Title: Lobizona
Author: Romina Garber
Publication Date: August 4th 2020
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Part of a Series?: Book 1/2 of the Wolves of No World series
About The Book: Some people ARE illegal.EXCERPT!
Lobizonas do NOT exist.
Both of these statements are false.
Manuela Azul has been crammed into an existence that feels too small for her. As an undocumented immigrant who's on the run from her father's Argentine crime-family, Manu is confined to a small apartment and a small life in Miami, Florida.
Until Manu's protective bubble is shattered.
Her surrogate grandmother is attacked, lifelong lies are exposed, and her mother is arrested by ICE. Without a home, without answers, and finally without shackles, Manu investigates the only clue she has about her past--a mysterious "Z" emblem—which leads her to a secret world buried within our own. A world connected to her dead father and his criminal past. A world straight out of Argentine folklore, where the seventh consecutive daughter is born a bruja and the seventh consecutive son is a lobizón, a werewolf. A world where her unusual eyes allow her to belong.
As Manu uncovers her own story and traces her real heritage all the way back to a cursed city in Argentina, she learns it's not just her U.S. residency that's illegal. . . .it's her entire existence
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 eleva- tor. 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.
“Hola, Mimitos,” I say, stroking
his velvety head. Since we’re both confined to this building, I
hear him meowing any time his owner, Fanny,
forgets to feed him. I think she’s going senile.
“I’ll take you up with me later, after lunch. And
I’ll bring you some turkey,” I add, shutting
the window again quickly.
I usually let him come with me, but I prefer
to spend the morn- ings after
lunaritis alone. Even if I’m
no longer dreaming, I’m not
awake either.
My heart is still beating unusually fast as I clamber up six flights of stairs.
But I savor the burn of my sedentary muscles,
and when at last I reach the highest point, I swing open the
door to the rooftop.
It’s not quite morning yet, and the sky looks like blue- tinged steel. Surrounding me are
balconies festooned with colorful clotheslines, broken-down properties with
boarded- up windows, fuzzy-leaved
palm trees reaching up from the
pitted streets . . . and
in the distance, the ground
and sky blur where the Atlantic swallows the horizon.
El Retiro is a rundown apartment
complex with all elderly residents—mostly Cuban, Colombian, Venezuelan, Nicara-
guan, and Argentine immigrants. There’s just one slow, loud elevator in the
building, and since I’m the youngest person here, I never use it in case
someone else needs it.
I came up here hoping
for a breath of fresh air, but since it’s
summertime, there’s no caress
of a breeze to greet me. Just
the suffocating embrace of Miami’s humidity.
Smothering me.
I close my
eyes and take in deep gulps of musty oxygen, trying to push the dread
down to where it can’t touch me. The way Perla
taught me to do whenever I
get anxious.
My metamorphosis started this year. I first
felt something
was different
four full moons ago, when I
no longer needed to squint to study the ground from up here.
I simply opened my eyes to perfect vision.
The following month, my hair thickened so much that I had
to buy bigger clips to pin it back. Next
menstrual cycle came the growth spurt that left my jeans three inches too short,
and last lunaritis I awoke with
such a heightened sense of smell
that I could sniff out what Ma and Perla had for
dinner all three nights I was out.
It’s bad enough to feel
the outside world pressing in
on me, but now even my insides are spinning out of my control.
As Perla’s breathing exercises
relax my thoughts, I begin to feel the stirrings of my dreamworld calling me back.
I slide onto the rooftop’s ledge and lie back along the warm cement, my
body as stagnant as the stale air. A
dragon-shaped cloud comes apart like
cotton, and I let my gaze drift with
Miami’s hypnotic sky, trying to call up the dream’s details
before they fade . . .
What Ma and Perla don’t know about the Septis is they don’t simply
sedate me for sixty hours—they transport me.
Every lunaritis, I visit the same nameless
land of magic and mist
and monsters. There’s the golden grass that ticks off time
by turning silver as the day ages; the
black-leafed trees that can cry up storms, their
dewdrop tears rolling
down their bark to form rivers; the colorful
waterfalls that warn onlookers of oncoming
danger; the hope-sucking Sombras that dwell in darkness and attach like
parasitic shadows . . .
And the Citadel.
It’s a place I instinctively know I’m not
allowed to go, yet I’m always trying to get to. Whenever I think I’m going to
make it inside, I wake up with a start.
