¡Eres un héroe! ¡Cuidado! yelled the crowd behind her in Tijuana. I could hear people chanting from behind the Wall in San Diego. It sounded like they were saying, Let her through! Let her through!
The voices on all sides swelled and lifted her up so she looked like she was floating those last few steps. Eleven, twelve.
I was counting in my head.
She had just put down her flip-flop for the fifteenth time when the ground exploded underneath her. The sudden flares of orange, yellow, and red slashing through her. Blowing her into bits. Turning her into dust.
Everything shuddered around me. I felt like that bomb had just detonated inside my gut, the shock waves rumbling through me. The fierce blast of flames was the sharpest color I’d ever known. And scariest of all, there was no sound. Or, really, there was only the absence of sound. Like the whole world had just been punctured and we had to suck in whatever air was left in one giant gasp, holding it all in for as long as we could.
Ernie was the first one to lose it. “What happened? Where’d she go? How come we can’t see her?” he said, panicking.
“She’s . . . she’s,” I stammered. I didn’t know how to explain what had just happened—to him or to myself. “Mami?”
Mami just stood there, watching the screen, as Ernie and I let a thousand unanswerable questions dribble out of our mouths. We needed to fill all the space between us. To keep talking, because talking was breathing, and breathing was living, and living meant we still existed even if it was in some crazy effed-up world where a fifteen-year-old girl was blown up because she tried to cross the border.
“Mami, did you see what happened?” I begged. When I couldn’t take Mami’s silence anymore, I grabbed her warm wrist and squeezed.
“Sí, claro que sí,” Mami murmured. Seeing Mami this disturbed only made it more horrible, more real. She exhaled slowly, the air whistling through her teeth. Then she clenched her eyes shut, like she was trying to erase what she’d just seen on my screen. “It is a land mine, mi’ja. Like in Colombia.”
“What?” I shouted. As if my anger could change what had just occurred. Although maybe it did, because the picture of the girl in flames went dark. The connection severed.
I flipped to a different livestream again. The first one I found was from someone standing on the San Diego side of the Wall. I heard people wailing and shouting, They killed her! They killed her!
Then I saw a mad rush of bodies, pushing and shoving their way toward the Wall. Hurling themselves at the steel slats, scraping and kicking at the mesh in between.
A stampede of green zombies charged into the fray. It looked like there were just as many of them on the ground in San Diego as there were on top of the Wall. Maybe more. Now they were unleashing their German shepherds on the American side. The canines grunting and snapping.
There was a blast of white.
Whoever was filming our livestream started shaking and running. Shouting, Cover your mouths! Run!
It sounded like the Border Patrol officers on the American side were now launching tear gas canisters at the scrambling crowd in San Diego.
“Dios mío,” Mami gasped again.
There were bodies writhing and twisting on the ground. They clawed at each other, desperate for pockets of fresh air. Then there was a thud. All we could see on my phone was the dusty ground—a flood of sneakers, flip-flops, and bare feet running by.
“No!” I pleaded. I wanted to reach through the screen and save whoever had just gone down, but I had to find another feed to see what was happening. I scrolled through image after image. The crowds on both sides of the Wall were multiplying by the second now. Surging with rage and heartache. Shouting into their screens or at the Border Patrol helicopters swooping in and circling overhead.
In Tijuana, there were people scaling the chain-link fence. Tripping over themselves as they charged toward the bits of that broken girl.
¡Era una niña! they wailed. Mothers clutched their children, tears coursing down their cheeks.
In San Diego, there were people banging rocks on the Great Grotesque Wall. Pounding and hammering at the ballasts, like a growing thunder.
No more walls! No more deaths! they yelled. There were thousands of hands grabbing, scratching. Trying to rip apart the steel, the barbed wire, the hatred that went into building the Wall. The green helicopters hovered over them like a venomous cloud.
“What are the helicopters for? Are they gonna hurt more people?” Ernie asked in a tiny voice.
“I don’t think so. No, they cannot,” Mami said, reaching for my phone, maybe to shut it off and protect us from seeing any more. Only, as she did, a new and horrifying sound belted out from my screen.
Tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet!
The helicopters were shooting into the crowds on both sides.
“No!” I screamed.
“Dios mío santísimo . . .”
The shrieks and moans were piling on top of each other. It didn’t matter what language they spoke; they were all crying Help! Ernie buried his head in Mami’s chest.
“Wait! What if . . . what if Tía Luna’s there?” I sputtered.
Mami lunged at the kitchen counter to get her phone.
“Todo va estar bien. Tranquilos,” was all she’d say as she dialed her sister’s number.
“Call Tía Luna!” I screamed at my phone. It couldn’t recognize my voice when I was this frantic and screechy, though. So I tried to type in her name, my fingers jerking and stuttering from key to key.
A stale recording came on at the other end of the phone:
Your request cannot be processed at this time. Please hang up and try again.
Mami was pacing across the linoleum, hanging up and trying again. Hanging up and trying again.
“Do you think she’s there?” I asked. “She wouldn’t go there, would she?”
“No. No creo,” Mami said, her face a knot of pain and anger. She put down her phone for a brief moment and clasped her hands together in front of our kitchen window like she was begging the sky to tell her something else.
“I don’t get it,” Ernie whimpered. “What’s going on?”
There were so many shots coming from my screen now. I couldn’t count them anymore. I couldn’t do anything. The gap between us and whatever was going on at the border widening like a giant hole.
Dividing us into here and there.
Before and after.
“We know nothing,” Mami told us. “We don’t know if Tía Luna is there or if . . .”
And then it was all cut off.