I. Enrique Castillo
It was August, almost a month before Independence Day, on my first day of classes at the Preparatoria del Norte (a high school for failing students), when I woke up to find my mother sitting on my bed, looking grief-stricken. She’d been mad at me since the start of the summer, so it scared me to see this softer side of her. Taking my hand, she led me to her bedroom, where it was dark and my father was still under the covers watching what I needed to see—my kindergarten and elementary school classmate Enrique Castillo on the morning news being escorted by the Monterrey city police, surrounded by dozens of photographers. The news crawl on the television screen read a forecast for a hot day and the headline: Young Man Arrested on Suspicion of Homicide. The woman behind the news desk reported that Enrique had been arrested for the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl named Anita Gaspar, that Enrique had killed her with a dumbbell and then buried the body in his backyard, and that he’d covered the area where he buried her with limestone powder to hide the smell of dead human.
