Retro

play button 1.

Play

You don’t know me yet. But here I stand, soaked in mud, blood stained across my diamond disco dress—and I’m not even sure where I am. My heart is splintered glass inside my chest. Un corazón roto.

How I arrived is a story too twisted to believe.

So let me center myself and take in my surroundings. I’m trapped. I was thrown into a sterile white room with no windows, the closest thing to a jail cell I have ever seen. And the maddening silence makes me wish this place came with a minibar and a lobotomy pick. Anything to help me escape my current reality.

But isn’t that all the rage these days?

People hide behind an online profile, a facetuned image, or a filter—when, in reality, their face doesn’t need a filter; it needs a double cappuccino. Like my mom always said, La cara es el espejo del alma. And how right she was—no matter how much you try to hide, your eyes will always reflect who you truly are. And in my eyes, they found someone who would never back down. I guess I’m difficult. Which is basically why I’m here.

At least they had the decency to let me keep my Walkman. I press the headphones tight to my ears. It will help me tell my story.

Let me introduce myself.

My name is Luna, but lately I’ve earned a few others. You might think I’m locked away because I killed someone—or maybe you think I robbed a bank. Assault and battery.

Not quite. But this year we did create a revolution, and I was there on the front page.

Because this year we were invincible.

Or so we thought.

Now my heart is burned by the flames.

My friends disappeared, never to be seen again.

And the blood is dried on my hands.

My music fades out, and I wipe black tears of mascara from my eyes. I don’t need a mirror to know that I probably look like a hungry, rabid raccoon. The tape has ended, but the story is far from over—so let’s bring it back to the very beginning.

To the first song of the soundtrack of my life.

play button 2.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

—Cyndi Lauper

I was innocent. She knew it and decided to bury me anyway—silent as a grave. No matter how harmful we know lies to be, each one of us will tell ten to two hundred of them per day. They come in all shapes and colors, from I love your haircut to I have read and agree to these terms and conditions. Some are white and others stained crimson red. But what they don’t teach you is that the most dangerous lies are the ones you don’t tell.

Or at least that’s what I learned the day I got caught for stealing.

It all went down the last day of summer, on one of those Northern Californian afternoons where clouds threatened darkly overhead. Instead of organizing a funeral for our summer vacation, my friends and I enjoyed one last afternoon of saturated fats, inappropriate jokes, and brand-new clothes. It’s not like there was much else to do in our small town anyway.

The Monteverde Mall was always a second home to me, and not just because when I was six I hid in the furniture store until my mom rounded up a mall-cop search party. It was where I experienced my first true deception and mixed all the Play-Doh colors, expecting to get a rainbow and instead got caca brown. I even killed my first gaggle of zombies in the arcade. But most importantly, my family ran the little movie theater in the corner of the top floor, where I had a lifetime supply of radioactive-yellow popcorn.

My mom had given me the day off, so my friends Samantha and Mimi were pretending to be my personal shoppers, though I didn’t remember hiring them. Samantha had her mind made up that I was a pop star partying in Malibu, and Mimi, like a seagull, was distracted by anything shiny. A match made in department store heaven.

Luna, you’ll be literally irresistible in this, Samantha said, holding up a microscopic emerald blouse.

Thanks, but I think it’ll fit you better… it’s too sexy for me, I told her.

Mimi threw an arm over my shoulder. Like my mom always says, the sexiest thing you can wear are your values.

As wacky as Mimi could be, she was always somehow super wise.

I see how all the guys look at you ever since you got your braces off. Samantha nudged me. This year boys are going to be lining up to meet you.

I smiled. No blouse, no guy could make me feel luckier than having you two.

Samantha grabbed my hands teasingly, making me dance with her. Come on—love and hormones are in the air.

Then where’s my gas mask? I laughed.

Give it up, Mimi said. The last time Luna had a boyfriend, she was eating sand at playtime, and we all know how that ended.

The rest of our department store experience consisted of Mimi and me pretending that we could afford more than one article of clothing while Samantha spent forever in the dressing room taking selfies in all the clothes. Or at least that’s what we thought she was doing.

