Mexican High by Liza Monroy

Author:Liza Monroy [Monroy, Liza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

I was too depressed to go to school the next morning, and Maggie didn’t try to make me go. I looked around the kitchen for bottles and was relieved to find none. I threw two bagels into the toaster oven as my mother walked in looking haggard, clad in her red bathrobe.

“I’m making us breakfast,” I said.

“I’m going to L.A.,” she said. “I need to get out of here for a week or two. You can stay with Nina if you want, or she can stay here with you.”

“Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“I think I need a little time alone, away from everything, so I can get it together.”

I read between the lines that she’d probably spend the whole time going to meetings, trying not to drink her way through her grief.

I went downstairs and turned on the TV. The news said that the Popocatépetl volcano was on the verge of erupting, that it was spewing red-hot rocks. I walked outside and looked underneath the leaves in the garden; they were coated in thick black dust. I wondered if Popo would explode all over us, bringing down the city, a modern-day Pompeii. The volcano’s name meant “smoking mountain” in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. Evacuating Mexico City would be impossible. With so many people, and the chaos of everyday life, there was no way we could get out. In the end, we didn’t need to. But the volcano was active and rumbling, begging to explode and devour the city. There was a joke paralleling the explosion to how corrupt Mexico’s president was: “What is that smoke coming out of Popocatépetl? It’s President Salinas burning his papers.”

The other lead story was the sighting of an apparition of the Virgen de Guadalupe in the Hidalgo subway station. I decided to go look at it, just for something to do with myself. When I got there, hordes of people were gathered around, offerings of flowers and candles strewn about. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and saw the big, splotchy water stain on the gray cement wall. The Virgen de Guadalupe was a puddle.

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