June

The sun had tricked me. With her shining so brightly today, even the bare piece of land called Soundview Park had looked like the most beautiful Californian garden. The waving leaves on the trees, the birds flying about, kids running and playing on the new grass — for a blissful thirty minutes, all of my worries had disappeared, taken away by the first genuinely warm day of the year. Filled up with energy I wasn't supposed to have, I'd decided to walk the long way home.

Right now, I thoroughly regretted that. My feet hurt, and a muscle in my upper leg protested loudly with every step forward. A friend of Leonita, who was a physical therapist, had told me I needed insoles to correct my gait, or the pain would just get worse in the future. All very well, but those things cost a sweet two hundred to eight hundred dollars a pair — money I didn't have, and would rather spend on something else if I did somehow manage to get my hands on it. If only I would've known this when we'd still been insured, it wouldn't have been a problem.

A soft cry from below me caught my attention, and I allowed myself a break to look at the little human who'd produced it. Pushing a buggy with a baby that weighed as much as a Thanksgiving turkey was no small feat, after all. "Yeah, yeah, we're gonna be home soon, alright? Just a little longer."

Luis raised his fist at me, his large brown eyes blinking haughtily. He blabbered something, probably not believing me anymore. With good reason: I was panting heavily. "Oh," I managed to say between breaths, "you think you can do better? Well, mister, I can't wait till the day you have to push old me around in a wheelchair. Let's see how you'll like that, hey?"

He kicked in response, then focused on the toy dangling above him. Ever since he was born, I'd been wondering what was going on in that big head of his. I had the feeling he understood far more than we could ever guess.

When I reached the apartment at last, closing the door behind me, I breathed out deeply. Everything was a mess: piles of dirty dishes cluttered the sink, food crumbs covered the table, and drying laundry took up most of the living space we had. Add to that Luis' toys, Valentina's course books, and David's random shit, and you had me longing to jump into bed and sleep for a thousand years.

Relax, June. It was only stuff. Nothing to stress out over. Since leaving California, I had developed a new appreciation for Agnieszka the cleaning lady — maintaining a house was hard. Especially with a nine-month-old baby crawling about. In the beginning, I had given all to keep the place spotless, until I realized my cousins didn't exactly care, and I was sick of dying every day. I simply did not have the energy to do it all, not with the websites I had to build and Luis constantly screaming for attention.

"Hey there, little man," I said to him, as I wrapped my arms around him tightly, hoisting him up before quickly getting down on my knees and putting him on the floor. It'd taken me some time to get confident enough to carry him. He wasn't a bowl of cereal after all — if I dropped him, I'd never forgive myself. Slowly, I'd learned to recognize when I could and couldn't pick him up, and somehow, my body just knew he was something I absolutely could not lose my grip on.

Luis happily crawled away, then started licking the leg of a chair. I laughed. Weird boy. I hoped he hadn't inherited the brains of his mother. She had named him Luzo, convinced that was how you spelled Lucho. Who the hell would give their son a name like Lucho anyway? That was a nickname, not a first name. When she'd dumped the kid on our doorstep and vanished from Soundview, we'd decided to call him Luis, after my dad. David really needed to raise his standards if he was going to go around sleeping with women without any form of protection.

With a sigh, I picked up the pile of letters on the dinner table, scanning the names on them one by one. David, David, Valentina, me —

Me.

My mouth went dry, body tensing immediately, as I stared at the envelope in my hand. This was it. The last one. All of them had arrived.

I could open them. Finally.

I had to open them.

Just in case.

My heartbeat sped up, and I hurried to my room, walking straight into Luis crib. The spot where my hip had bumped into the corner throbbed intensely, but I ignored it, pulling out the other letters from between the pages of Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. My fingers were trembling, my thoughts hazy.

It'd been months since I sent in the applications, and yet, I remembered it like yesterday. I'd been sitting at the table, in my Stanford sweater, a blanket wrapped around me, staring at my laptop screen, at all the open tabs. Scholarships. Collages. I'd thought if I filled them in all at once, I wouldn't have the time to lose my nerve and change my mind. Wrong.

I'd just reasoned that waiting a little longer couldn't do any harm, when Valentina had barged in, obviously drunk. Noisy as she was, she'd come to lean on my shoulders, engulfing me in a cloud of alcohol-breath.

"Are you filling in applications?"

"Yes," I'd said, quickly minimizing the window. I absolutely hadn't wanted her to know what exactly I was doing. She'd laugh at me for sure. "They're ready, but... I don't know, I feel like they're not good enough."

She'd clacked her tongue. "Not good enough for community college? You? Please, honey, get over yourself." I hadn't said anything, my palms sweaty at the idea of confessing that it wasn't only community college I was trying to get into. "Now, where are the glasses around here? I swear, sometimes I think someone comes in here at night and steals our tableware... Oh. There it is."

"Could you please keep it down? Luis is—"

Too late. Her loud talking and banging of cupboards had woken him up: he'd gone from completely quiet to screaming his lungs out in two seconds. No. Please, not now. I'd looked at Valentina, but she'd just shrugged. "I'm too drunk to be anywhere near a baby."

Yes. So much was clear.

All in all, I couldn't have left the room for more than five minutes. When I'd returned, Vale had been sitting behind my laptop, browsing through my mail.

My heart had stopped.

"What did you do?"

She'd grinned at me lazily. "What you couldn't. You'll thank me later."

And now, now, the consequences of her actions were all here, and it was time to find out if I really had a reason to thank her.

Which one first?

The community colleges, or the actual universities?

With something fluttering in my stomach, I grabbed a paring knife, using it to slice open all six of them.

Luis stared up at me, drool dripping from his open mouth. "Let's see what my life will be like, hey?" I said, randomly ripping out the first one.

The fluttering intensified when I spotted the red logo in the corner.

Stanford.

We are very sorry to let you know —

Of course. What was I thinking? That I would somehow be admitted to an Ivy League school, just because I'd been there before? Really, June... What kind of irrational reasoning was behind this?

I dumped the letter on the ground. Luis immediately surged towards it to inspect it.

Right. Now some good news, or I was going to lose my cheerful mood completely. Without any real nerves, I opened the ones from the community colleges, the ones I printed out myself, wanting to see it on paper — I knew for sure I got accepted into those: all you really needed for the Computer Science program was an okay SAT score, and I had an amazing SAT score.

We are pleased to inform you —

Yeah, yeah. Understood. Well, maybe I could try a university again in two years — prove to everyone I was smarter than them.

Unless...

My eyes traveled to the last one — my last hope, last chance to spend the coming years at an exciting institute, between all these other intelligent people like me.

I swallowed, accidentally ripping the paper as I pulled out the final letter. The blue and yellow logo of Berkeley glowed at me, making my stomach turn upside down.

Congratulations! I am delighted to offer you admission to the University of California, Berkeley, for next fall!

What?

I squeezed my eyes shut, convinced I was seeing things that weren't there. When I opened them again, the text was still the same.

Berkeley.

I had managed to impress Berkeley.

Who the hell cared about Stanford? Berkeley wanted me. Me.

I had done this, all by myself.

After so many people telling me I couldn't do it, I'd done it. Again. Proved them wrong. Again.

Everything in me screamed to jump up and dance around the kitchen like a ballerina, to laugh out loud like a little kid, to lift Luis up in my arms and swing him around —

but it wasn't time to celebrate yet, and I couldn't do most of those things anyway.

Because one thing I absolutely needed if I was to go to Berkeley, was a scholarship.