Ice Shock(45)

“You’ve got your phone, haven’t you?”

“I’d better turn it off.” Ixchel smiles mischievously. “He can trace us.”

We decide to leave a note.

Benicio, I want to show Josh this really interesting thing. Plus I think it would be good for us to spend some time alone. See you back here in a couple of days.

“‘This really interesting thing’ … are you kidding?” I say, incredulous. “He’s never going to believe that. And we should ‘spend some time alone’?”

“I know,” she replies, grinning. “Benicio had better keep this quiet. Because if Montoyo finds out, he’s going to completely lose it.”

“What Montoyo’s gonna have to realize,” I say as we stand up, “is that he can’t have everything his own way. Not when it comes to you and me.”

“Okay, Josh,” Ixchel says with a smile. “Now you’re talking!”

She jabs my arm. It feels a bit like affection …





BLOG ENTRY: GRAN CAFÉ DEL PORTAL




A friend of mine named Ixchel has been working in a famous coffee shop in Veracruz. My cousin Benicio took me to visit her. When she started, they made her clean floors and wipe tables. They didn’t know then that she spoke fluent English, French, and Japanese. Even fancy, rich Mexicans get impressed by that. You’d have thought they’d offer her a bigger promotion. But no. They only moved her up to waitress.

Anyway … I’m still fine. I had to get out of Ek Naab. I thought maybe Ixchel had been sending us those postcards, the ones with the photos of Mayan cities, mailed from Veracruz. I asked her right away. She said no. She’d never heard of them.

Then I thought—obviously she’s telling the truth. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it first: how would she know your name and our address?

“Oh, I know all that,” she said. “Josh Garcia, son of Eleanor and Andres.”

And then she told me our address.

“You don’t think I checked you out?” she told me. “You must be even dumber than you look.”

Nice. They fixed me up with a girl who thinks I’m dumb.





21


I find an Internet café, where I persuade them to change the twenty-pound note that’s stashed in my back pocket under my dad’s iPod. They make me buy fifteen minutes online, so I do a quick update to the blog.

And that already seems like too much time. I don’t even want Ixchel to stop off at her room to change out of her waitress clothes, but she insists.

“You want to hitchhike?” she says, more than a bit irritated as we trot through the streets of Veracruz. “No? Then okay, I need to get my money.”

Ixchel lives in what used to be the maid’s room at the top of a house. The room is completely separate and has its entrance on the roof. The walls are brick, painted with thick, pale pink paint, the floor a dirty marble tile. Ixchel’s bed is low and narrow. Apart from that, all she has in her room is a small chest of drawers with a twelve-inch television on top. Behind me Ixchel changes as I stare at the wall, where she’s taped postcards of Mexican film stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. It’s the single personal touch, the only decoration in the room.

“Why are you living like this?” I ask, wondering. “I really don’t understand.”

Ixchel turns me around. She’s dressed in blue jeans, sandals, and a salmon pink T-shirt and carries the little sisal-weave bag I remember from the jungle. The chopsticks are gone and she wears her hair in a high ponytail.

“Let me ask you this: you want to move to Ek Naab? Live your life there?”

“Not really, but …”

“You see?”

“… but I wasn’t born there. I’m not used to it.”

“Ek Naab is a prison with golden bars, unless you are on the Executive or a pilot like Benicio.”

“Everyone seems so happy.”

“They are terrified of the real world outside. They believe someone’s going to kill them or rob them the minute they step out of the place.”

“And you don’t?”

“I never believe things just because people tell me,” she says with a little toss of her ponytail. “I like to see for myself.”

We leave her room in a hurry, make straight for the bus station. She buys two tickets on the express to Villahermosa, in Tabasco. I remember my lonely bus trip last summer, and I’m relieved to think I’ll have company this time.

Ixchel and I take two seats somewhere in the middle of the bus. She lets me have the window seat, “since you’re the tourist here.”

Typical.