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she said.
    â€”Awesome, I said, meaning it.
    She stopped mid-fold and almost laughed.
    â€” Awesome! she parroted back, her voice high and in her nose. She threw what she was folding into the drawer, pushed it shut, then slung her hands under Dante’s arms. She raised him to her face and cooed to him, Awe -some, awe -some! What other stupid words you picking up at that school?

 
    5
    MAMI WOKE UP BEFORE THE SUNRISE on my first morning back—a habit left over from marriage: she always made our dad his café before he headed to a jobsite—and learned from Radio Mambí that the very first rally to support Ariel’s Miami family not only was happening that morning but would be held just two blocks away, in front of the house owned by Ariel’s U.S. relatives. She kissed me on the forehead while I was still asleep, told me she was going and that she’d left café con leche for me in the microwave. All you gotta do is press start, she said, and from the bedroom door, she either said or I half-dreamed, I’ll be back by lunch. So I spent Friday morning on the living room floor, playing silly singsong games with Dante, who I was surprised to realize I’d missed. He was eight months old by then and could do several new things that made him more appealing to me: crawl, talk a little, sleep through the night. More than my mom’s new apartment, or our old house belonging to someone else now, or the things from my old room stuffed into half a new one, it was Dante’s unexpected heft when I lifted him out of his crib that made me understand how much could change in three months.
    Thanks to the holiday, Leidy was off from the salon, where she mostly worked the phone and booked appointments, swept hair off the salon floor, and sometimes did makeup. She spent her day off just sitting on the couch, flipping between back-to-back episodes of Jerry Springer and the news coverage about Ariel, avoiding what seemed like the chore of playing with her son or taking him to go see his father. I wasn’t sure if Leidy and Rolando were talking to each other and, though I never admitted this to Leidy, I didn’t blame him for wanting to stay away from her, considering what she’d done: When Roly didn’t propose to her during the last slow dance at prom, or in front of Cinderella’s Castle at Grad Nite, or while receiving his diploma in front of a couple thousand people at graduation, Leidy decided to force the issue and stopped taking the pill the week after school finished in June. On a mid-July morning the summer before my senior year, while our parents were at work, she screamed my name from the bathroom, and seconds later, she blasted into my room holding a stick she’d peed on three minutes before. I figured from her joy that the test was negative, but then she showed me the plus sign as she laughed and cried at the same time. She smashed me in a hug and said, Roly is gonna freak out ! I started crying too and saying Oh no oh no —the same reaction I had while waiting those three minutes for my own results from my scares with Omar. What was happening inside Leidy, I realized, was my own worst-case scenario, but Leidy shook my shoulders, the stick still in her fist and now against my skin, and said, Aren’t you gonna congratulate me?
    â€”You’re happy about this?
    â€”Of course! Lizet, I graduated from school. So did Roly. This makes sense, this is what’s next for us.
    Leidy looked down at the test again, and I wanted one for myself: some test that would measure whether or not I was really headed for the same future. When she left for Roly’s house, I went to the library and found those lists made year after year by important people, the lists of the very top schools in the country. These schools, I saw, were next to impossible to get into, but like the plus sign on Leidy’s test, I wanted whatever result my actions brought—positive or