For the love of Turing, why won’t these invoices delete? Come on, Amalia. You did not spend years drowning in textbooks and problem sets just to be defeated by a DELETE command. Use that big beautiful brain of yours.
My fingers fly across the keyboard, and I think it’d actually be pretty funny if someone snapped a photo of me right now, because I can feel the grin spreading all the way across my face. A few more invoices to wipe and I’m done. If only they knew that the person sitting here with a stupid smile could make every single one of their orders vanish from the system without a trace. That’s the adrenaline. That’s the thrill. And honestly? It makes me feel pretty damn proud.
Bien hecho, Amalia.
Okay, the hundred dollars I’m about to pocket are a nice bonus too, but it’s thepower— the kind that comes from two keystrokes, from the ability to make a company lose money, clients, or inventory. Thirty seconds of code and I can take down their entire site. That thought fills me with a satisfaction I’m pretty sure would raise some serious eyebrows among the people who know me.
Because sweet, kind Amalia? She would never. Except she absolutely would.
Now, that’s a good start to the day. Nineteen years old and the first day of college.
The School of Engineering at Ciudad Universitaria wouldn’t have been my first choice, but Lupe wanted to study law here, and we both wanted to stay close totíoFelipe.
The first rays of sunlight push through the window, and I glance over at my twin, who’s softly snoring into her pillow. I decide to give her ten more minutes while I get her coffee going.
In the kitchen, at the counter, I findtíoFelipe flipping through the same financial newspaper as always, a radio murmuring the morning news somewhere in the background.
“Buenos días, tío,” I say and kiss him on the cheek.
“Buenos días. ¡Feliz cumpleaños, corazón!”
“¡Gracias, tío! Can we order pizza tonight?”
“Whatever you girls want. I’ll askseñoraSuzana to make that tres leches cake you two love so it’ll be ready by tonight.”
“Gracias, tío chulo.” I watch him turn back to his papers.
He doesn’t take his eyes off that newspaper, like it’s about to hand him the winning lottery numbers. And I already know the odds of that are 0.00000007 percent. Yeah — being good at math does come in handy.
While I get Lupe’s coffee going, I make myself a hot chocolate and light the small candle I always keep on the east-facing windowsill.
Diosito, watch over Julia. Wherever she is.
My uncle glances at what I’m doing and closes his eyes for a moment. It’s been thirteen years since we lost contact with her, because I refuse to believe she’s dead.
No. She’s alive.
She just hasn’t found her way back to us yet.
I add a pinch of cinnamon and a little whipped cream to my drink and take a sip.
Perfect.
“Ready for your first day?” My uncle’s voice makes me wrinkle my nose just slightly, not because there’s anything wrong with the question. Honestly… I’m scared.
Lupe is more of a people person than I am. I’ve always been the class nerd, the one everyone wants as a friend specifically so they can copy her work when they need to. And I was fine with that for a long time, handing out homework answers and test results, until I realized that when I stopped helping, my value to them dropped to zero.
A former friend once told me I was too arrogant, just because I corrected her on a project she’d done. But what no one understands is that this is how my brain works. Who gets the formula for the sum of the firstnconsecutive natural numbers wrong and still tries to apply for a scholarship spot at the School of Mathematics? It’s not my fault my mind never really shuts off, and my mouth doesn’t always get the message that it should.
“Amalia, sweetheart, are you okay?” The concern in his voice makes me look up as I adjust my glasses.
“What if I don’t fit in here either?” I whisper, because he knows better than anyone how many times I came home in tears because someone had gone after me.
Most of the time I didn’t even tell Lupe what had happened. The truth was, our relationship had always been complicated by an invisible weight between us. She’d always felt like she wasliving in my shadow, suffocated by comparisons she never asked for. I was the straight A student, the one teachers praised in class, the one called agenius. Lupe was always a step behind, at least in everyone else’s eyes, and I could see how it wore on her.
I’d become a burden to her without meaning to. My achievements cast a spotlight that only made her feel more invisible. Every award I brought home felt like another reminder of the gap between us that I desperately wished didn’t exist. So I kept my struggles hidden. I didn’t want her to know how hard I was fighting just to hold onto some kind of social life, how I was barely keeping my head above water in areas where she seemed to move so effortlessly.
Maybe part of me thought that if she saw me struggling too, it would feel like pity. Or worse, like I was trying to prove we weren’t so different after all, which would only diminish what she was going through. So I carried my loneliness in silence, protecting both of us from one more complicated conversation we didn’t know how to have.
