Okay then.
I know what those terms mean and they don’t scare me, but when I glance to my left, the girl next to me already has wide eyes and a faint tremor in her hands.
It’s no secret that a lot of firms recruit straight from the first years of college, so everyone is trying to absorb the material as thoroughly as possible and ace their exams to get noticed by the right people.
The next hour is a walkthrough of the projects we’ll be completing throughout the first semester and how we’re supposed to choose a topic for our end-of-year assignment.
I already have something in mind: a weather prediction model built on artificial intelligence, but I’ll need some guidance to pull it off. There’s a big difference between logging into a server to route a company’s donation to an orphanage and sourcing millions of input data points to train an algorithm.
With every year that passes, I hold on tighter to these moments: the three of us sitting around the same table. Because I know that at some point, both Lupe and I will build lives of our own, and daily dinners withtíoFelipe won’t be something we can take for granted anymore.
And if anyone has sacrificed for us, it’s him. He never married, and I’ve always suspected that was because of us, because when we landed in his life, we became his number one responsibility, and everything else came second.
When I walk through the door, I hear my twin singing along to Thalia — Mom’s favorite.Piel Morenafills the entire kitchen, and my uncle is sitting there smiling, watching Lupe spin around while absolutely demolishing the high notes of the chorus.
I drop my backpack on a chair and pull my sister into a hug, and we spin together through the verses that have always made Mom feel a little closer. She never cooked withoutAmor a la Mexicana,Piel Morena, orTú y Yoplaying in the background.
Lupe spins me into a turn, but of course I have two left feet and nearly face-plant. She catches me just in time, and we keep dancing pressed together, laughing.
“La extraño,” she whispers when her back is totíoFelipe.
A knot rises in my throat, becausemissisn’t a strong enough word for it. We didn’t just lose her that day. We lost our whole family, and the only grace was that we had each other.
We’re so different, and yet I know I could tell just from one look if something was hurting her.
“You two are going to make me cry.” Uncle Felipe’s voice carries from his chair, and he gets up to pull us both in.
My heart feels twice its size in my chest, and I wouldn’t change a single thing about this moment.
“They would be so proud of the extraordinary women you’ve become,mis niñas.”
“Gracias,tío chulo,” I tell him, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
His eyes are full of tears. I study his face, the lines deepening with every year, that thick mustache that makes him look just like Super Mario, his dark blue shirt buttoned all the way to the top and tucked into his pants.
We spend the whole evening on the couch watchingEncanto, eating pizza, and going through photos. We don’t have many saved from that night, but the ones we do have, we only look at on this day. The rest of the time we keep them put away so they don’t hurt quite so much every single day.
Officially one week of college down. Third class of the day. No hot chocolate. A philosophy lecture so boring it’s making me question the nature of consciousness — which I suppose counts as participation.
I had to pick some extra classes and made the grave mistake of thinking, how bad could philosophy and international negotiations be? Catastrophically bad, as it turns out.
One more “What do we think about…” and I’m slamming my head into this desk. Repeatedly.
I’m simply not built for hypotheticals and sociological abstractions. Give me a concrete problem and a clear objective and I thrive. Ask me to reflect on the human condition and I’m just a girl staring at a wall.
“Tell me you’re dying in here too,” a voice whispers from behind me. When I turn around, I find a pair of green eyes fixed on me.
“I’m still deciding which exit strategy is fastest: throwing myself out the window is the most accessible option, but the drop only guarantees two broken legs, and my pen tip isn’t sharp enough to break skin, so I’d just make a mess.” The second I finish talking, my eyes go wide.Good grief, Amalia. What is wrong with you?
The guy staring back at me looks openly amused and shakes his head.
“Gabriel. Nice to meet you.”
I look at him, and all my brain registers is that he’s wearing the latest Apple Watch, which means money, which means he’s just trying to buddy up to the nerd who earns good grades to carry him through exam season.
He wouldn’t be the first. But I’ll play along.
“Nice to meet you too, and sorry about the monologue. I promise I don’t normally have thoughts like that,” I tell him, realizing I never gave him my name in return.
