PROLOGUE
The morning takes a deep breath. And holds it.
A shadow stains the sunny horizon. A black SUV with blue lights flashing.
Don’t come here, don’t come here, don’t come here.
The air grows stale as the vehicle stops outside our building. The street is so still, it could be playing dead.
Five men in bulletproof vests jump out. That’s when I react.
I storm into the stairwell and race down from the rooftop. Ten stories below, the agents thunder up.
I’m out of breath by the time I burst into the apartment.
“ICE is here!”
Ma leaps to her feet and tosses all the food she just made, stacking the utensils in the sink so it looks like the dishes have been piling up. There’s pounding on a door one level beneath us, and a man’s voice bellows out, “We’re looking for Guillermo Salazar!”
We rush to Perla’s room, where Ma drops to the floor and rolls under the bed. When it’s my turn, I look at Perla and say, “They can’t come in without a warrant—”
“You don’t know what they can’t do.”
The horrors Perla left behind when she came to this country darken her glassy gaze, and I realize she never got away. No matter how many borders we cross, we can’t seem to outrun the fear of not feeling safe in our own homes.
Screaming starts.
Followed by scuffling.
There are other people shouting now, and I recognize the voices of those neighbors whose papers are in order, yelling at the officers in Guillermo’s defense. Everyone else is probably hiding like us.
I have to pee and my leg has a cramp, but we stay under Perla’s bed for forty-five minutes. Ma and I don’t even speak until we hear the SUV drive away.
When the morning exhales, the street looks untouched.
But it’s not.
PHASE I
1
I always bleed on the full moon.
Ma blames the lunar cycle for hijacking my menstrual cycle, so she calls my condition lunaritis—a made-up diagnosis that depending upon inflection can sound like English or Spanish.
“Comé bien que en una hora empieza lunaritis,” Ma reminds me as she shuts the oven door and places the seasoned carne al horno on the table to start carving.
My mouth waters with a whiff of the meat’s smoky aroma. “Obvio,” I say, agreeing to eat my fill. Even if this weren’t one of my favorite meals, I’d still need sustenance for my sixty-hour fast.
I feel a quiver of discomfort in my uterus, and I pry my sticky thighs from the plastic chair to readjust my legs. The apartment’s ancient air conditioner has a hard enough time battling the Miami sun, but it can’t compete with the heat of Ma’s cooking.
“Cuando te despertés seguimos con Cien Años de Soledad,” says Perla as I’m squeezing salsa golf over my roasted potato wedges. Ninety-year-old Perla has been homeschooling me since we moved in with her eight years ago, so she’s used to lesson-planning around lunaritis.
“Sí,” I say as I slice into the tender oven roast and spear my first bite of succulent pink meat. A delicious warmth fills my mouth and body as I chew, and I fleetingly feel sorry for Rebeca from One Hundred Years of Solitude who would only eat whitewash and dirt. Sucks that I won’t get to finish that book until lunaritis ends.
A tremor shoots up my belly, and my hand clenches around the red-and-white checkered tablecloth—a warning shot that soon I’ll be in excruciating agony. I stop chewing and close my eyes to focus on my breaths. When I open them again, three bright blue pills line the outer rim of my dinner plate.
I meet Ma’s concerned brown eyes.
The first few nights of my period are so painful that I can only endure them sedated. These chalky tablets plunge me so deep within my mind that it takes me nearly three nights to climb back out—long enough to miss my gut-contorting menstrual cramps.
I cup the pills in my palm, and for the first time I notice a faint Z etched into their center. Strange, since the blue bottle they come in says they’re called Septis. Maybe the Z stands for the zzz’s they provide.
I pop the meds in my mouth and chew them with the meat and potatoes.
“Maldita luna,” says Ma, glaring out the window. Damn moon. Perla follows up Ma’s declaration with a spitting sound, as if saying luna out loud could invite bad luck.
They think the moon cursed me, so they run through this ritual every month. Only, unlike them, I don’t dread lunaritis.
I count down to it.
I chase the food and pills with water and gaze out the window at the dusky violet sky. Any moment now, the shift will happen, and I’ll be transported to the only place where I don’t have to hide. The one world where it’s safe to be me.
I come alive on the full moon.
2
I awaken with a jolt.
It takes me a moment to register that I’ve been out for three days. I can tell by the well-rested feeling in my bones—I don’t sleep this well any other time of the month.
The first thing I’m aware of as I sit up is an urgent need to use the bathroom. My muscles are heavy from lack of use, and it takes some concentration to keep my steps light so I won’t wake Ma or Perla. I leave the lights off to avoid meeting my gaze in the mirror, and after tossing out my heavy-duty period pad and replacing it with a tampon, I tiptoe back to Ma’s and my room.
I’m always disoriented after lunaritis, so I feel separate from my waking life as I survey my teetering stacks of journals and used books, Ma’s yoga mat and collection of weights, and the posters on the wall of the planets and constellations I hope to visit one day.
After a moment, my shoulders slump in disappointment. This month has officially peaked.
I yank the bleach-stained blue sheets off the mattress and slide out the pillows from their cases, balling up the bedding to wash later. My body feels like a crumpled piece of paper that needs to be stretched, so I plant my feet together in the tiny area between the bed and the door, and I raise my hands and arch my back, lengthening my spine disc by disc. The pull on my tendons releases stored tension, and I exhale in relief.
Something tugs at my consciousness, an unresolved riddle that must have timed out when I surfaced … but the harder I focus, the quicker I forget. Swinging my head forward, I reach down to touch my toes and stretch my spine the other way—
My ears pop so hard, I gasp.
I stumble back to the mattress, and I cradle my head in my hands as a rush of noise invades my mind. The buzzing of a fly in the window blinds, the gunning of a car engine on the street below, the groaning of our building’s prehistoric elevator. Each sound is so crisp, it’s like a filter was just peeled back from my hearing.
My pulse picks up as I slide my hands away from my temples to trace the outlines of my ears. I think the top parts feel a little … pointier.
I ignore the tingling in my eardrums as I cut through the living room to the kitchen, and I fill a stained green bowl with cold water. Ma’s asleep on the turquoise couch because we don’t share our bed this time of the month. She says I thrash around too much in my drugged dreams.
I carefully shut the apartment door behind me as I step out into the building’s hallway, and I crack open our neighbor’s window to slide the bowl through. A black cat leaps over to lap up the drink.