Chapter twenty nine

The rock she holds in her hands ignites and the flames, to Luz's eyes, look like golden algae with a hidden power.

Luz's hands could not leave the stone even if she wanted to. The rock takes on unexpected strength and rises and lifts her feet off the ground. After a couple of seconds in the air, the stone breaks through the ground to enter all the hidden recesses of the underground.

The flames of the rock slide down Luz's body to doze over the scars left by the rain of fragments from some of the rocks on the road that no longer exists.

Back and forth the "golden algae" lead her like handcuffs to a kingdom underground. Her heart is racing and she imagines it as small rocks polished like pearls. Her heart has betrayed her so many times and has made a fool of her.

Luz believes she is heading to the underworld because; besides not being baptized, she has just committed suicide. According to her, she committed suicide while in the other world of her head with certain doses of reality. For Luz, her method considerably lessens the pain. It is her way of explaining why she did not see any blood when she hit her head.

"My soul is denying its own death and I do not intend to contradict it."

The stone slips out of Luz's hands and she falls against some kind of earthen pipe. The dirt it raises makes her cough and almost choke. She feels too big for the cramped space she was in. The earthen pipe was choking her psychologically, if it is possible to be more "choked" than she is.

She opens her eyes wide as she notices in front of her how the rock that brought her in transforms into a skunk. Luz scrutinizes it completely. It is like any other skunk, or so it seems.

The skunk shakes off the gray dust on its back. With that, Luz feels herself dying once again because more than just dust, she smells like ash. What's more, it seems to want to stick to her body like a cursed plague.

"Do you feel bad?"

She is startled to hear the skunk speak; so she hits her head against the ceiling of the pipe and more dirt begins to fall to finish sinking her consciousness into darkness, literally.

The only thing that can illuminate the darkness inside her mind, her only sign of brain life consists of beeps that sound like cold drops. The water of life and the coldness of death, the metrical melody of survival and the feeling of conformist surrender; everything sinks into a group that could be composed of a certain toxic family.

Those beeps are like the pencil that colors Flavia's almost always furrowed eyebrows brown when she is at home and has not done Tiktok, like the tape measure that her brother carries everywhere to verify any change in his height, like the cane that her mother always wanted to perform that very sexy and elegant French dance, like the string that was supposed to hold her father's balloon when he was just a child; or like a rectangular piece of cloth with which Luz tried to cover her parents' eyes so that they could see the world she saw. ... too much credulity is poison for dignity.

Her world was not mortal when she was in herself, but now Luz found herself with reason waiting for the kiss of Prince Charming. Just for this reason her mind generated those beeps, so that from the fright her reason would wake up.

When Luz opens her eyes, she notices that the walls of the earthen pipe resound as if they were shaking because something is approaching and coming from behind. Luz crawls as fast as she can, and the further she goes, the more the sound reminds her of boiling water. Then she remembers the skunk, it looked so real, but of course Luz is the least likely to refer to reality, even if it is the hell she is supposed to be in.

The sound of the boiling water changes and echoes closer; but this time as the symphony of bubbles colliding and exploding against each other. Out of nowhere the scent of some kind of perfume results in an almost magical ambrosia to her sense of smell. It is a mixture between the smell of the leaves as they are about to disintegrate on the ground, and the smoke as it is about to vanish into thin air. In short, it makes Luz think of the delicacy of a newborn baby's head and the harshly soft way in which its mother announces to it, through the milk inside her nipples, that it has enough warmth to feel the lie it needs to survive in this world.

I know you think I'm writing her feelings for the sake of filler but I'm beginning to believe that the protagonist of this story is not her but her feelings and thoughts. The devil says that for him a diary is just the writing that has as protagonists the deepest and most secret emotions. The only thing that can "show without showing" who we really are is a task that lies in the most humble words.

Luz wishes she could have a pencil and a piece of paper to explode there and not inside herself. Writing in a language that only she would understand, no one would know who is the author of such a composition. She should have thought better of it before letting herself be carried away by her fear of someone finding her thoughts and making fun of them or pretending to be interested in them. Now she knows and is so sorry but she is already dead, isn't she?

Luz begins to doubt that she is in "the beyond" when she sees blood dripping from her forehead to the bridge of her nose. At that very moment the earth beneath her collapses like a brown waterfall. Note that not all of the soil pipe vanishes, only the part where Luz was crawling. The part that does not disintegrate becomes a relief with curves similar to wave crests. These curves have a magnetic force that makes Luz descend the "earth cataract" with a sublime delicacy, as if it weighed the same as a feather.

