonies and worshipped a man made of straw, and though we were startled to hear about rituals in the park, we didn’t tell her that what she described was a lot like a movie we’d seen on TV one Saturday afternoon, a really great horror movie about killing little girls to bring fertility back to a British island.
Sometimes we didn’t do cocaine and instead took a little acid with alcohol. We’d turn off all the lights and play with lit sticks of incense in the darkness; they looked like fireflies and made me cry. They reminded me of a tiled house in a park with a pond where frogs played and lightning bugs flew among the trees.
One afternoon when we were playing with incense, we put on an album, Ummagumma by Pink Floyd, and we felt like something was chasing us through the house, maybe a bull or a wild boar with teeth for horns, and we ran and crashed into each other, hurting ourselves. It was like being back in the van again, but this time in a nightmare.
1993
In our last year of high school Andrea found a new boyfriend, the singer of a punk band. She changed. She wore a dog collar around her neck, she tattooed her arms with stars and skulls, and she didn’t spend Friday nights with us anymore.
I knew she had slept with him. She smelled different, and sometimes she looked at us with contempt and fake smiles. I told her she was a traitor. I reminded her of Celina, a girl from our school who was a little older than us, and who had died after her fourth abortion, bleeding out in the street as she tried to get to the hospital. Abortion was illegal and the women who performed them kicked the girls right out to the street afterward. There were dogs in the clinics; supposedly the animals ate the fetuses so there would be no trace left behind. She looked at us angrily and said she didn’t care if she died. We left her crying in the plaza.
Paula and I were furious, and we decided to take the bus to Parque Pereyra. We were going to look for the girl from the forest again. Could she be our third friend if Andrea abandoned us? By then they’d built the highway and only the worst buses still circulated through the park: the ones with decades of grime stuck to the seats, the ones that smelled of gasoline and sweat, had floors sticky from spilled soda and possibly urine. We got off in the park at sunset. At that hour there were still families there, kids running over the grass, some boys playing football. “What a pain in the ass,” said Paula, and we sat down under a pine tree to wait for nightfall. A caretaker came by with a flashlight and asked us if we were leaving.
“Yes,” we told him.
“The next bus comes in half an hour,” he said. “You’d better go wait by the road.”
“We’re going,” we told him, and I smiled. Paula didn’t smile because she was so thin that when she showed her teeth she looked like a skull.
“Be careful of scorpions,” he said. “If you feel one bite you, just yell, I’ll hear you.”
More smiling.
That September, which was exceptionally hot, there was an invasion of scorpions. I thought maybe I could let one of them bite me so I’d die. Maybe that way we’d be remembered like Celina, dead in the street with her bloody fetus between her legs. I lay back on the grass and thought about venom. Paula, meanwhile, walked among the trees asking in a low voice, “Are you there?” She came to get me when she heard a rustling in the trees and saw a white shadow. “Shadows aren’t white,” I told her. “This one was white,” she assured me. We walked until we were exhausted. The lack of energy was the worst thing about quitting eating. It was worth it except for now, when we wanted to find our friend, the girl with eyes full of hate.
We didn’t find her. Nor did we get lost; the light from the moon was bright enough to make out the paths leading to the road. Paula found a white ribbon that, she thought, could belong to our friend from Parque Pereyra. “Maybe she left it for us as a message,” Paula said. I don’t think so, I thought. Surely someone who’d been picnicking in the park had lost it, but I didn’t say anything because I could see she was convinced, happy with her new amulet, sure it was a sign. I felt a stabbing in my leg that was neither a scorpion nor death; it was a nettle that burned my skin and covered it in bloody red spots.