Mexico City, omigod, it’s so…so super-incredibly overwhelming, there’s just no other word. I can’t cram this place through my senses and fit it all into my head. The visual overload of 25 million different faces coming at me in an endless crush — street vendors with plaster Venus de Milo statuettes and handwoven sarapes and chiclets, scruffy hustlers with desperate standoffish eyes that crawl all over you, businessmen in pinstriped suits trailed by bodyguards with earjacks whispering secrets, Indian beggars plucking at passersby with sore-weltered hands, school groups of adorable rioting kids in uniform, muchachitas like anime fashion plates in their un-clothing and teeter-totter heels, cops slouched in a mind-boggling variety of disinterested postures, camera-toting tourists as slack-jawed as me. Past the faces are broad avenues of slow honking traffic bleeding around traffic circles, kaleidoscope billboards blinking SEGUROS COMERCIAL AMERICA and TELEFONICA MOVILES and BANAMEX, winged statuary taller than buildings, slums stretching forever in a grim parade of wastage. Overhead jets are screaming across an invisible highway, everybody shout-talking, mariachi music and alternativa death metal and earsplitting operatic arias. Inhalations are a sickening invasion of exhaust fumes, reeking garbage spilled everywhere, body odor and cologne and hairspray, too-sweet baked goods on sidewalk carts. I’ve never been jostled this much in my life.

And now I’m being washed away in the torrent of students pouring out of UNAM — the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico — and across the campus plaza. I’m buffeted by elbows and shoulders and backpacks. “Nick!” I cry desperately, my hand outstretched in his, losing my grip –

His Kangol hat turns my direction. He’s standing like an oak in a flood, the crowd breaking around his unyielding profile. “What are you doing, Nooshball?” he laughs, as if I’m goofing around or something. “Get over here!” With a muscular effort he yanks me back alongside.

I shelter in his lee, arms locked around his waist, my pregnant tummy pressed into the small of his back. Our shapes fit together like puzzle pieces. Then I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out the overwhelming stimuli, retreating into happy thoughts, yeah, that’s it, happy happy happy, floating on an inflatable seashell raft in the middle of a sun-spangled ocean…

Suddenly the jostling stops and we’re standing alone. Mostly. A few students trickle past carrying placards that read Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico — Mexican Green Ecological Party. Somewhere an amplified voice is booming. Looking over my shoulder, I see a street demonstration swirling. At the vortex is a mohawked student with a megaphone, shaking an upraised fist. He’s urging the milling crowd of protesters into motion, toward a ragged line of riot police. The cops are strung across the street in wait, helmets unbuckled, leaning on their plexiglass shields. Students approach with banners and green bandanas and Diet Cokes. The cops respond by buckling their chinstraps and hefting their shields. I assume both sides are yelling at each other across the 10-yard divide, but I can’t tell for sure. Angry drivers trapped on either side of the impromptu gridlock are blaring their horns in a hellish symphony.

“Wow,” is all I can think to say. In a couple minutes the street we walked became a conflict zone, just like that.

“I don’t know much about the PVEM,” Nick shrugs blithely, as if we’re watching TV instead of real life. “I think they’re a bunch of Green anarchists, but I could be wrong.”

I’m trying to decipher the slogans spray-painted on banners in big dripping letters. “What are they protesting?”

“Who the hell cares?” He’s already lost interest. No Mexican civics lesson for me. He tugs me in the opposite direction, bouncing his icy blue eyes around. “Inez has got to be around here somewhere.”

I clatter along in my strappy sandals, gazing up at the Aztec-style motifs that seem to cover the buildings like skin. I saw similar murals growing up in East LA, but nothing of this size and complexity. A giant fanged snake writhes out of a lake of fire. Ears of corn explode in vibrant symmetry. Naked dark-skinned men with melting limbs struggle toward a ghostly two-faced sun. Overhead the real sun is a dim bulb swimming through the smog.

“Nick!” a woman calls in Spanish, inflecting his name into Neeeeek!

“Inez!”

They rush together in a collision of hugs and cheek-kissing. The woman is tall for a mexicana but barely up to my collarbones. Her mop of aluminum-dyed hair is styled into a jagged bob, the kind of haircut that looks self-administered. She’s wearing a black t-shirt that says “I (skull-and-crossbones) YOU” and too-long jeans turned halfway up her shins and black Converse hightops. A camo backpack dangles from a shoulder.

Nick steps aside with a polite wave of his arm. “Inez, this is my girlfriend Nooshin. Nooshin, Inez.”

She swarms me in another bout of hugging and cheek-kissing. At close range her stink of cigarette smoke almost makes me gag. When she breaks away, her muddy eyes triangulate between my belly and Nick and me. “You guys are…pregnant?” My proud blush is all the confirmation she needs. “Ay ay ay! Pregnant!” She throws her arms around his neck in a violent hug, then repeats the embrace more gently with me. “Congratulations, Nooshin! When are you due?”

“October 22,” I beam. It’s already my favorite day of the year. “We’re having a boy.”

Nick loops an arm around my waist, pulling my hipbone toward him in a brief squeeze. A seam in the side of my sundress rips audibly. Argh. Maternity clothes. I need to buy my first maternity clothes.

He’s oblivious, focused on Inez again — and the way she’s radiating sadness at us in an emotional doppler shift. His voice is a half-octave lower than usual. “Sorry we went to Julio’s place last night. I didn’t know you guys broke up.”