As we were wrapping things, up Mimi received a call. She hung up the phone, looking concerned. I have to go. My cat is fighting my iguana again.

I would have asked questions but had learned better by this point. Although I did very much care for the well-being of Professor Meowmington and Juanita.

We hugged Mimi goodbye, and she headed for the exit, but not without winking to a guy in the cologne section. Mimi had no problem hitting on anyone at school, not because she was especially confident, but because she lived on her own planet—and it always blew my mind.

Left to our own devices, there was a weird air between Samantha and me.

I had a lot of fun today, Samantha said, looking down. Thanks for inviting me out with you and Mimi… you know how my other friends are.

Don’t mention it. I knew exactly what she meant. Samantha and I were well aware that we came from entirely different worlds.

She was the popular one.

And let’s just say I was made up of different ingredients.

Her life was about beautiful blond hair, social media followers, and grades so high, they set the curve. She was the perfect friend, and it had always been that way, ever since we were kids on the same soccer team. We never hung out together at school, but I was the first one Samantha called when she won class vice president or became a cheerleading captain. When her grandmother passed away. When she needed to relax and have fun. Because with me, for better or worse, she could always be herself. She didn’t have to try to be perfect.

I have to use the restroom, Samantha said. Would you mind holding on to this for me? She extended her orange backpack.

No problem, girl. I took it and slung it over my shoulder.

While I waited, I flipped through Limbo—the social media app that had devoured all the others. If you didn’t have a Limbo profile, you practically didn’t exist. My friends and I were always coming up with new dances, having fun with trends, or just killing time. One time Mimi went kind of viral with a kitty-face filter, licking her dad’s elbow, which was hilarious.

Anyway, as I stood there in the department store, a scent drifted up my nose. The divine aroma of white chocolate macadamia, coming from CookieWorld, the bakery just next door. I followed the fragrance, drooling like a bulldog. Samantha seemed a little off, and a surprise cookie would put a smile on her face. But as soon as I crossed the exit, I heard an earsplitting screech.

The sound of alarms.

I hovered awkwardly, confused, until a hand grasped my shoulder, spinning me around.

Store security—a man dressed in a yellow-and-black uniform, with the weathered demeanor of a retired cop.

Ma’am, I’ll need you to open the bag, the guard ordered, pointing with his baton. I had almost forgotten I was still wearing Samantha’s backpack. I pulled it off and opened the zipper, finding a cheer team sweatshirt.

Would you mind showing me what’s underneath? the security guard added. No longer so tense, I dug a little deeper…

Revealing the sparkle of silver.

A snarl of it—a brand-new space-gray phone, an unboxed smartwatch, a pair of designer sunglasses, and necklaces still with the tags on. There I stood, holding up hundreds of dollars of stolen merchandise, struck to the core with panic.

Samantha was going to steal all these things.

I asked myself how over and over again. How the girl who always followed the rules, who never copied homework, was capable of taking so much merchandise—clearly I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did, which freaked me out.

You’re coming with me, the security guard growled, blocking the exit. It’ll be up to the store manager to decide whether or not you’re going to spend the night behind bars.

Jail? I can’t go to jail! I wailed, pulling away. I was starting to make a scene. Shoppers circled around.

This isn’t my fault! I didn’t do this!

The guard raised an eyebrow. Then who did?

But I couldn’t open my mouth to utter her name. I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare into her eyes—because Samantha was frozen in place, face blanched, watching the scene unfold from a distance. I waited for her to step forward—for her to take responsibility. But she didn’t.

If it wasn’t you, then who did? the security guard repeated.

Samantha. Please say something! I screamed inside my head.

But Samantha said nothing. She was going to let me take the fall for this. Her eyes screamed I’m sorry, and I could see that she’d never intended for me to walk out of the store with that backpack, but everything else about her face told me that this was now my problem. It was her or me, and she chose herself.

play button 3.

