I am shadowboxing with Katarina in the backyard, and I can feel her eagerness to quit: her moves are halfhearted, she’s squinting against the sun, and she looks tired. Today is Sunday, so our afternoon drills are short, only an hour. We keep to ourselves out here, away from the eyes of others, so I don’t have to hide. Back in Denver, whether swimming at the Y or just playing on the street, I always had to hold back, to keep myself from revealing the superior speed and strength that Katarina’s training regimen has resulted in. One of the nice things about living in Puerto Blanco is that I don’t have to hide my skills. Katarina says even though I am only thirteen years old, I’m so agile and so strong I could easily take down even a well-trained adult. But half-blind from the sun, I see them as Mogadorians, and I relish the chance to tear them to pieces. I do battle with straw men: shooting them with arrows, stabbing them with knives, or simply pummeling them with my bare fists. I prefer drills.Īfter studies it’s back out into the blazing sun, where the heat makes me dizzy enough that I can almost hallucinate my imagined enemies. Studies are probably the highlight of her day. Katarina is a quiet, thoughtful woman, and though she’s the closest thing I have to a mother, she’s very different from me. She says her teaching method and subject matter are “eclectic.” I don’t know what that word means, but I’m just grateful for the variety. Morning drills are followed by a light breakfast, then three hours of studies: languages, world history, and whatever other subjects Katarina can dig up from the internet. We take advantage of the two relatively cool hours of morning. We wake up with the sun, and before eating or showering Katarina has me run drills in the backyard: running up and down a small hill, doing calisthenics, and practicing tai chi. We lead a lonely but ordered life in a sprawling, single-level shack tucked between two big patches of farmland. We have been here almost a year and we haven’t been bothered once. “Sometimes you can hide just as effectively by sticking out,” Katarina says. To our neighbors, we are the gringas, strange white recluses. We are the only whites for many miles, and though we both speak good Spanish, there’s no confusing us for natives of the place. Our only regular contact with the locals is our once-a-week trip into town to buy essentials at the small store. Katarina and I make no attempt to blend in with the other residents, Mexican farmers and their children. The sun is bright and hard in Puerto Blanco, the air impossibly dry. But our life had gone sour there, and Katarina figured we’d been there long enough as it was. We had no immediate reason to believe our slip would raise the kind of suspicion that could attract the Mogadorians to our location. Then Eliza told her mother and that’s when people started to get suspicious. Katarina remembered differently, and claimed Tallahassee as our previous home. Before Denver we’d lived in Nova Scotia for a cold, cold winter, but as I remembered it, our story, the lie we’d agreed to tell, was that we’d lived in Boston before Denver. Something I said to my friend Eliza had contradicted something Katarina had said to Eliza’s mother. To this day I can remember our conversation as we drove away from Denver, headed to Mexico for no other reason than we’d never been there, both of us trying to figure out how exactly we’d blown our cover. But those identities allowed us to live out in the open. Our names, our lives, our stories were all fictions, identities for me and Katarina to hide behind. In public, Katarina played the part of my mother, claiming that her “husband” and my “father” had been killed in a car accident when I was an infant. By night, it was a well-stocked combat training gym, with hanging bags, floor mats, weapons, and even a makeshift pommel horse.
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By day, it was an ordinary suburban rec room, with a big comfy couch and a TV in one corner and a Ping-Pong table in the other. My real life took place in our basement, where Katarina and I did combat training. I liked my friends and the life we had there okay, but I had already been moved around by my Cêpan Katarina enough to know that it wasn’t going to be permanent.
I had sleepovers with some of them, the girls I called “my friends.” I went to school during the school year, and in the summer I went to a swimmers’ camp at the YMCA. We lived there for two years, and I wore barrettes in my hair and pink rubber bracelets on my wrists, like all the other girls at my school. My name then was Sheila, a name I hate even more than my current name, Kelly. Katarina says there is more than one way to hide.īefore we came down here to Mexico, we lived in a suburb of Denver.