My mother never gave me “the talk,” so I was not aware that the blood dripping from my thigh down to my dirty shoe came from my lady parts when we were crossing the Sahara desert.

There we're so many things keeping my mother busy at home to remind her that i was finally going to be fourteen, the age where most girls become a lady. My father had recently lost his job working at the city bank in Mexico. It had gone bankrupt because there had been a robbing earlier that week. And it took a toll in the family since my mother didn't work. She  took care of us, maintained the house, and cooked all day. My brother dropped out of school when he was 17. He began to work with a friend of his to sell drugs in the streets because he didn’t have the grades so he knew he wasn’t going to graduate. They had got in a lot of trouble and Samuel was put in jail for a couple months but eventually got out. He got caught selling drugs to a minor at a school campus during school hours, he had got in a physical fight with the police but had gotten arrested. My parents were looking for any solution to get our family adelante.  And had spoken about leaving to the states but feared the consequences of being an illegal family with no where to go. But this drastic change made my parents mind up.

One night, when my brother called my parents they told him about what was going on. And he promised us that when he was out that he was going to join us because when he came out he was going to be get paid for not ratting the people he worked with out. However, my parents still made me drop out of school to sell caramelos so that we could earn more money.

We were waiting for the summer to come alone so we could plan how we were going to cross the border from Mexico to the U.S. It was almost the end of April and we had come up with the decision to leave in one month.

Our plan was to get a friend of my mothers who only lived an hour away from the border to pick us up when we had already gotten to the other side. We promised my mother's friend that would give her. $500 to take us to California. We were not planning on taking any heavy luggage, only a pair of underwear, a blanket for each person, and plenty of canned food and water for us to be able to last us a couple of days. Our family was planning on crossing with a few other people as well. As days passed the more worried I started to become.  

The day had come it was June on a hot morning.  I had just finished packing my most important possessions which were a picture of me as a baby with my family,  a necklace from my grandmother, and my bracelet I got from my best friend.  I can see the scared looks upon my parents faces while we were on our way to the boarder.  I wasn't very much nervous but mostly anxious of what was gonna happen. We were crossing with two different families but I didn't really like them. The first family was a mother and two little boys that were 11 or 12. The second was a mother,father, and a baby, only a couple months old. We had met up and it had only been two hours and my feet were already starting to feel swollen. I was able to feel the sweat building up inside me when we had attempted to cross the first couple times and it was getting really dusty and the air was starting to feel hot and humid. The first day had passed and we were already running very low on food and water. The new born baby was already starting to get week and within the first 4 hours of the following day the baby had passed away due to dehydration. I did not really know how to take something so dramatic but i dealt with it. We had crossed the boarder and we had no water or food left. It was the third day we had been walking in the desert and the soles of my feet were already to get blisters from how hot the floor was. I was able to feel my burning flesh in the 102 degree weather. It hurt so bad that i knew by the time i got to safety i would need days to recover. I was able to smell the must and the burning crust coming of my lips while i tried to lick them as if it were too help. One of the little boys had gotten sick that same day. He got very dehydrated and we left them with no choice but to leave them behind. It was a cool night, cooler than usual. I felt weird inside like if i had gotten rotten cheese and warmed it up to eat or drank a cup of cold expired milk. I was not feeling so good so i decided maybe in the morning i can try to walk it off.

I was never an emotional person. I never really had time to talk about my feeling or anything back home so it was just normal for me to just deal with things on my own. One hot morning I felt weird in my stomach. I was able to taste the dirt on my lips and my tounge became drier than usual. I began to bleed. I did not notice until I looked down as i felt something "crwaling down my leg". I was so afraid i did not know what to do. I looked at my mother very confused. She had a sad expression on her face and looked at me right in my eyes and told me she was sorry. She had passed away the next morning. I was not sure what i was suppose to do. I was feeling regretful and didn't know what to do anymore. I looked for my father for advice and the first thing he told me was "We're here, you're a woman now."