Don’t Speak

—No Doubt

It was time to welcome back my old friend anxiety, his impossible cousin anger, and all the disappointment that hung around with them. It was all like a nagging pressure, as if an elephant had stepped on my chest, but I didn’t want to explode. On this day I needed to be a bottle of water—not a bottle of soda. It was something I had learned whenever I was treated differently because of my culture or because of the tan color of my skin. When others would laugh at me because I had a brain fart in class and just Spanish would come out of my mouth, I’d remind myself that I was a bottle, and inside might be a lot of emotions and reactions, but no matter how much the rest of the world shook me up, I wasn’t going to let that pressure detonate. Even if I wanted to scream, I couldn’t sell out a friend.

I just wasn’t made like that.

And Samantha knew it.

The security guard dragged me through the store to a small door in the back, near the fitting rooms. Then he shoved me inside a detention cell that felt more like the bathroom of an interstate gas station. The door slammed shut, and I was all alone—vulnerable and exposed like a raw nerve.

It wasn’t long before I heard the muffled ring of a cell phone on the other side of the door, so I pressed my ear against it. I recognized the voice as the security guard’s, but I could only make out some of what he was saying into the phone.

I’ve got her here in the back room.… I don’t know. Charges for a shoplifter aren’t pretty.

That sent my mind spinning. Who could he be on the phone with? How could I, Luna María Valero Iglesias, the girl who never even took a free pen from the bank, be deemed a shoplifter? Sure, I was far from perfect. I always left strands of hair on the shower wall like works of art for the rest of my family to enjoy. And when I texted almost there it meant I still had to cross the Great Wall of China, fight a dragon, and find an Ikea exit before getting there. I was someone who hated mugs that tried to force me to be confident. Someone who would love to listen to your life problems—which was why I dreamed of becoming a psychologist. And maybe now those dreams would be shattered.

No college would give a scholarship to someone with a criminal record, and without financial help, my family would never be able to pay my way.

I caught the next sentence through the door:

That’s all fine.… All right… as long as you’ve spoken with her family first…

Those words petrified me, because I started to imagine the horror my mother would feel when she received a call from the police—how she would think something terrible had happened, and then how disappointed she would be. What my father would think if he were still alive. The man who’d taught me that my last name, Valero, meant courage in the face of adversity—coraje frente a la adversidad. Because a crime, no matter how petty, would draw attention to my mother. And the last thing we needed was to be flagged by Immigration when my mother’s status was under close review. She was documented, but one crime could start a chain reaction that could separate us. All things that Samantha knew.

Okay then, you know where to find her.… If the owners press charges, she’ll be better off in the hands of a lawyer anyway.…

The last thing I heard through the door before the call ended. If I was going to need a lawyer, then I would have to sell my left kidney to afford one.

Time dragged on. Hours passed, and just when I thought I’d never see the light of day again, the doorknob began to jiggle and eventually turn. And when the door finally swung open, I wasn’t facing the officers of the law.

No guns. No handcuffs. No SWAT teams in riot gear. Just a woman in a smart business suit, hair pulled back tight. Someone so familiar to me, I could hardly believe my eyes. A woman whose house I had been to a thousand times, a lawyer I had known practically my entire life. And it was then, and only then, that everything began to make sense.

Samantha’s mother smiled and gripped the security guard’s shoulder, forcing a handshake and speaking in a smooth Southern drawl. Please thank your store manager for seeing it my way.

You’re lucky she’s a minor, or this would be a whole different story, the guard responded.

Relief crashed over me. For a moment I thought I was going to be okay—but Samantha’s mother opened her purse and wrote a check to the department store.

For the amount of three thousand dollars.

Mrs. Darby?

This is the fine for a misdemeanor, so this is how much they agreed to let you go for, Samantha’s mother explained. You’re lucky they’re not calling the police.

She produced a business card and handed it to the guard. You have a good day now.

Mrs. Darby led me out of the room. Clearly disappointed by the mess her daughter had made. And when I reemerged into the store, my eyes instinctively went to the last place I’d seen Samantha. She was hovering meekly behind a rack of clothes.

If I hadn’t been so angry, I would have felt bad for her.

I stared her down, hoping for an explanation, but Samantha never lifted her gaze. Instead, she pulled out her phone. She always flipped through her Limbo feed when she was nervous.

