“This is our new American dream,” Mr. Gutierrez, my freshman history teacher, had monotoned from a script at the head of the class, while a government-sponsored history video about the New American Investment Act—otherwise known as Gut and Cut—played behind him.

China, Russia, and other nations had sliced up the interior organs of America from across the world, all without having stepped foot on the ground that they were staking claim to first. You take the Rockies, we’ll take the Appalachians. Vegas was a Chinese vassal state. Oceans of Russian solarfarms across the badlands of South Dakota cranked power all the way up to Canada and past Chicago. Together, Egypt and Ethiopia had leased much of Nebraska to grow the drought-resistant splices of rice and wheat the two nations had pioneered. All of these handshakes had been called a lease, as if, seventy years from now, these countries will just hand over the land they’d bloomed to life to a nation that doesn’t have the power to take it back.

Mr. Gutierrez had read from the script like he was supposed to, talking about the how the leases and agreements had led to trillions of dollars for America’s new investment in the future. I.E., students. I.E., us. Like, all this is riding on you, now.

“We tried to fix a lot of stuff. Well, others—other countries—did pretty well,” he’d said. “We did a shit job and you deserve better.”

The other kids around me had giggled at the teacher swearing, while I’d just doodled faces on my knuckles because I’d been so high I was blasting out of this galaxy.

“People change, querido,” my mom had told me, brushing my hair off my forehead, after she’d kicked my dad out of the house when I was a kid.

My hair had been plastered to my head with sweat. I’d said I’d had a nightmare, when really I’d yanked my sheet over my head even in the full furnace of August heat to try to block out the sound of my parents screaming at each other. My dad had been kind, my mom had told me. But he’d let his anger take over too much, which is why he’d had to leave.

Just like America had been all sea to shining sea once—even if that was mostly a myth—before it decided to tell the world, you know? We’re gonna go at this alone. When the country’s leaders had played into fear about what those from the outside could do to the perfect America, which had been a playground for the world for too long, they’d said, a buffet where even the criminals and the leeches from other countries could pile their plates. Then came the home-grown terrorists, and the bombings, and the shootings, all in the name of preserving some fairytale white America that had never existed.