Picturing the black stone wall, I see the
thorny ivy that
twines across its surface like a nest of
guardian snakes, slith- ering and bunching up wherever it senses a threat.
The sharper the image, the sleepier I feel,
like I’m slowly sliding back into my dream, until I reach my hand out tenta-
tively. If I could just move faster than the ivy, I could finally grip the opal
doorknob before the thorns—
Howling breaks my reverie.
I blink, and the dream disappears
as I spring to sitting and scour the
battered buildings. For a moment, I’m
sure I heard a wolf.
My spine locks at
the sight of a far more dangerous threat: A cop car is
careening in the distance, its lights flashing and siren wailing. Even though the black-and-white is still too far away to see me, I leap down from the ledge and take cover behind
it, the old mantra running through
my mind.
Don’t come here, don’t come here, don’t come here.
A familiar claustrophobia claws at my skin, an
affliction forged of rage and shame and powerlessness that’s been my companion
as long as I’ve been in this country. Ma tells me I should let her worry about this stuff and only
concern myself with studying, so when our papers come through, I can take my
GED and one day make it to NASA—but it’s impossible not to worry when I’m
constantly having to hide.
My muscles don’t uncoil until the siren’s
howling fades and
the police are gone, but the morning’s spell of stillness has broken. A door slams, and I instinctively turn toward the pink
building across the street that’s tattooed with territorial graf-
fiti. Where the alternate version of me lives.
I call her Other Manu.
The first thing I ever noticed about her was
her Argentine fútbol jersey: #10 Lionel
Messi. Then I saw her face and real- ized we look a lot alike. I was reading Borges at the time, and
it ocurred to me that she and I could be the
same person in overlapping parallel universes.
But it’s an older man and not Other Manu who lopes
down the street. She wouldn’t
be up this early on a Sunday anyway.
I arch my back again, and
thankfully this time, the only pop I hear is in my joints.
The sun’s golden glare is strong enough that I
almost wish I had my sunglasses. But this
rooftop is sacred to me because it’s
the only place where Ma doesn’t make me wear them, since no one else comes up here.
I’m reaching for the stairwell door when I
hear it.
Faint footsteps are growing louder, like
someone’s racing up. My heart shoots into my throat, and I leap around the
corner right as the door swings open.
The person who steps out is too light on their
feet to be someone who lives here. No El Retiro resident could make it up the
stairs that fast. I flatten myself against the wall.
“Creo que encontré algo, pero por ahora no
quiero decir nada.”
Whenever Ma is upset with me, I have
a habit of translat- ing her words into English without processing them. I asked Perla about it to see if it’s
a common bilingual thing, and she said it’s probably my way of keeping
Ma’s anger at a distance; if I can deconstruct her words into language—something de-
tached that can be studied and dissected—I can strip them of their
charge.
As my anxiety
kicks in, my mind goes into automatic trans- lation mode: I think I found
something, but I don’t want to say
anything yet.
The woman
or girl (it’s hard to tell her age) has a deep, throaty voice that’s sultry and soulful, yet her singsongy accent is unquestionably Argentine. Or Uruguayan. They sound similar.
My cheek is pressed to the wall as I make myself as flat
as possible, in case she crosses my line of vision.
“Si tengo razón, me harán la capitana más joven en la
his- toria de los Cazadores.”
If I’m right, they’ll make me the youngest captain in the
history of the . . . Cazadores? That means
hunters.
In my eight years living here,
I’ve never seen another per- son on this rooftop. Curious, I edge closer, but I
don’t dare peek around the corner. I want to see this stranger’s face, but not
badly enough to let her see mine.
“¿El encuentro es ahora? Che, Nacho, ¿vos no
me podrías cubrir?”
Is the meeting right now? Couldn’t you
cover for me, Nacho?
The che and vos sound like Argentinespeak. What if
it’s Other Manu?
The exciting possibility brings me a half step closer, and now my nose is inches
from rounding the corner.
Maybe I can sneak a peek without her noticing.
“Okay,” I hear her say, and her voice sounds
like she’s just a few paces away.
I suck in a
quick inhale, and before I can
overthink it, I pop my head out—
And see the door swinging shut.
I scramble over and
tug it open, desperate to spot even a
hint of her hair, any clue at all to confirm
it was Other Manu— but she’s
already gone.
All that remains is a wisp of red smoke that
vanishes with the swiftness of a morning cloud.