Luz's body falls with the back-and-forth movement of a wall clock; as if she were relaunching the fall with the sole purpose of generating such anxiety that as soon as she touches the ground she shows all her madness.

The crust of the subsoil becomes soft and wet like a sponge. As she descends, no matter how hard she tries to touch, Luz cannot even feel a rock of the crust. His hands pierce the walls of the subsoil, even though they are rocky. In that instant she believes, thinking like the protagonist of a novel, that she is surely in a virtual reality. That is the only explanation why souls do not bleed.

Her hands try to feel something beyond the walls and, just before falling into a subway lake, she feels what could be the tip of a finger.

The water is dirty, black dust stains the transparency of the nature of it. However, Luz visualizes some nooks and crannies from where light seeps into the water and swims until she reaches one of these.

Luz observes an immense field with trees and bushes. There is a campfire burning and the "All without love" group surrounds it.

"What time are you coming? I don't understand what good the girls see in that jerk."

He's Nick and he's the former most popular guy because Alexis stole his spot when he came back to town. Now Nick is Robin only without the funny and Alexis is Batman. Although Luz doubts that friendship is true.

False friendships really bother her because she has wanted so much to have a sincere friendship.

"With friends like you why do you need enemies?"

He looks like a handsome brunette and she, Margot, looks like the cheerleader only instead of pom-poms she has a briefcase.

"Why don't you tell me what's in the briefcase?"

Margot squints her eyes and moistens her tongue with her lips. That's something Luz always wanted to do and her parched lips were always a good excuse, the problem was that those watching thought she was flirting with them. Well, she thinks, Alexis would have thought so too; but the time he watched her run her tongue over her lips in the school cafeteria, he didn't even smile at her and instead turned his back to talk to Margot. She has always had that seductive attitude with all the boys but no one makes fun of Margot because she just behaves as she should according to her role in the student society. Thinking about how the boys viewed girls like Margot made her feel good about being invisible because, if she were really a nerd, the "All without love" group would force Luz and many other students to do their homework for them.

"I never existed even to be a direct victim of bullying. A useless life or not to exist.

Which is worse?"

Margot approaches Nick, putting the briefcase in front of him.

"Why don't you take it from me and find out for yourself? I'm a woman I have no more strength than you and I'm not going to scream."

Nick's eyes go wide and he recoils like a frightened child.

"That's why Alexis zeroed you out. Guys are only popular for three reasons: you have money to impress, you're sexy, or you're the one everyone's afraid of. You had the first two but Alexis has all three. He's everything and you're nothing."

She turns to go to the center of the campfire as she hears the footsteps of the others who are just arriving at the gathering. Nick, however, frowns, presses his fingers into the palm of his right hand and pulls Margot against him with his left.

"Their gazes are so intense, his belly and her belly together could choke the stem of a rose, in my world it's like that, their bodies are pure magnetism and I am an electron out of the electronic cloud. Margot feels proud that someone does not forget her.

Why is it that in soap operas there are always those scenes in which "the girls who feel extra" play the discomfort but we love to be put "between a rock and a hard place"?

But I can only watch it".

A tear rolls down Luz's cheek and in the field; the sky starts to become clearer than usual, almost like a diamond but without so much shine.

"And are you anything to him? He only uses you because he can't be with that crazy woman. The real cowards are the ones who are afraid of the unknown of life; I'm afraid of the unknown of the world, that's called respect".

Margot tries to pull away from Nick but the strong grip on her waist doesn't give her a chance to escape. Then the determination in the expression of her gaze, her frown and her haughty complexion reflect her as the master of herself. No doubt that attitude makes her even more irresistible and a real "killer hottie".

"And now you're going to copy her phrases? You're not even good enough to be an imitator, admit it. You may have been reading, but Alexis would eat you alive in a debate or a boxing ring."

Nick's eyes radiate pure anger and he releases it with force until it lands on the flowers. He was frightened, not by her, but by the briefcase. Happily it didn't open or get destroyed.

"Remember that guy almost broke the crazy woman's head. I was the one who took that baseball bat away from her. I warned her mom and she got her daughter away from that freak.

I show up unlike him or you. Even Luz shows she's crazy and doesn't need to screw someone's life up. We trash but some people already overreact like you."

Nick walks away but Margot is outraged at his offense and is not going to overlook it. She never forgets and at some point it will be THE MOMENT.