Without a word, her mother led us through the parking lot and straight to her jet-black Mercedes. Then she set a course that would take me home. And though she played her classic post-court zen sounds of birds, waterfalls, and rain sticks, it was the tensest ride of my life. Samantha didn’t speak. I kept looking at her, waiting for an apology, waiting for a reason. Ten years of friendship, and she’d tossed me out like trash to save her own skin.

When we finally pulled up to my neighborhood, the Monte Dorado Apartments, the little apartment complex on the outskirts of town, her mother reached back and pushed the car door open, looking disgusted. Then she said something that pierced me with shock. I was expecting her to apologize on behalf of her daughter—or ask to talk with my mother—but as I stepped onto the street, defeated, Samantha’s mother rolled down her window and looked into my eyes.

Don’t worry, hon, she said. You can pay me back later.

Samantha, please tell her what really happened. You know this isn’t fair.

But Samantha turned her head away.

I needed her to be a friend—but what I needed didn’t matter to her.

And that’s when I realized that I was going to have to pay the price for her silence. Three thousand dollars. It was more than I had in my savings account. After working long nights at the movie theater and being an embarrassing beaver mascot at a water park under the sweltering sun for four summers. Samantha knew I’d broken my back for that money. She knew how hard life was for my family.

And just before driving off, her mother added, Promise me you won’t do it again.

My eyes flooded with frustrated tears.

Promise me, Luna, and what happened today will disappear.

My lips trembled, and I surpressed the rage that threatened to drown me. I promise, I finally said, my voice shaking. And like that, the car sped off.

My insides roiled.

I stormed to my house.

How could I be so naive? How could I be so stupid? How could I be so weak? Instead of pulling me out of the ditch I’d fallen into, Samantha had buried me in it. And I let her! She even allowed her own mother to believe that I was a thief.

We’d started hanging out because her parents would pick me up from soccer when my mother was working late. We even had this little whistle that we passed back and forth to encourage each other on the field. To support each other in important moments, something that always kept us close, no matter how different our lives used to be. We were like the sisters we’d never had. But now that was over.

Since my mom’s car wasn’t parked in the driveway, it was better to go nuclear inside than freak out the entire apartment complex. I thanked my lucky stars she kept the theater open late on Sundays. If my mother found out what had happened, she would worry herself into a panic. And the last thing a single mother like her deserved was another complication.

I barreled into my room like a tornado, slamming the door behind me.

I didn’t want to think about Samantha, even if it was all I could do. There were far too many things in my bedroom that reminded me of her. So I was going to destroy all the evidence. Ten years of friendship erased in a matter of minutes.

I was no longer a bottle of water.

I was pumped full of adrenaline and mixed with disappointment, so that I’d become a bottle of soda—full of explosive Mentos.

I ripped our favorite band poster off the wall.

I mutilated the Cristiano Ronaldo soccer jersey she’d given me with a pair of scissors. Then I shredded a Real Madrid poster that she’d gifted me for my seventeenth birthday. I knew it was dramatic, but I didn’t care. I was a heat-seeking missile for everything that reminded me of her. Then, through blurry tears, I scrambled for my phone. I needed backup from the one person who could help me through this. Who would always tell me if I had lipstick on my teeth. Someone who reminded me of the Spanish side of my family—honest, for better or worse, and with all the love in the world.

But when I took my phone and started pouring out my heart, Mimi wasn’t surprised.

Luna, if someone is trying to bring you down, it’s because they’re already below you, she said. What Samantha did was really messed up. Crazy. But everyone knows she never had a problem stepping on other people while she clawed her way to the glittery top.

Mimi wasn’t pulling any punches, but she was right.

Samantha and I belonged to different worlds, and in hers all the invisible rules of popularity applied—I was just naive enough to think that the relationship we had after the bell rang was the real one. And Samantha wasn’t afraid to make enemies at school.

Samantha’s friends have been calling me a freak ever since I got a beautiful cuddly iguana and dyed my hair pink, Mimi said. But who doesn’t want to look like a delicious strawberry gum? Whatever. They’re the worst. Everyone knows it.

The more I talked with Mimi the better I felt, until at one point she even had me laughing with her very Mimi comments. Samantha has a bee complex. She thinks she is the queen, but in reality she’s just an annoying insect.

