I remember that I liked that feminine warmth, that it seemed a new and desirable possibility: living with Teresa and Mariana, I’d never had occasion to experience it. Both Teresa and my sister expressed their affection obliquely, without falling into the trap of sentimentality or being overly demonstrative. Ximena and Citlali’s bubbly warmth was, by contrast, a window into a world of attentions I’d unconsciously longed for since I was small: I wanted to stay in their company, make other pronouncements that would bring fond smiles to their faces, listen to their reedy voices, treasure their gestures of approval. And what’s more, I wanted to rub myself up against them like a cat, brushing my shoulders against their knees, and I wanted that odd behavior to seem even more attractive, wanted them to be on the point of exploding with tenderness for me. But that would have been taking things too far: however ominously the threat of being found out might hang over her, when faced with such blatant upstaging, my sister would have pinched me, pulled my hair, locked me in the tiny first-floor bathroom.
As I’d earned the right to join the party, I decided that it would be best not to attract too much attention—however much that idea appealed to me. I stubbornly stuck it out for quite a while, but the truth is that their conversation didn’t really interest me. No one mentioned origami, or the Bogeyman, or how to build a Zero Luminosity Capsule inside a closet. And neither did they talk about Choose Your Own Adventure books, even when I timidly attempted to raise the subject. Their only topics were boyfriends, girlfriends, bands, and what they could expect in senior high (which they would start in September). More teenagers arrived—by that time they numbered around twenty—and I thought that there had never before been so many people in the living room; maybe never so many in the whole house, not even when I turned seven and Teresa unexpectedly—it was a first—allowed me to invite all my classmates to break the piñata.
As they entered the living room, the adolescent guests greeted one another with kisses, making me deeply jealous. I wanted Mariana’s female friends to treat me as an equal, wanted to feel them slobber on my cheek, wanted them to visit my bedroom to admire just what I could do with a simple square of colored paper: “This is the crane,” I’d say. “If you succeed in mastering this figure, you’ve taken the first steps along the road to mastering your own fears.” It was a phrase I’d thought up in case anyone ever asked me about my hobby, but sadly had never had the chance to use.
They ordered pizzas and I ate a few slices, even though there were no Hawaiians: Citlali, whom I considered to be very good looking (her hair smelled of bubblegum), had ordered salami. Shortly afterward, as if attracted by the leftover food or the scent of boredom, Rat appeared. Mariana opened the door and he came in, followed by his band of emulators. One of them had a colorful paliacate tied around his head, like some kind of indigenous Mexican ninja. Another had an eyebrow stud, and that impressed me.
I was surprised to see a local celebrity in our living room. That would never have happened if Teresa had been home, I thought. Mariana’s party was becoming increasingly large, serious, and unsafe. I was a little concerned that they might use drugs—temporary tattoos—or have sex: activities about which I knew very little but that were generally associated with teenagers (not adults: they drank tequila and made love, almost direct opposites to taking drugs and having sex, according to my worldview at that time). More beers materialized on the coffee table, and I decided it was time to “give them some space,” as my father had said I should. Moreover, my superhuman efforts to be accepted and pretend that I was interested in their criticisms of the ninth-grade physics teacher were becoming wearisome.
I went upstairs to my room and closed the door. On the floor was the note I’d written about going to play with Rat. Suddenly it seemed dumb. I tore it into small pieces and hid them around the bedroom: I didn’t want anyone to reconstruct the note, as I’d learned was possible from my Choose Your Own Adventure books.
I attempted to make an origami pagoda. The manual included a couple of explanatory sentences for each figure: “A pagoda is a Chinese house,” it said, but no one could have lived in the house I produced: it was a piece of crumpled paper with folds that refused to stay folded. If a family of origami Chinese people had lived in my pagoda, their lives would have been extremely tough. The origami mother would undoubtedly have run away to Chiapas.
7
THE PARTY DYNAMIC WAS REPEATED during the following days with a number of variations. The gatherings weren’t always so large, of course, and the pizzas and beer didn’t always appear. Sometimes it was just Citlali, Ximena, and my sister sitting on the floor for hours on end, grumbling about their parents’ general lack of understanding, making themed mixtapes, or comparing the size of their breasts. But in addition to Citlali and Ximena, Rat frequently turned up, not always accompanied by his henchmen.
One morning, when I left my bedroom after a mammoth session of “blind origami”—a discipline that consisted of folding paper by touch inside my Zero Luminosity Capsule—I found Rat sitting alone on the couch in the living room. I asked very timidly where my sister was and he replied that she’d