“Yeah. About three, four months ago.” She flutters a hand dismissively. “He was cheating on me. I suppose he didn’t tell you that.”

“Actually, he said you were cheating on him.” I want to elbow Nick in the ribs for saying it, but too late.

“That was revenge,” Inez laughs. But the sound is hollow and aching. To cover it, she quickly adds, “I’m living with my mom now. She’s got an apartment in Coyoacan. You guys are welcome to stay with us, if you want. Neither of us have a double bed, but there’s an inflatable mattress big enough for two.”

“Awesome!” The word is an item crossed off his to-do list — talk Inez into letting us stay with her tonight.

“You and your mother are too kind,” I say in an apologetic tone, becoming irritated with Nick’s single-minded focus. What is he, emotionally tone-deaf?

But he’s already working the rest of his list. He makes a show of considering the Anthropology Building looming over us, where Inez is a graduate student. “Hey, can you smuggle me into a professor’s office? I need to make some phone calls back to the States.”

“Nick — ” she begins to say warningly. Knuckles whiten around her backpack straps.

His megawatt smile is blinding. “Come on, Inez. UNAM will never notice.” He boxes her gently in the shoulder. “Please? We’re trying to save money for the baby.”

“Ay ay ay!” the mexicana snaps, but angrily this time. For a long dragging moment her muddy eyes seem to be congealing into solid rock…but then she spins on a Chuck Taylor and starts marching toward the louvered doors. Her backpack’s zipper fob is a noosed Barbie doll.

My mouth is halfway open in reproach when Nick shoots me a shut-up-and-sit-down look. I fall into clattering stride next to his almost-silent hiking boots. I’m trying to stay quiet, but his treatment of Inez is still raw and right there in front of me. Finally I turn to him again and start to — but I get another look. The same one, only harsher. Shut-the-bleep-up-and-sit-the-bleep-down.

She leads us into a lobby that’s part hospital waiting room, part ethnographic pawn shop. Cold linoleum tile and formica countertops are offset by colorful huipiles tacked to the walls, hand-fired pots on display stands, a carved wooden mask in a picture frame. If it was up to me, I’d put everything on Ebay and hope for the best. A crowd is waiting at the single elevator door, so she darts into the stairwell. We circle upward through landings pressed into service as closets, squeezing past cardboard boxes and dusty unused furniture and obsolescent dead-screened computers. Eventually we exit onto the 4th floor, a warren of narrow cinderblock hallways studded with metal doors. She uses a key from her backpack to unlock one of the doors.

“Your advisor, huh?” Nick guesses.

“Yeah. My advisor’s office. He’s in Nicaragua right now.” Inez flings the door open, revealing a scarred wooden desk crowded by metal bookshelves. Yellowing papers and dog-eared books are piled everywhere. The window shines weakly behind a drawn shade. “Just don’t fuck with anything, got it?”

“Got it.” Nick keeps his face perfectly serious. But I can already picture him chatting on the phone, hiking boots kicked up on a stack of papers, idly picking through desk drawers to amuse himself.

The claustrophobic office isn’t big enough for all three of us, so Inez and I retreat to the end of the hallway, a glassed-in observation overhang — also tiny. We have to take turns standing in it. First she points out a noteworthy campus landmark, then we squeeze past each other and I try to spot where she was pointing. My Spanish is the functional kind, not well-suited to conversations about the identifying characteristics of buildings and parks, so the exercise is frustrating for both of us.

I get tired of it before she does. Kicking off my wedgie sandals, I brace my back against the cinderblocks, planting a bare foot on the opposite wall and stretching my leg — and riiiiiiiiiip, the half-torn seam of my sundress is now fully-torn. God I’m so stupid! Feeling totally humiliated, I grope for a conversational distraction. “Nick told me you’re a DJ?”

Inez studies me for a while, compounding my misery. I feel like a puzzling and slightly gross bug under her microscope. Finally she shrugs. “Yeah, I dj every couple weeks. But I’m not so into the music part of it anymore. Now I mostly play fundraisers for orphanages and stuff. I want to feel like I’m doing something with my mixing.”

There’s another uncomfortable silence — broken by Nick’s laughter, amplified by the echo chamber of the hallway. He’s laying it on thick for somebody, don’t ask me who.

“Is he going to marry you?”

My gaze flashes to her. Muddy eyes are blinking at me lizard-style. Her t-shirt logo rises and falls placidly. I decide she’d look cuter with a different hair color, something more natural than tin-can silver.

“Well?” Inez prods.

There’s a meanness to the word, because she already knows the answer. She already knows Nick, longer and maybe better than I do. She just wants to hear me prove I’m an idiot, my voice hopeful and fluting, a girl deluding herself. That, or I admit the truth — marriage is a word that frightens other words off, or even makes them stop entirely.

I refuse to give Inez the satisfaction either way. Instead I slip back into my sandals, rising even higher and farther away from her, and clatter down the hallway into the unisex bathroom. I lock the door behind me and kneel over the toilet, thinking that I might be sick. But I can’t discharge the bad feeling so easily. I sit on the tile and hold my face in my hands. I utter a soft animal moan. Eventually there’s an insistent knocking, and with it Nick’s voice, strident and concerned. “It’s alright,” I call through the door, through my splayed fingers, through my misery. “I’m okay…”