For the first time that night, I was smiling through the tears—convinced that the things she said should be printed on T-shirts, or at least framed in the Guggenheim. Now that I was a little calmer, I went to the kitchen to retrieve my I give up on life guilty pleasure: chocolate ice cream and hot sauce.

It wasn’t going to solve my problems, but neither would broccoli.

Samantha doesn’t deserve a friend like you, Luna. What happened was a good thing, because now you know the truth.

Thanks, Mimi. You’re so right. I’m already over it.

That’s my Loony, she said, calling me by a nickname she’d given me back in elementary school. Before hanging up, Mimi left me with a few warm parting words. Don’t forget how brave you are. After all, you’re the only person I know who cuts her own bangs.

I lay down in my bed and pulled out my phone. It was time to erase Samantha’s digital footprint from my life. Whether it was posts on social media, video games we played together, or pictures on my camera roll. But now it wasn’t about anger, or rage. It was about my own self-respect. It was about truth.

So I kept deleting. It was empowering. I was no longer going to live in Samantha’s shadow. I was on the warpath. But what happens on the internet stays on the internet.

Something I was about to learn in the most hard-core way.

Because in that moment I found the Video.

I didn’t even know it existed, but there it was, divinely out of place.

It was the night of Samantha’s Halloween party last year, and because her parents weren’t home, she decided to make it a rager. I was never much of a drinker, but Samantha was a pro. She dressed like a Disney princess but was drinking like it was Pirates of the Caribbean. And after everyone had gone home, I was left to take care of the star of the show. I had never in my life seen a princess so wasted. Covered in her own vomit, with her face mushed into an entire greasy meat-lovers pizza, Samantha recorded the wrong video with the wrong phone.

And it was brutal.

In a drunken stupor, she’d trashed her friends and everyone who wasn’t her friend: the popular kids, the guy she was hooking up with, the class president, the athletes, and the mathletes. Her teammates on the cheerleading squad. No one was safe. I was surprised she hadn’t gone for me—I guess the battery had died before she’d gotten the chance to.

I never was supposed to have that video, but there I was, marveling at it—as if I had my very own Picasso in the palm of my hands. Beautiful and grotesque all at the same time.

The world needed to see this work of art.

If I was going to get scapegoated and lose all the money in my bank account, then the school deserved to see Samantha for who she really was. She wouldn’t get to pretend that she was so perfect anymore.

So I opened up my Limbo app and uploaded the video from an anonymous account. And then I finally clicked post, publishing the video to Limbo, releasing with it all the bad feelings of the day. Then I shared it with Mimi, flipped my phone on silent mode, and hopped in the shower. And as I washed the bad vibes away, I reminded myself that tomorrow would be a fresh start. An opportunity to put the past behind me. To kill it on the first day of school. And I told myself that my problems couldn’t get any worse. Little did I know, they would grow into monsters.

play button 4.

Bitter Sweet Symphony

—The Verve

In psychology there’s this thing called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s the theory that, in order to reach your full potential, you have to have all the building blocks of your life set in place underneath, and like all cool things, it’s in the shape of a pyramid. At the very bottom you’ve got your physical needs like food and water; then come safety, love, and esteem. So let’s imagine you don’t have any food in the fridge. The next day you’ll steal your friend’s lunch, and then they won’t like you. And without their support you’ll never accomplish your dreams of becoming president and making Taco Tuesday a national holiday. One by one as the building blocks are threatened, your entire pyramid comes crashing to the ground.

And it was about to happen to me on the first day of school.

That morning I woke up to the disturbingly happy jingle of my cell phone alarm. Past me always had a funny way of torturing future me. I stumbled into a pair of shoes and slathered on makeup. Nothing was going to hold me back—no matter how wounded I felt. I wasn’t going to dwell on what had happened yesterday, and I definitely wasn’t going to worry my mother about it. That was the last thing she deserved.

"Luna! ¡Hija! Come drink your juice or it’s going to lose its vitamins!" my mom called from downstairs.

I’ll be there in five seconds! I yelled back, buying myself another five minutes. I cleaned up the fallout in my room from the night